By Thanksgiving, my mother and father had settled into a kind of life together I wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me about it in October.
They aren’t married again. They’re not going to be. Mom says she’d sooner marry a snapping turtle. Dad says the turtle would get the better end of that deal.
But they’re something.
Mom cooks. Dad does the dishes. Mom watches her island show on Wednesdays. Dad watches the Indiana game in the back bedroom with the door shut and yells at the referees through the wall.
They sit on the porch swing most mornings before he goes to work. She has her coffee. He has his, black, out of the thermos. They don’t talk much.
They don’t have to.
On the morning after Thanksgiving, I came by early to look at the furnace before it got cold for real. Mom was still in her housecoat.
The light was coming in through the east windows of the front bedroom, through June’s lace curtains, landing on the floor in little flowers.
And on the windowsill, all in a row, June’s violets were blooming. Every single one of them. The purple ones. The pink ones. The white one with the blue edge.
Mom said they’d never bloomed like that in the north window. Not once in six years.
“They know where they are,” she said.
Dad came in from the kitchen with his work boots on and his lunch bag in one hand. He stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the violets for a minute, the same way he had that first day.
“June would have liked that,” he said.
“She would have,” Mom said.
Then he reached into the pocket of his barn coat and took out an envelope and handed it to me.
It was a bank envelope from the credit union. My name was written on the front in his blocky handwriting.
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded once, and went out the front door, and I heard the Silverado start up and pull away.
I sat down at June’s yellow kitchen table and opened it.
Inside were three crisp hundred-dollar bills. And a piece of Miller Lumber notepaper, folded in half.
It said: First $300 toward the gas bills. More on the 15th. Dad.
I sat there a long time with that note in my hand.
Then I went into the kitchen drawer by the phone, where I’d moved my little yellow sticky notes. Six years of them. Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars.
I took the top one off the pile. Eighty dollars, from a January three years back. And I threw it in the trash.
I figured I’d throw out one more every time he paid. However long it took.
It took him a little over two years. He never missed the 15th. Not once.
The last sticky note went in the trash on a Saturday morning in March. I was sitting on the porch swing with Mom when he handed me the envelope. When I told him that was the last one, he didn’t say anything at all.
He just sat down on June’s end of the swing, and Mom poured him a cup of coffee from the thermos, and the three of us sat there and watched the lilac by the back step start to bud.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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