Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Long Distance

63 Long Distance I called you on a rotary phone, stuck my fingers inside the cord, stretched it out and watched the coils snap back like my hair always wanting to be itself even though that was the year I ironed it flat every morning so I could be smooth and pretty in the way everyone was pretty, not like the garden in the house where I lived with Grace. She threw the seeds out where the other brownstones had lawns so the front was clumps of impatiens and Gerbera daisies and then at night she painted them on her easel, just dots of them like she was lifting the color off their skin. She went to bed before we talked. I sat on the floor by the refrigerator, and your voice poured into my ear like the curve of cold water from the drinking fountain in elementary school. I could only take a short drink because there were kids lined up behind me. And the water tasted good, like metal. Remember when you visited me and we kissed in the kitchen by the phone on its hook, Grace sleeping upstairs? We sat on the floor, on the rugs I washed every Tuesday to pay for my rent. I watered the garden with the watering cans sloshing as I carried them. They had all those small holes like the phone 64 and the water came out through them and the sun caught on its hooks. On Tuesdays, I pretended our children were following me as I worked, their steps loud on the wood floors. They were small and fragile like Aunt Maud’s teacups in the hutch, which I dusted each week, running a cloth inside them where they were never touched. ...