What the End Is For

What the End Is For Rasma Haidri Today I will throw out the two-inch broken cola glass. The two halves ofit fit perfectly together and could be glued, but I'm done with gluing . It is late spring and the glass has been here since November. I remember how my mother gasped, "Oh, what have I done now?" with unusual vulnerability, as if owning her part in a destruction, when she heard the clamorous crack under her foot. I heard it too and looked to see her trying to lift her foot, afraid of further damage. I was afraid of her falling. "It's nothing. Just that little Coke glass," I said. "That's from Detroit," she answered. Meaning from the green-lawn days I set up my toy trademark Coke dispenser by the road and waited for business . The four miniature glasses, narrow at the bottom and wide at the top, had "Coca-Cola" in script on the side. I filled and set them in a row with my careful fingers. Then one by one I lifted the glasses and drank. Each held scarcely a tongue full. Perhaps I sat on my canvas director's chair, my hair pulled into the popular Alice in Wonderland look. I don't know, but my mother would have a clear memory of seeing me from the window of our house on Hawthorne Avenue, while she held my small brother in her thin arms. "What a shame," she said with self-reproach, shaking her head as I lifted the broken toy offthe kitchen floor. "It's all right. I can glue it," I told her and at the time I intended to. Not so much for the sake of my own daughter with her teacups galore. She had not prized this lone glass, had probably not noticed the faded authentic logo ofthe world's most popular drink. I intended to put it back together because ofthe memory. For my debt ofpreserving the past, keeping track ofall scattered pieces. And to tell my mother that any damage done under her foot could be undone, or mended. I showed her how well the two halves fit, and placed them in a corner of the window. Rasma Haidri9 The next time I saw my mother she was sitting up in her bed. It was three in the afternoon on a Saturday in November and she had died before dawn. Died before there was fight enough to open the shades. Before morning coffee . Before this now-empty body had gotten "something decent to wear" to her sister's for Thanksgiving. Gone in an instant, the coroner said. Shouldn't there be a warning? At least one minute to prepare, to memorize the way the world looked the last time we looked at it together? Days, maybe weeks later I found the broken cola glass and set it out of sight in the cupboard. Other signs ofmy mother's last visit surfaced. A small spoon was on the deck railing where she and two year old Nadine had made snow pies. Nadine had been bundled in hat and mittens. "Look at this girl dressed for winter, and I'm only in this sweater!" my mother had shouted to us from the doorway, holding her cigarette high so the smoke did not drift into the kitchen. She was laughing. "We need more pans!" she called, and my husband and I had looked at each other, not recognizing this jovial, energetic woman. For days afterward the pie tins stood on the counter, holding water that had been the snow Nadine wanted to save. I found them lying among teacups in the play kitchen after the funeral and I held them for a while. My mother had tried to help me save snow, too. But this was after Detroit. This was in the low hills of east Tennessee where it snowed only twice in the ten years we lived there. A thin layer on the roads and school closed, the city shut down, while my mother told us tales of her childhood on aWisconsin farm, where the snow drifts were so high around the house her father had to climb...