I hear my mother’s voice as I open the kitchen cabinet to take down her favorite mug. If it could talk it might sound like her, with the high pitch of know-it-all confidence and a singsong lilt on words she wants to emphasize like Jeannine, coupons, and your father. The mug, of course, doesn’t talk and my mother is gone so all I’m left with is the Red M’n’M character smirking back at me from the curve of the cup, its black comma eyebrows arched in mockery. I’m back, just like she predicted.

I make coffee and eye the cars pulling up on the lawn. Locusts, all of them. My mom used to do it, too—scour the newspapers for sales and patrol neighborhoods at daybreak, coast onto the browning lawns of elderly couples cleaning out their garages. She’d often take me with her, teasing the mystery of discovery, as if someone’s discarded Rubik’s cube could unlock untold possibilities. She loved the thrill of giving new life to someone’s forgotten objects and preached the importance of a circular economy long before it became a corporate catchphrase. Why buy a new dress when you can get this muumuu for $2? I’ve got a McCall’s pattern that will make this look brand new! Never mind that the dusty pink nighty was worn by someone for half her married life.

Her frugality was later abandoned in favor of late-night flash sales on QVC after one too many drinks and sleepless nights after my father died. This, unfortunately, saddled me with a smattering of saucer-eyed porcelain dolls, souvenir teaspoons from 39 states, DVDs from Wal-Mart’s bargain bin, and celebrity-hawked cookware still in the manufacturer’s box.

It took me a week to dig through the debris she left. And much of what was hers, was surely someone else’s in a former life. When I finished sifting, I tacked signs up and down the town: Estate Sale. Yard Sale. Garage and Junk Sale. Things My Mom Left Behind Sale. Please Take this Shit Sale. Who Needs Two Salad Spinners? Sale.

The buzzing intensifies. When I’m ready, I prop open the screen door with an empty planter and invite the swarm inside.

Mmmm, smells like freshly brewed coffee, a woman says, nodding at the mug in my hand. I pour myself a cup. I don’t offer any.

A teenager pokes her head in the front door, cautious and skeptical. Mom’s not haunting this place, if that’s what you’re afraid of, I say. I take a sip and wink at Red. At least, I don’t think so.

It’s a lie, and I sense that the kid knows it as she wanders down the hallway that leads to my old room. My mother’s ghost everywhere. Evidence of her lives in the misaligned panels of wallpaper she pasted up at two in the morning. She’s in the chalky hole in the drywall behind my bedroom door. In the tile grout, in the dust dunes gathering on the fan blades, in every patchy spot of lawn where she tried and failed to grow.

And while the pores of her house are excavated by careless archaeologists, I poke around my mother’s hiding places for liquor. I know there’s a bottle around here somewhere and now’s about the time she’d replace cream and sugar for Jack.

How much for this? Someone asks. He’s a big guy with a bushy beard and a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his bicep. He might have been one of my mother’s boyfriends, but then again he might be no one. One of my grandma’s afghans is slung over his shoulder like a half-worn cape and he’s carrying a lamp under his arm. In his free hand is the mug.

That’s not for sale, I say too quickly. Warm panic inches up my throat and I really want the man to put the cup down. I’m afraid his grip will break it. I can even see Red’s face melt, his swooshed brows furrowing in fear. There’s coffee in it, I explain. It’s being used.

He looks down into the mug. No there isn’t.

Well, there will be.

Okay, he says slowly. How about all this then?

I wonder if I look crazed; I feel it. He shouldn’t have touched the mug and now his very presence inside my mother’s house makes me want to slam the doors and scream into a pillow.

Ten bucks.

That’s a steal. He hands me cash and lumbers off, looking back once. To me or the mug, I’m not certain.

By mid-afternoon the house is picked clean. When everyone’s left, I lock the door and turn on another pot of joe. As it brews, I sit on the kitchen counter and thump my heels into the cabinets like I did when I was a kid stirring a pot of easy mac while my mom smoked Winstons out the window.

I think of what I might tell her about today. She’d relish in knowing her home was a bargain bin Antiques Roadshow. A little tap-tap on her cigarette in the ashtray and she’d tip her head back to laugh at how someone tried to sneak off with the fuzzy blue toilet seat cover. There’d be a smile knowing I managed twenty dollars for her ancient washer. Held together on duct tape and dreams, baby. She’d scoff at the three offers on the house, all declined, and tell me I should have accepted. I would have given it away for nothing—maybe I should have—but I’m not ready yet.

I collected pennies on the dollar and watched midnight dance parties and screaming matches, movie marathons and family secrets filter out in the hands of strangers. They don’t even know that a layer of her now lives with them. In every item, a stratum of memory.

All I’ve got left of her is this stupid cartoon coffee cup and an empty house, and it still feels like it’s too much.

 

Jacqueline Parker is a writer/editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her fiction often explores loss in its many forms, but occasionally she writes something funny. She’s an Associate Flash Editor at JMWW and you can find some of her work in Funicular, Flash Fiction Online, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and flash exploring the feminine wild. Read her work at www.jacqueline-parker.com or connect on social @onmytangent.