Mystery Woman PGallaher

My mother is so much of me, I can’t tell where she leaves off and I begin.  I am too much a baby that way and old enough to know it, but nothing fastens me to the world like the clasp of my mother’s cool fingers around my small clammy hand.  I will not wail and stamp my feet in their frilly nylon anklets and black, patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother’s tongue clucks at little girls who throw fits.  I prefer to delight her if I can. I get to spend one day with her.  Don’t ruin it, Aunt Irene has warned me.  Marie has enough worries, she said. Before my mother left me with Aunt Irene, I had never spent a night away from her.  I don’t know how many weeks she’s been with my brother at Baptist Hospital in Nashville.  My brother is sixteen.  I am five.  I’m the baby.  Aunt Irene says he needs my mother more than I do.  I don’t believe it.  It’s a hundred miles from Nashville to our farm near Waynesboro, farther t...

What We Keep, What We Throw Away             The rain began that Saturday morning and pounded Nashville all day.  It was a driving, insistent rain that drowned out thoughts of anything else, even before the local news preempted programming to report cars stranded on the interstates and residents trapped in their homes by rising waters.             My daughter Caroline, with husband Luke, two-year-old Max, and Randolf, the Jack Russell, lived in a neighborhood bordered by a creek that at times rose and mimicked white rapids for a little while. But never had the creek jumped its banks. On this day, it did.             One neighbor’s bridge had washed away, Caroline told me in her first call that afternoon. Another neighbor’s back yard was a lake, with water already seeping into the house.    ...

Gifted      with needle and thread, you      smocked my baby clothes, little girl dresses you      embroidered with cats and daisies, eyelet-ruffled pinafores,      frilly petticoats finished with a      grosgrain ribbon trim – your own exquisite handiwork. Crisp paper patterns      laid out on the dining room table,      patterns pinned with straight pins –      I can see it - I come home from school, there you      are with straight pins clamped between      your teeth, pinking shears in hand,      you shape my next new frock – I see your shoulders’ gentle curve as you      lean forward, guiding cloth      under the Singer’s clacking needle,      treadle whirring, wh...

PRIMATES Up here, where the road dips into hollows that hardly ever see the sun, the mail comes in a beat-up Dodge Ram.   Jonathan Blair’s daddy has been the mail carrier on this route all my life.  Jonathan was my boyfriend in seventh grade.  I hear he’s on a scholarship at the university in Johnson City, the same place my mother is working on her nursing degree.  I hear Jonathan wants to make a lawyer and come back home to work for legal aid.  I know for a fact Mama won’t be back.     Mr. Blair hands me a big Priority Mail package.  “Hey, Rochelle, you having a birthday or something?” His smile is lopsided like Jonathan’s, but without the dimple.  “Yep, tomorrow,” I answer.  “You must be about twenty.” “Yep.” “Jonathan turned twenty back in the spring.” April second, I could say.  He missed being born on April Fool’s day by nine minutes.  Jonathan dumped me in eighth grade, but wh...