The kitchen still smells like her cinnamon rolls sometimes, even though I haven't baked them since March. I stand there some mornings, coffee going cold in my hands, and I swear I hear the scrape of her slippers on the linoleum in Dayton, Ohio, the house where I grew up.
Mom died eleven months ago. Pancreatic cancer, four months from diagnosis to the funeral, faster than any of us could brace for. I'm forty-two now, old enough that I thought I'd made my peace with losing parents someday, the way you tell yourself you're ready for winter because you own a coat. I wasn't ready. Nobody is.
What I miss isn't the big things. It's her voice on the phone asking if I'd eaten dinner, always doubting the answer even when I said yes. It's the way she'd hum off-key while she watered her tomato plants on the back porch, some hymn she never got quite right but sang anyway. It's her handwriting on birthday cards, looping and slanted, always signed "Love, Mom" like she needed to clarify, like I could ever mistake it for anyone else.
I called her number last week. I don't know why. It's disconnected now, my sister took care of that months ago, closed the account, donated the clothes, did all the practical things that grief doesn't let you do yourself. But I dialed it anyway, sitting in my car in the parking lot of the pharmacy, and let it ring twice before I hung up.
There's a photo on my refrigerator of the two of us at Niagara Falls when I was nine, her hair frizzed out from the mist, both of us laughing at something I don't remember anymore. I look at it most days. Some days I can only manage a glance before I turn back to whatever I was doing. Other days I stand there long enough that the ice in my glass melts.
My daughter is seven now. She never knew her grandmother, not really, not enough to keep. She asks me sometimes what Grandma Ruth was like, and I try to explain the tomato plants and the off-key humming and the way she called everyone "sweetheart" whether she liked them or not. It comes out flat, like a list, when what I want is for her to feel it the way I felt it, standing in that kitchen with the smell of cinnamon and butter thick in the air.
I keep thinking there's a version of this year where I call her back. Where the ringing doesn't just trail into silence. Where I ask her the thing I never asked — what she was afraid of, what she wished she'd done differently, whether she knew, really knew, how much I needed her still.
Tonight I'll drive past the old house on Maple Street, the one my parents sold when they downsized, and I'll slow down the way I always do, like she might be standing at the window. She won't be. I know that. But I'll look anyway, because looking is the only conversation I have left, and some nights that has to be enough.
If I could ask for one thing, it wouldn't be more time or a different ending. It would just be her voice, once more, asking if I'd eaten dinner yet. I'd tell her yes. I'd tell her I was fine. And for once, I think she might actually believe me.
