ones. I told him over and over that he should sell. But he refused, he loved it here. God only knows why.”
It seemed to me that she was talking to herself, arguing with the past as though she could alter it. As though the past could ever be altered. That was how I had felt, too, when my mother died. Late one afternoon, I came home from baseball practice, still basking in the coach’s praise of my swing, still aroused by the sight of Maddie Clarke in a miniskirt cheering me from the stands, still smiling at the teasing jokes of my teammates, to find my mother passed out in the hallway, her purse slung across her chest, the day’s mail in her hand. I scrambled for the phone, all the while struggling to remember the first-aid class I’d taken two years earlier, in the seventh grade. Was I supposed to look for a pulse? Move her or leave her on her side like that? Carefully, I turned her on her back, tapped her cheeks, unbuttoned her collar. Somehow I managed to find a pulse, but I couldn’t wake her and neither could the paramedics when they arrived. By the time my father and sister had caught up with me at the Hi-Desert Medical Center, she was dead. Pulmonary embolism. To this day I can still remember, with a clarity that startles me, my father standing in a colorless hospital hallway, telling the doctor that there must be some mistake, that all she had was a little cough.
But there was no mistake; she was gone. She wasn’t there when I returned to our dark and empty house later that night. She didn’t call my name from her bedroom, didn’t ask, What are you still doing up? You’d better go to sleep, it’s a school night. In the morning, she wasn’t leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping from her cup of coffee, looking out of the window at the new day. She didn’t say, Did you forget to take the trash out last night? Because I smell something. She didn’t ruffle my hair and ask if I slept well. I didn’t sleep at all, either that night or many, many others to come. Her absence was too heavy to be surrendered to dreams.
For the funeral, my aunts Aura and Estella drove down from El Monte and my uncle Paul flew in from Oregon. They bought me a black suit and helped me with my tie and told me stories I hadn’t heard before, stories about how my mother had won second place in a dance contest at the Orange County fair; how she had hives when she sat for her teaching-credential exam; how she could play any tune on the violin by ear, any tune at all, no matter how difficult; how she’d traveled all the way to Sonora three weeks after giving birth to Ashley, just to help out a cousin who’d gotten into trouble. These stories were meant to be comforting, but in truth they were excruciating. I wished all the family would leave. Then they left, the house was empty again, and I wished they had stayed. At school, nothing made sense. My bandmates gave me a condolence card they had all signed, but I had missed the spring recital, and I felt left out of the conversations they had about it. Some of the boys on the baseball team came up to me to say they were sorry for my loss, but at lunch they all stayed away, as if my grief were contagious. And when I came home, my father was sitting in the dark, drinking and staring into space. The silence was so profound, so unrelenting, that Ashley went to eat dinner with the Johnsons, a rowdy family that lived two doors down from us.
“Dad, should we just have cereal for dinner?” I asked.
“Whatever you think,” my father said.
To fill the silence in the living room while I did my homework, I turned on the television. The sound was oddly comforting, even though it made it more difficult for me to concentrate. I kept reading and rereading the same three or four lines in my textbook as my mind wandered to distant days when my mother was alive and healthy. She would never again watch me play ball with