The Silence

She took the spareribs out of the oven and set them steaming on a plate before leaving her apartment. I didn't know how long to wait, tore into cold meat when I decided my mother wasn't coming back. * No one knew about the gun she kept in her purse until the authorities called—a .38 caliber pistol with a pearl handle and a trigger even she could easily pull— her car still waiting to be towed from a roadside ditch when they arrived on the scene. * Yesterday morning, I was leaning over a kitchen sink, my husband upstairs sleeping. Between his snores muffled under a down comforter and a portable electric heater that kept our bedroom warm, I knew I could sob as loud as I wanted without disturbing his dreams. * At the sports arena between musical acts and clouds of dope, I texted my lover a wide-angle shot of the stage— the reception bars on my phone bouncing back and forth between high and low—a text I had to send several times before it went through even though there was a chance his phone would be off or the text get lost for hours in the ether, even days. The silence is the agony. * My therapist says: It's not your fault. No way for you to have known exactly where your mother was headed. Then why am I left weeping in my kitchen decades after the fact? When I went upstairs and sat beside my husband, he could feel the mattress shift beneath our weight even though I felt much lighter after watching translucent ropes of snot lowering down into the sink, arms around me when I asked if he was awake, knowing that he wasn't. * How many romances get derailed when a text that has been sent fails to go through? How many mothers disappear through a kitchen door never to return—the food on the table the last meal they will ever serve? * My lover texted back: where are you now? Having no idea what I'd been going through when he texted again: Wish I was there with you.