My Mother’s Timeline

When I asked my mom to buy me a specific candy, she’d say something along the lines of “Oh, of course I will, tomorrow.” And lo, within the week, that very candy would be in my hand. So she was off by a few days, so what? She’d kept her promise in the broadest sense.

This trend expanded, generally. I’d ask, “Mama, when can we visit Aunt Sarah?” She’d reply, “Definitely this month.” Three months later, we’d travel to see my aunt.

“Will you buy me a car when I turn sixteen?”

“Sixteen, seventeen, thereabouts.” I was nineteen, but it was a brand-new Mercedes. As such, I had no complaints.

I got the candy. I got the car. Materially, I got everything that mattered. Beyond that, I got to see my Aunt Sarah.

I was damn near spoiled by my mother, a wealthy and loving woman, who abided by her own vague timeline. She never lied. She merely had a calendar written in pencil with flexible dates.

The last time my mother and I spoke, she told me: “I love you, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

A part of me thinks, oh, Mom is just doing her usual thing. She’s delayed, as has always been her default mode. It would be so much like her to call me a week after her own funeral.

Because really. Why should she be bothered by the fact of her own death? Such things are immaterial details, mundane. She’s a big-picture woman, my mother. Too busy to cross over to the past tense.

So here she stays, indefinitely. And I enjoy waiting for a call I know won’t come.

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist.