Saying goodbye

Mama and Patrick were now on the road to Washington, that much had become clear. Agnes walked around the empty house. Saying goodbye, always a challenge. She’d done so much of it these past years – when she left this house to marry Norman, when Granny died, and now that she’d inherited this house, after Patrick got his job in Washington and she’d sold it. To Presbyterians, just like Mama had complained.

She walked around the empty rooms, feeling her shoes clank against the hard wood. The house had never seemed quite so dirty, quite so diskempt. All she could remember was running up and down the stairs, Daddy sitting at the head of the dining room table, smoking a pipe and reading his newspaper, Mama standing at the kitchen sink, a waft of steam rising from the boiling pot as she emptied it – and Granny sitting on an old sofa in the parlor, listening to her play “Danny Boy” while Mr. Larney sang. Well, they’d done an encore of it at Granny’s wake.

Saying goodbye. There was the familiar ache at the bottom of her heart, the tingling feeling she felt in her stomach, and the burning behind her eyes. She needed to leave – and go back to her own house. Her and Norman’s house, where her 3-year old daughter awaited her.