Thanksgiving

“I’ll be upstairs for a few minutes. I’d like to rest,” Jeremy said to the group gathered in the living room. Greg had a fire going, and they – Greg, Janet, and the two kids – were playing Pictionary. Janet had announced that dinner would be in an hour. It would give Jeremy enough time to see what he needed to see.

It was a pretty enough house for Denver, hardwood floors and dark walls which seemed to be all the rage. Jeremy had graduated to the guest room whenever he visited from San Francisco. It used to be that Jeremy slept on the pull-out in the basement, when Greg and Janet were in the larger house and Mother and Dad were always present at holidays, which was loads of fun because he’d been with Mark at the time, and they’d slipped into the hot tub and fooled around. But this house – no hot tub, and certainly no Mark. And no parents.

He walked up the stairs slowly, one step at a time; with his arthritis, it’d be disaster if he fell. But when he got to the top, he didn’t turn into the guest room. He crossed the hall, tip-toed to the office door. He looked down the stairs, no one to see, opened the door, and closed it behind him. He took off his shoes and tip-toed over to the closet. Must be in here, no other place. He’d checked all the other closets.

He fanned the closet doors open, and they creaked, but so loud as to attract interest. Yes, what he wanted was hanging on the rack in front of him.

Jeremy recognized the purple terry-cloth bathrobe with the white lace collar. Oh, he’d seen that so many times on Mother, sitting in that chair in her den, watching Fox News or Jeopardy, yelling at the television at something the Democrats did, calling out Jeopardy questions. “What’s the Louvre Museum, Alex?”

And next to it was the lilac blouse the nurses had put on her that day – when Alex had accompanied her grandmother to Boulder for the funeral. Oddly enough, the blouse she wore to Dad’s funeral was the same one the nurses put on her the day she died herself. Exactly one year, to the day, after Dad died. And it had been Jeremy’s birthday.

He felt the clothing. Same soft feel to it, same texture. No indication that the owner was no longer here – was no longer. Jeremy felt warm and comforted by the clothing, his mother’s blouses, the bathrobes, the slacks. Somehow, he felt as though Mother were there, celebrating Thanksgiving with them all.