Safe

 

After we buried my mother, we drank beer

and told stories in the room where she’d died.

The hospital bed was gone and the portable

commode I’d helped her settle on, the love

seat tucked flush with the window again, long

sofa shoved against the wall like always, the same

sofa where she’d fall asleep watching baseball

while she waited for me to come home from

some high-school date, and once, when I wasn’t

home by midnight, she threw a raincoat

over her flannel pajamas and drove around

until she found me mussed and unbuttoned behind

the Big Boy, sharing a bagged can of Colt 45

with the second-string quarterback. All the way

home and for an entire week, I was punished

by silence, a vast black void of disgust. The last time

I saw her, I wanted her to speak to me, to lock

the front door and turn off the last

light, to follow me upstairs, having made

the house safe for the night. But she didn’t

know who I was.

Sara Freligh, thesunmagazine.org (August 2012)