The Spare Chair

On the small rituals of grief — and the impossible habit of buying two bags of apples

My mother calls me early on Tuesdays. Some hour before the world is supposed to be awake. I know it’s her before I answer because nobody else I know has the bad manners to be up at this hour. She’s been awake since before five. She says she doesn’t sleep well anymore. I say, Mom, you’re seventy-three, of course you don’t sleep well. She says, No, it’s not that. And then there’s the pause. The pause that used to be filled with my father clearing his throat in the background, or the kettle doing its whistle, or him yelling from the other room that who calls at this hour, honestly. Just my mother breathing and whatever she was about to say that she decided not to say.

I keep thinking about the pause.

My father has been dead for a little over a year. Some mornings I still pick up the phone half expecting to hear his voice in the background, the way you might flinch at a car backfire even though you haven’t lived anywhere near gunfire since you were a kid. Some wire in my brain keeps misfiring at the empty space. The house, I think, is doing the same thing.

There’s a chair in my mother’s living room that no one sits in. It’s a worn leather recliner, way too big for my mother, with a dent in the headrest…