My mother hadn’t hummed in eleven years.
I want to be precise about that number, because I counted it without ever meaning to. Eleven years, four months. Since the Tuesday morning in February when my father sat down on the edge of their bed to put his shoes on and didn’t get back up.
After that, the house in Ridgewood got very quiet in a specific way. Not silent — she still talked, still had people over, still ran the church rummage sale two years running. But the small sounds went out of her. The humming while she made coffee. The little tuneless thing she did folding laundry.
Then on a Sunday afternoon last April, I came upstairs to borrow her good scissors and stopped dead in the hallway.
She was standing in front of her bedroom mirror in the red dress, clipping on the pearl earrings my dad gave her for their thirtieth anniversary, humming Fly Me to the Moon.
Source: Unsplash
I stood in that doorway with my arms folded and I did not trust myself to speak for about ten seconds.
“Mom. You look beautiful.”
She waved a hand at the mirror without turning around.
“Oh, stop. It’s just dinner, Avery.”
“You’re wearing the red dress.”
“I’m allowed to wear the red dress.”
“You bought that dress in February and it’s been out of the closet more times than my winter coat.”
She laughed. And that sound — that actual laugh, not the polite one she’d been using for a decade — almost made me forget why I’d really come upstairs.
Which was, if I’m being honest, to snoop.
Everything Richard Did Right in the First Six Months
His name was Richard.
Fifty-two years old. Lived alone, as far as any of us could tell. They’d met at the community gardening club over on Prospect, where he complimented her tomato plants in April and asked her about her staking method like it was a subject of genuine academic interest.
By May he was bringing her sunflowers.
By June he’d fixed the wobbling porch railing my mother had been asking me to look at for two years, and he did it on a Saturday morning without telling anyone he was going to, and when she came home from the store it was just — done. Sanded and repainted to match.
He remembered that my daughter Chloe, who was fifteen and difficult about most things, liked mint chocolate chip specifically and not just any mint ice cream. He brought her a pint most weeks.
He asked about her history project. He remembered the topic from the week before.
And somewhere in those months I got a version of my mother back that I had genuinely believed we buried with my dad.
She bought the red dress. She started wearing perfume again — the Chanel that had sat unopened on her dresser since 2014. She looked at her phone sometimes with this small private smile, like a girl in study hall.
I wanted to like him.
I want that on the record, because of everything that comes after. I wanted to like Richard so badly that I spent about four months talking myself out of the one thing I couldn’t stop noticing.
The Thing About 7:30 That My Fifteen-Year-Old Noticed Before I Did
“So what time’s he coming?” I asked her that Sunday.
“Five. And he needs to leave by seven-thirty again, so let’s plan on eating around six.”
