Circuitry
Leah Browning
In the fall of 1952, when I was eight years old, my mother lay down on the couch in the living room. For the next six months, she rarely got up again.
I was able to keep this secret for a long time because no one was around to notice. Although my parents had never formally divorced, my father rented a two-room apartment in a nearby town. He owned a furniture store there, and he told me that he liked to keep tabs on it. When I asked him what he did every night, he said that he ate at the diner nearby or swam laps in the community pool.
He visited on weekends, sometimes, and I started to meet him on the front steps, wearing a dress with a pinafore I had starched myself. My hair was badly braided, but he didn’t seem to notice, only placing a hand on the back of my head with a fond, distracted smile.
The front door of our house led right into the living room, and I was always afraid that he would open it and discover the scene inside. But things between my parents were often tense, and I think he was relieved that he didn’t have to go in and try to make polite conversation with my mother.
Instead, we went out for an ice cream cone or some other little treat and then he delivered me back to the house, waving from the car as I slipped inside.
This was only on the occasional weekend, though. Most days, I saw only my mother.
She lay stretched out on the couch, which was a faint green—a boxy shape, but not uncomfortable. At night, after I had changed out of my school clothes and finished doing math problems at the kitchen table, after I had cooked a dinner of scrambled eggs or cheese slipped between two slices of toasted bread, after I had rinsed and wiped the dishes and placed them back in the cupboard, I turned on the television and sat near my mother, folded into the crook of her knees. Once a week, I watched the Lone Ranger gaze into the distance, his hand on the neck of his horse.
That spring, someone from the school office called my father, and as I left Mrs. Taylor’s classroom and crossed the school’s front lawn on my way home that afternoon, I saw him leaning against his car, waiting for me.
“Who’s minding the store?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just opened the car door and waved me in. I climbed inside.
“Why are you here?”
Again, there was no reply. He drove me to my mother’s house and parked in the driveway rather than alongside the curb, as he had taken to doing.
Suddenly, I could see everything that was wrong: the lawn gone to seed, the paint peeling off the shutters, the flowers that had long since died in their beds. Winter had softened these edges, but now that the light blanket of snow had melted, everything I had kept so carefully hidden had been exposed.
We went inside. My mother was already gone. We didn’t speak about this. I changed my clothes and did my homework, and at an appropriate time my father made me a peanut butter sandwich and an apple. I had just done the shopping and everything in the refrigerator was fresh.
Whenever I saw him, my father would give me a bit of money—twenty dollars, say, or twenty-five. Presumably he gave it because he felt guilty, but I didn’t think about that. For months, I had been making that occasional weekend money stretch out to cover all of our basic necessities. The women at the market would smile when they saw me take out my little change purse to pay for milk or toothpaste. My father was still paying our bills every month, so we never had to do without water, or electricity.
*
Many weeks later, I came home from school and found that my mother was back from the hospital. She met me at the door holding a spatula and wearing a red and white half apron with a ruffle along the bottom. She was baking cookies.
I thought that maybe this time, the treatments had worked. Now she could be a regular mother who threw birthday parties and made me eat my vegetables. My father, who was sitting in a chair in the living room staring into space, could sell his little apartment and move back into their bedroom on a permanent basis.
That night, though, he put his shoes back on and drove away. Before he left, he briefly cupped the back of my head with his hand.
She was standing in the kitchen, wearing dish gloves and holding a sponge. “Where is the soap?” she asked, though I had already answered the same question twice that afternoon. I pulled the bottle from the back of the sink to the front.
*
In the fall of 1987, when I was forty-three, my first boyfriend died. The obituary made no mention of AIDS; it said only that he had died after a prolonged illness.
My mother was the one who called and read the newspaper column to me over the phone. “It’s so sad,” she said. He had grown up just down the street from us, in the yellow house on the corner.
I knew then, as I had always known, that one day the phone call would be about her. All that afternoon, for hours after I hung up the phone, I couldn’t seem to stop crying.
At dinner time, my daughter called. She had just gotten home from work and was trying to make meatballs. What do you add to the ground beef, she wanted to know. She had moved into her first real apartment the year before. Her younger brother, my son, was in his last year of college.
I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Do you have saltines?” I asked, and waited on the line while she checked her pantry.
Leah Browning
Leah Browning is the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks. One of her most recent chapbooks is Orchard City, a collection of flash fiction published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. Browning’s short stories have appeared in Four Way Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Newfound, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Random Sample Review, The Homestead Review, Santa Ana River Review, Bellows American Review, Waypoints, First Class Literary Magazine, Chagrin River Review, Wigleaf, Thin Air Magazine, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, an anthology from White Pine Press.