Weeks On End

Sometimes I don’t think of her for weeks on end. No one tells you that tid-bit when a parent first dies. Lately though, I’ve been thinking on how I used to scratch her back. I would sit, wedged behind her and the recliner she was partial to. Her shirt pulled up high, bra undone revealing the groove marks which had dug into her shoulders by the truss bearing the weight of her pendulous breasts. Sometimes we made a game of it. I’d draw out letters or pictures with my finger and she would guess their shape. Eventually I used the closeness that it brought us, against her. It’s how I bargained to do things. It’s how I got her to let me spread my wings. “Mom, I’ll scratch your back for fifteen more minutes, if you let me bicycle up the highway to the Yellow Front to see what they just got in.” The Yellow Front was the bargain store that sat on the edge of the next town over. She’d slowly take a drag off her Benson and Hedges and haggle for thirty-five minutes more. Sometimes I'd try to stump her by scratching out filthy words, just to hear her guess them out loud. Once I got her to say Rusty Trombone. I had heard an older boy say it at my friend Tammy’s house. He used it as an euphemism, as he lectured me on how to work a carburetor on a bong. As my mother said it aloud, she stopped, turned her head back towards me and smiled. Neither an acknowledgement of recognition for the word, or a hint of recrimination against me for knowing it. And to think, that sometimes now I don’t think of her for weeks on end.