by AnneMarie Miles
It’s 4 a.m. and there’s someone whistling in her back yard, a melody she can’t put her finger on.
A caution from her neighbor replays in her head. Lock your doors. Put a chair in front of them, Malcolm said. Apparently, there’s been a string of break-ins in the neighborhood. Someone lost their father’s pocket watch; another lost all their great-grandmother’s jewelry. The corner house is missing all their vintage Hot Wheels. Still, she wasn’t so concerned by the content of Malcolm’s warning as she was irked by how he said it, like she needed protection.
I just worry about you, Mom, you know… What her daughter means is, living alone. But it’s been a year since Ben died. She’s cleaned the gutters. She’s called the septic company. She’s fixed the squeaky fence. Whether Emma wants to believe it or not, those weren’t grief moments. They were proud moments. Moments of independence, like when Emma used to scream at the top of her lungs when she was three, yelling that she could put her seatbelt on all by herself. Now, Emma prefers to imagine her mother incapacitated by grief, missing her dad. She only tells her daughter not to worry.
The whistling is getting louder. She rests her coffee mug in her lap. It’s too hot to drink. She lets it warm her thighs and tries to identify the repeating melody. It’s a song from the 70s. She swears she knows it. It sounds like one she and Ben would blast in his car as teenagers, ditching AP Bio to go swimming in his pool. He was the water lover. She was just his lover, so in she went.
Strange to remember this now. Just yesterday, she swam laps at the gym pool for the first time since he died. The water was freezing. She had to use Ben’s trick, pretending she was the octopus escaped from the aquarium, finally reaching the open ocean. She swam fifty laps. That was both: a grief moment and a proud moment.
The whistling stops. It’s replaced by a faint sound of metal scraping against metal just outside the back door. She recognizes it instantly. In his endless pursuit to equip her with as many unusual survival skills as he could, Ben tried to teach her how to pick locks once. This is a rake pick, he said. She always just called it the “toothy tool.”
With the melody gone, the lyrics come: I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger…
Ben’s face, teenaged and smiling, flashes behind her eyelids. One of his hands on the steering wheel, the other reaching for her lap as he serenades her, loudly and horrendously off-key.
She hears the lock click, the doorknob turning. It sounds just like Ben sneaking in, afraid to wake them after a night shift. The door cracks, opening up a home that lost all of its precious things a year ago. Her coffee finally cooled, she takes a sip, the warm hazelnut greeting her lips, something like an old friend.
AnneMarie Miles’ poems have been published with Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, The Concrete Desert Review, Allegory Ridge, Porter Gulch, and more. When she’s not drinking coffee, she’s usually thinking about where she can get more coffee. AnneMarie lives in Northern California with her husband, daughter, and furry firstborn.
Original photo by Ahmet Yüksek on Pexels, digitally altered by On Sunday.