The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

Emily noticed some of it too, in her own quiet way. She stopped calling Jerry “Uncle Jerry” sometime around her senior year of high school and started just calling him Jerry, flat, without explanation, and when I asked her about it once she only shrugged and said she didn’t know, he just felt different lately. I did not push her on it. I wish now, more than almost anything else from those six years, that I had pushed her on it.

Six years is a long time to live next to a question you are not allowed to ask.

It was Emily who finally moved us forward, in the ordinary, practical way that twenty two year olds move their mothers forward, by deciding that a house cannot stay a shrine forever. She had graduated from the community college that spring with her associate’s degree, she had a job lined up at the county extension office, and she came home one Saturday in October with a stack of empty boxes from the liquor store and told me, not unkindly, that it was time we did something with her father’s and her brothers’ things besides let them sit in the dark.

I had not touched most of it in six years. Mark’s jackets still hung in the back of our closet, sleeves creased the way he always folded them. The boys’ fishing gear was still stacked in Rubbermaid totes in the garage, tackle boxes we had not opened since the funeral that never actually had bodies in it. Some superstitious, stubborn part of me had always believed that if I moved those things, I was agreeing they were never coming back, and as long as I never agreed to that, some tiny flame of the alternative could keep burning.

Emily talked me into donating what the church clothing closet could use, and we spent that whole gray Saturday afternoon working through totes in the garage, mostly in silence, mostly crying quietly and pretending we weren’t. It was almost six in the evening, the light going long and orange through the garage door, when Emily lifted the last tote off the shelf above Mark’s workbench, the one marked “TAX PAPERS 2013 to 2016” in Mark’s own blocky handwriting, and underneath a stack of yellowed receipts she found a phone.