Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [5]
“How dirty can sheets get in one week, or two weeks? We shower, we’re clean people. It’s not like we’re sheep dogs,” Bob had argued.
Over four months had passed. The new fall semester had started and this was the time of the year that Rocky had always loved. But all she could think of was preserving Bob’s scent on his pillowcase. The sheets had not been the same because her scent, skin cells, and hair were mixed in; it was not pure Bob. She had reluctantly changed the sheets after a month, but Bob’s pillowcase remained unwashed. She panicked at the thought of his scent evaporating completely.
Every morning, she covered the pillow with white newsprint, pulled from an unused roll she got from the local newspaper. She imagined the skin cells that Bob had rubbed off in his fitful sleep were still there, bits of his DNA, and she was desperate to keep them. She pictured tiny cells, atoms really, all spread out on the pillowcase and she wanted the newsprint to keep them safe. She had her own pillow, but Bob’s pillow was placed next to hers and she chanced a stroke or two in the night, a light sniff to catch his essence during the long hours until sleep came. She dreaded the day that the pillowcase would be empty of his smell. That would be worse than his death, or like dying again.
She kept three of his flannel shirts and one gray cashmere sweater. The rest of the clothing was stuffed into black plastic bags and taken across the state line into New York. She didn’t want to see any local people wearing his clothes, not that she begrudged them anything, she just didn’t want to see the town suddenly dressed as her dead husband. Dead husband. Not like the live one.
The clerk at the Salvation Army store said, “Do you want a receipt for taxes?”
Rocky looked at the four black plastic bags, lumpy with Bob’s clothes. “These are my husband’s things. He died. His heart was bad. I didn’t know about his heart.”
She wanted the clerk to know all this about the clothes. That they weren’t just clothes that someone got tired of, or grew too fat to wear. The world would never be the same again.
“Do you want a receipt?” the clerk asked again, with a hint of impatience. The woman shifted her weight to one hip and sighed.
“Yes I do. I want a receipt.” Rocky felt the crush of the clerk’s coldness start at her brain and then descend like a thick poison throughout her body. She did not leave the house again for three days.
Fall semester started again and Rocky returned to her job at the university in western Massachusetts. She was a psychologist at the counseling center and she lasted two weeks before the director asked her to come into his office. He asked her if she needed more time. He told her that several students reported that Rocky had gotten up in the midst of a therapy session and stared out the window. One student had apparently stayed for the full fifty minutes watching Rocky’s back, and then left. Rocky told him about the clerk at the Salvation Army. She did not tell him about Johnny’s Drive-In.
“The strange thing about you is that you expect store clerks to understand your grief instead of opening up to people who care about you. Did you really expect a clerk at Salvation Army to be an empathetic angel? She was probably tired, horribly paid, and afraid of your sadness. We are all afraid of someone else’s grief,” said Ray Velasquez. He was older than Rocky, closing in on fifty.
Rocky grabbed a hunk of her long dark hair and rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. “I thought just getting in my car and coming to work was such an accomplishment. But I can’t remember why any of this matters. I can’t remember how I ever did therapy. My brain has been deleted.”
They agreed that the university could give her a year’s leave of absence. She was guaranteed her job when she returned. “You know that work can sometimes be the best friend after