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It was hot, sitting in the car. I got out and walked back to the 7-Eleven. I bought a pint of Red Label and took some to settle my stomach. I went back to my car. I waited until forty minutes had passed, and then decided to go back.

When I got there she was gone. Her clothes were gone from the closet. I pulled out the dresser drawers. Her underwear was gone. The bathroom, all her cosmetics were gone. The lacy bras that hung over the shower rod, the thong panties dangling from the tub spout, they were gone too. Hell, it was the first time in two years she’d cleaned up after herself.

I didn’t look for a note.

I knew she wouldn’t bother.

The mail came. I heard it rattle through the slot. I went out to get it. It was mostly bills. I sat on the couch in the living room and shuffled through it. The sun was coming in through the front windows. It was glaring and bright where I sat. I moved over to the piano bench, which was still in shade.

I finished with the mail. There were a couple of pieces for her. I tossed them aside. I looked down at the piano bench, noticing how scratched up it was, how old. I didn’t know why I’d kept it all these years. For that matter, I didn’t know why I’d kept the piano. My mother used to play it, occasionally, when she lived here.

And when I was a kid, she sat on the bench beside me and made me do my lessons. Every day, she sat beside me and corrected me, getting angrier and angrier because I wasn’t paying attention, and then she’d start smacking me on the shoulder every time I made a mistake. She thought it would make me pay attention. But for me it was just a daily challenge, to see if I could take what she dished out, and not cry. I refused to cry after about the age of eight. Of course she wanted to make me to cry so she hit me harder, and harder. My arm would get red, and sometimes it was bruised. But I wouldn’t cry.

We played that little game every day for about four years, until I had football after school, and could stay away until dinner. Once I was a teenager, I avoided her as much as I could. By then she was drinking hard, anyway. She’d snarl at me that I was a fuckup like my father, that I’d never amount to anything. My father had left her before I was born. Made sense to me.

In later years, she was usually drunk asleep when I got home. I was grateful she was passed out, because I wouldn’t have to listen to her abuse. I’d fix dinner for myself, do my homework. It was all right. Then I went back east to college, so I didn’t see her much after that.

The sun was moving. It had almost crossed the living room to find me at the piano bench. I wondered how long I had been sitting there, remembering old times. The sun reflected off the black polished surface of the piano and glinted on the silver frame that had my mother’s picture. The picture was faded, the colors washed out. It showed my mother smiling. She always smiled for a camera, and then dropped it as soon as the shutter clicked.

I don’t know where the picture was taken. It was on the piano when I got back from college. By that time my mother was unable to care for herself. She had bleeding ulcers and trouble with her balance, and she walked with that shuffling gait that marks the real drunks. You know the way they never pick their feet off the floor, because they can’t feel anything anymore.

Right out of college I had a job as an insurance claims investigator. My hours were long and erratic. Left alone in the house, she kept falling down and hurting herself. Broke her arm one time, cut her forehead open another time. Finally I put her in a home. I got her to sign the papers one night when she was really drunk. She was furious when I took her to the home and dropped her off. She called me every name she could think of. And she told me I’d never amount to anything. Screaming at me as I walked out the door.

For the first year or so, I didn’t go near her. Then she had a stroke, and they called me up, so I went over to see