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By Root 1128 0

laugh, the sherry he’d pour the uncles on Sunday nights, Til’s fox-foot collar, the sound of Ness’s name. He thought he should see his life as he tumbled head over knees toward the center of the sea: the South Carolina lean-to where he was born, his mother, who died birthing him, shouldn’t she appear right now with wings and a halo reaching for him to enter into eternity, his brothers, who’d all left home before he was born, who probably never even knew his name, shouldn’t the faces come to him in death that never did in life? And where was Clarise’s face? Could he just see her face one more time. How cruel that he should die and not see his beautiful bride pass before his eyes, even if he couldn’t see his girls—Clarise. Where was Clarise? He jolted to, grabbed at the water in one final tug, one last try to live. But the water was slick, oily, too soft. It went through his hands like spilled milk, and now he really did let go.

It had been a month since the closed-casket memorial service for Finch; the casket had to be closed because there was no body to fill it, just his Ferragamo handmade shoes and the gray wool suit that Clarise used to insist he wear when he garnished with pink. She placed his unabridged Websters in the center of the casket because Finch had been a self-made man and relied on that dictionary so that he could approach prospective clients and dazzle them by describing his food with words like “delectable,” “succulent,” “palatable,” “pithy,” “scrumptious.” Plus she wanted the casket to have a little weight to it because Finch had been such a substantial man.

Now it was twenty-nine days later; she knew it was twenty-nine days because the aunts had stressed that she couldn’t wash the sheets on which Finch had last slept for twenty-eight days. The smell of those sheets had brought her comfort over the past month, the way the creamy sweet of her cold cream blended perfectly with the Royal Crown Finch rubbed nightly in his scalp. But last night she hadn’t been able to fall asleep clutching Finch’s pillow and taking in the scent of his hair pomade because the aunts had come over and stripped the bed themselves the day before. They’d come over every day since Finch had been declared missing and presumed dead. The uncles concocted desserts that begged up fleeting smiles from the girls, while the aunts propped Clarise between the two of them, taking turns squeezing the nape of her neck, helping her hold her head up when the girls were in the room; they cried less when they could look on their mother’s face.

Clarise was fading in and out still, which of course everyone blamed on her grief. Her pastor from the AME church stopped by once a week and told her things like “Joy cometh in the morning”; her best friend from high school called her daily with conversations that they’d had twenty years before, trying in vain to make Clarise laugh; Finch’s florist sent her a single red rose three, sometimes four times a week; the aunts brewed her tea, chamomile, spearmint, licorice. Everyone had their own prescription to save her from her grief. All to no avail. Because it wasn’t just her grief that was taking her over. It was the medicine.

This was 1965, and Elavil was being dispensed like lemon drops. And even though the drug had been a balm during the first days after Finch turned up missing, when Clarise’s emotions were oozing and running like pus from a picked-at scab, after Finch was declared dead, her doctor increased the dosage so she wouldn’t be devoured by her grief. He didn’t realize, though, that Clarise had a sensitivity to the drug; probably the same thing in her brain that gave her such a heightened sense of smell rebelled against the chemical rockabys. Now her senses were dimming on and off like a short-circuited night-light, so much so that she could barely manage to do the one thing that calmed her, knit.

This morning she tried. She wrapped the loop of yarn around the pointed end of the knitting needle, and then that navy haze dropped over her that always fell right after she took her morning pill. It