“You could sell the house,” my mother suggested once as she sat beside me in bed, spoon-feeding me soup because it was the only way I would eat, if she kept shoving the food into my mouth like I was a toddler. “Or we could sell both houses, yours and mine, and move somewhere together.” I liked the idea of that. We daydreamed about places we could go because, now that Jake is gone, there is nothing that keeps us tethered here. My mother is the only one who loves me. She’s the only person I have left.
“Despite the circumstances,” she said to me one night as she sat beside me in bed, “this is kind of nice. It’s just like old times,” and I agreed that yes, despite the circumstances of my husband being dead, it was just like old times.
One afternoon I sit on my mother’s sofa, staring through the gauzy living room sheers at the world outside. She forced me out of the bedroom, saying she wanted to wash the sheets, which I think was just a ploy to get me out of bed and it worked, because being out of the bedroom for just a few hours has brightened my mood. I took a shower for a change. I put on clean clothes.
As I watch out the window now, the mailperson comes tooling down the street in his truck.
“I’m going to get the mail,” I call out to my mother, feeling a sudden craving for movement and fresh air. I step outside, pulling the door closed behind me. The sunlight blinds me. It’s so bright after all those days of living in darkness.
I make my way toward the mailbox, staying aware of my surroundings. My mother’s neighborhood is 1970s era. The houses are all relatively small, mostly ranches like hers with the occasional raised ranch. Her house is just over eleven hundred square feet and is yellow brick with brown trim. The exterior hasn’t changed much in forty years. Because of the age of the neighborhood, the trees are mature and yet there aren’t many of them because I imagine that before the community was built, the land was razed.
I stay vigilant as I make my way down the driveway. I observe the street, which is remarkably quiet now. Oddly quiet. There isn’t a person around. The children are all at school, where I should be. My bereavement leave has officially expired and I’m taking unpaid time off now. I was given four days off from work, four days to grieve the death of my husband. Interestingly enough, there is no law that requires employers to give bereavement leave. I didn’t know that before, but I do now. The four days from my school district is considered generous. Four whole days to make funeral arrangements, to call family and friends, to bury a body if I could, obtain death certificates, file life insurance claims and somewhere in there, to actually grieve. Four days isn’t enough, though I wonder if any amount of time is enough. I want to get back to work, and yet I can’t imagine the way people will look at me when I come back. My mother had told me not to rush things. I worry about money, but she says not to worry about that because Jake has left us plenty of money and soon the life insurance will pay out, and then we will be set for years.
Lily is out of prison on bail, though, under the terms and conditions set by the court, she can’t have any communication with me. So far she hasn’t tried, but that’s not to say it won’t happen.
I get to the mailbox. I open the little black door and reach inside for the mail, coming up with it in my hand. There is more than a day’s worth of mail. My mother must have forgotten to get the mail these last few days, which have been a blur, every day running into the next until I can’t tell them apart anymore.
I flip through the mail. One envelope catches my eye and I stop midstride, as I make my way back up the driveway for the front door. The envelope reads: Notice of Traffic Violation.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t open my mother’s mail but I do because my mother doesn’t even drive a car. She owns a car, but only because we haven’t had a chance to sell it. For now, it sits idle in her garage, collecting dust and biding time until we do. Someone has made a mistake.
Just inside the house, I slide my finger under the flap. I lift it open, tearing the envelope where it doesn’t easily give. I pinch the slip of paper between my fingers and draw it out of the envelope, unfolding and running my eyes slowly over it.
Notice of Violation, it says at the top of the ticket.
Automated Red Light Enforcement System.
It’s one of those traffic cam tickets that comes in the mail. I’d think that it was a mistake, but then I see two grainy images of my mother’s car on the page, one taken just before and one taken just after the transgression, showing her car turning left through a red light. Another image shows a close-up of the back end of my mother’s car, with the car’s make and model visible as well as the license plate number.
I would think that someone took my mother’s car out for a joyride, that someone borrowed or stole it from her garage, were it not for the fourth black-and-white, low-resolution picture at the bottom corner of the page. In it, I see my mother’s face, the picture snapped from the camera on the top of the stoplight through the windshield, the upper bend of the steering wheel slanting across her chin.
The date of violation: September 17
Time of violation: 2:18
There is a location of the violation. I think that’s inconsequential at first. It doesn’t matter where my mother got this ticket for running through a red light; the bigger problem is that she was driving her car when her vision isn’t anywhere close to good enough for her to be driving a car. What was she thinking?
She could have gotten herself killed. She could have killed someone else.
I hear my mother’s footsteps approach from down the hall. “Was there anything good in the mail?” she asks, rounding a corner and coming to stand in the living room with me.
“I don’t know,” I say, turning to look at her. “I didn’t look.”
I come forward. I meet her in the middle of the room. I hang on to the violation, but I hold the rest of the mail out to her. As she takes it from me, her eyes look down to peruse the mail. I watch for five and then ten seconds as she reads the words on the outsides of the envelopes. I watch the movement of her eyes running from left to right across the page before she catches herself, as if remembering only then that she supposedly cannot see well enough to read.
Her eyes come slowly back up. Our eyes lock. She harrumphs and shakes her head, as if disappointed in herself for trying. She holds the mail back out to me and says, “Can you just tell me what it is, Nina? You know I can’t see very well. The words, they’re all a blur.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry, Mom. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I take the mail from her, and then I thumb through an electric bill and the cable bill.
“And what’s that?” she asks, pointing to the envelope still in my hand.
“You got a ticket, Mom,” I say, feeling hot all of a sudden, the room suffocating. “For running a red light.”
She doesn’t try to argue. She doesn’t claim that the woman in the picture isn’t her, because it obviously is. She stands quietly, as if waiting for me to speak.
“Can you still drive, Mom?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I have good days and bad days,” she tries telling me. But macular degeneration, from what I know, is degenerative and incurable. The progression can be slowed but it can’t be reversed, which means that every day should be the same or worse.