Kaddish

By mid-March, three months after my mom left, she hadn’t called or sent a letter, and there was no way she was coming back. I scanned the faces of women her age who rode the city bus I took to school. Was she following me, trying to blend in with office workers and their somber faces? Had she found a pair of dress slacks, as she called them? Traded her puffy burgundy coat for something grey or black, and put on a paisley scarf? Or had she made it to the prairies and was taking pictures of wheat fields and grain elevators like she said she would? I imagined her parked at the side of a road in the country, asleep in the back under a blanket. There’s nothing worse than worrying about a person who’s ditched you.

My father told me someone was coming for dinner. He took a salmon fillet in plastic wrap from the fridge and cut it in thin pieces. Then he sliced a loaf of rye bread and placed the fish on it. Since my mom first went to the hospital, months before she vanished, we’d lived on frozen pizza, packaged tortellini, and iceberg lettuce with Kraft dressing.

My father bought cloth napkins and ironed them, something he’d never done. And he set the table with my mom’s china that we used two or three times a year. The plates were rose and gold-coloured, and lightly scratched. Just like most of the things my mother owned, she’d found them at the...