Estate sale.

I stood there and just kept saying “estate sale” back to him like the words would rearrange themselves into something else. He felt bad. He didn’t know what to do with me. I apologized and got back in my car and sat in the driveway of the house I grew up in, and I called my Uncle Ray. My mom’s brother. First time in years.

He picked up. I said, “Ray, where’s Mom?” And there was this pause that told me everything before he did. Three words. “She’s gone, Diane.”

Pancreatic cancer. She’d been sick. Hospice for four months. She died in February, in a bed, in a building, with people I never met. February. I went to her door in November thinking I’d hug her. She’d been dead nine months and nobody told me. Or, no. Ray said they tried. He said they called the old number, they didn’t have my new one, and Gary, well. Gary had blocked Ray’s number off my phone two years back and told me Ray was harassing him. I didn’t even fight it at the time.

Ray told me the funeral had one person at it besides him. The hospice nurse. A woman named Patrice who’d taken care of Mom those last months came on her day off because she didn’t want my mother to be buried with nobody there. A stranger sat at my mother’s funeral so she wouldn’t be alone. I want you to sit with that the way I have to.

I didn’t talk for a long time after that call. I just drove home and stared at the wall.

A week later Ray mailed me something. He said Mom made him promise. It was a letter, in her handwriting, that shaky version of her handwriting from when she was already sick. She wrote it the week before she died. I’ve read it so many times the fold is going soft.