My mother’s cousin on her father’s side came down from one river to another with his wife. “Well, I don’t like to think of the boys’ father,” mom reminded them. Ah, yes, of course, we forgot. We drank martinis and sodas and water (spread among us) and ate off holiday paper plates with holiday napkins and the clouds arrived gray and thick. On our walk sporadic rain and sleet. Then snow, blanketing surfaces, wet defined, hardly holding on, ephemera complete. The girl I once ogled now has her first son and her husband coaches high school football and “he’s never home.” She is the daughter of my mother’s best friend, divorced, retired, hearing aids, reads continually, a librarian and an English teacher. I played with the two-year-old and we were like this. Soon revealed that the daughters of my mother’s cousin, from one river to the next, had my father for government or humanities and for Model United Nations. Laura became a lawyer. My dad must have been doing something right. This cousin had lived where I had lived, children schooled where I had been, streets mentioned, do-you-remembers. The cousin’s wife, too, very well put together, holding it as she ages, worked with my stepmom at the middle school. “Oh, yes, I knew Sue.” My excitement should not have come as a surprise, with young Mac hanging on my feet screeching, and our sharing, though brief, was intense. Mom never mentioned this connection.
