HABDO Ledger un-dated

HADBO Ledger February — 1931

Mother is gone.

I will not write the date. I don’t want this page to have a date.

Maury telephoned at half past ten. Elias was at his club. I stood in the hallway with the receiver and said yes and yes and I understand and thank you and hung up and stood there another minute with my hand still on it.

The window was cracked. I had forgotten to close it this morning. Cold coming through — the particular cold of a Boston February that finds the cheekbone first and stays there. I did not close the window. I stood in it.

My chest did something I don’t have a word for. Not breaking. Caving. Like a room where someone has taken the load-bearing thing out quietly and the walls have not yet understood what’s happened.

My eyes went. I let them, briefly, because Elias would not be home for two hours and I have learned to budget grief the way I budget everything else — by the time available.

The tears were warm. That surprised me. Everything else was cold and my face was cold and the tears were warm against it and I stood in the draft from the window and catalogued this the way I catalogue everything: cold cheekbone, warm wet, chest caving, head heavy as a thing waterlogged.

This is what it weighs. I wanted to know what it weighs.

I keep numbers. I have kept Elias’s numbers for eleven years — the fire claims, the mortality tables, the columns that tell you what a life is worth in the aggregate. The older mathematics my mother taught me lives in the wrist and the palm and has no column for this either.

Some things resist the count.

He cannot know yet. I need time with this before it becomes his to manage.

I telephoned Maury back.

I told him to begin the paperwork. The estate. All of it.

Mother would have wanted me to be practical.

Mother would have wanted me gone.