Jennifer Maloney
Mom on Her Last Good Day
is seven in second grade walking to St. Josaphat’s with her sister. Pleats plaid knee socks braids a big boy rushes past knocks her down in the snow. I’m telling Sister, Jimmy Connelly! her wiggly front tooth finally lets go
she pushes her tongue into the place where the empty space should be Patrick spooning oatmeal milky-blue into her mouth plop! on her clean shirt sigh. Spoon wipe spoon wipe. Blue green and yellow meds rattle in the cup cinnamon tablet waits its turn on the counter in its rose-pink coat
of lipstick at sixteen nervous posing in a black one-piece for her best friend Kay’s brother Jimmy in the army. It’s to keep his spirits up. Glasses out of frame she feels for them in grass shaved prickly as an army private’s skull scratching rashy on bare thighs eyes blurred as snow in the pines of the Ardennes so far away so cold she shivers and hopes the picture helps. Eighty years later the kids get the photo blown up thankful their father wasn’t
but now Daddy’s in the cemetery eight years dead. He’s at the store Mom, he’ll be home soon a grocery run that will never end. The piano keeps asking have you seen my have you seen my have you seen my new shoes to keep her from asking where her own father is saying she needs to go home
because at 20 she’s all they’ve got no mother no wife sister married and gone but chores don’t stop because people leave people die five boys plus her father working the mine and there are dinners and dishes and laundry laundry laundry carpets to sweep and rugs to beat to keep the coal dust down they bring it home they track it everywhere and she’s all they have when her father’s cough gets worse and her brother’s cough starts up. She keeps writing Jimmy in Germany he writes back asking will you be my sweetheart? and it makes her feel funny kind of fizzy inside buzzy like a coca cola when you first pop the top and when her brother Larry asks what are you smiling about she folds the paper up quick slips it in her apron pocket grins never you mind nosy parker and runs upstairs singing to
strip the bed each morning. Soiled linen in the basket, blue paper pads in the trash but Pat changes the Depends before he changes the sheets, like caring for a baby he learns not to invite trouble. She doesn’t fight him but cries and says don’t do that, no, and that breaks his heart he starts to cry so it’s hard to say I’m sorry, Mom, forgive me the brochure he tried to show her on the bureau the suitcase squatting like a traitor near the bed because this is the morning
she’s twenty-four and a bride. Looks at herself in the mirror misses her mother. Looks at herself and is grateful for her father brothers sister who taught her how to make a home but mostly grateful for Jimmy who asked her to be his sweetheart who came back from the war when so many did not Jimmy with his big mouth bigger smile so safe to be quiet in his arms. This morning a girl this afternoon a wife she’s packed ready suitcase in the corner ready to step into this new life with Jimmy an adventure before them and all the time in the world.
Road Trip
We followed a beer truck, my best friend and I, as we drove to the town where her grandmother Rosemary still lived, the place she had grown up and watched her brothers grow up and watched her father grow old. The old place, the home place, the place where Rosemary’s mother died from the same illness that stole Rosemary’s hearing but did not steal music—it outlived the fever, that headache that drummed and crashed behind her eyes, polka’d fast, wild, deep and hot—music outburned it, songs born with her on the side of the mountain like the clouds that waterfall glissando down to the Susquehanna, tripping and trickling like quarter notes down the mountain, dissolving into the river that swings high against its crumbling, stony banks, lipping the highway with a trumpet pout, breathing and blowing, playing against the mountain’s face that tilts and demands, inquisitive, cloud-washed, the mountain pulling us up and rolling us down like a drunken soldier at a canteen dance, pulling us up, rolling us down till we had to stand on the brakes to Rosemary’s house, Rosemary waiting with a small glass of beer, Rosemary waiting in the house on Luzerne Street, deaf but dancing, laugh so big and ready, hands so small and clever and busy with her brothers’ breakfasts and her father’s dinner and her mother’s rosary and her granddaughter’s visit—my best friend and I on our way to Rosemary’s house, the old place, the home place—her grandfather unknown, just like her great-grandfather, dead from lives that faded beneath the mountain like a song on the radio, only Rosemary left, Rosemary, her daughter, her daughter’s daughter and me, unconnected but drunk on the mountain, the river and the descending scale of the clouds. Rosemary never a soldier, Rosemary unburied in the mine, Rosemary burnt but unbroken and waiting for us with small glasses of beer and silence in her ears but music in her head, sound and rhythm behind her eyes, music that washed away the fever and pain or perhaps subsumed it, consumed it, ensconced it, cocooned it, made it into and of itself like the Susquehanna drinks the clouds. Rosemary surviving her mother, her father, her brothers, her old man, Rosemary waiting for us, two young girls singing at the top of our lungs, following a beer truck up and down the mountain and into her arms.
Jennifer Maloney is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions nominee. Her work is available in Ninth Letter, Synkroniciti Magazine, Flash Boulevard and many other publications. Recent chapbooks include Maps of a World (Raw Earth Ink, 2025) and Red (Clare Songbirds Publishing, forthcoming). Jennifer is a parent, a partner and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.
