I turned onto McCormick Street. It was a beautiful spring day and Jill Harrison and I were going to have lunch. Jill and I used to be the best of friends back in high school, and now was the first time since then we had both really been around. I hadn�t seen Jill since her wedding eight months before. Now she had her own quaint little house on McCormick Street.
It was nearly seventy degrees out so I had the windows of my �93 Honda Civic rolled down. I didn�t have the radio on because I preferred the sound of the wind coming through the window to some punk rock group. I could remember the days when I would sit smugly behind the wheel of Dad�s car, music blaring and friends packed in as tightly as they could be. But those days were long gone. I slowed to the twenty-five mile an hour speed limit on this residential street and reveled in the sounds of summer. School had just let out for the summer break and I could hear the distant calls of children playing down the block.
The shadow of the leaves from the trees danced across the hood and windshield. This was the typical suburban neighborhood�neat houses lined up behind luscious green lawns. Some houses even sported white picket fences. I eased the car towards the right-hand curb in front of a modest house wearing the number 431. Jill�s house. Cutting the engine, I breathed in the smell of summer. I reached for the door handle. That�s when I saw her.
Maybe I didn�t really see HER. Maybe I saw the dress. Regardless, my eyes fell and stuck on the woman standing in the driveway across the street and three houses down. The dress was long and red, to the ankles, with little blue and yellow flowers. I couldn�t actually see the flowers, but I knew they were there. I would have recognized that dress anywhere. The woman looked just like she had. Ten years ago. Her golden brown hair blew in the breeze, cascading around her milky shoulders. The dress whipped around her ankles and my heart stopped. It was her.
I wanted to jump from the car and run to her, throw my arms around her. Never let her go. I wanted to, but my common sense told me there was no way. No way it was her�? Instead, I sat in my car, staring through the open window. The woman just stood in the driveway of 428 McCormick Street, not moving.
Reason told me that twelve years is a lot and there was no way this could be the same woman I had last seen on April 13, 1986. The woman I had kissed and waved goodbye to like any other day when I boarded the bus that would take me to my fifth grade class. She hadn�t done it any differently. Her lips had not lingered on my forehead, her hands had not held mine even a millisecond longer than usual. There had been no warning that it would be the last time I would see my mother. I had waved and ushered my younger sister, Erika, onto the school bus, never seeing it coming.
She had been wearing that dress. The long, red one that fell to her ankles. It had the smallest blue and yellow flowers decorating it. She had worn a jean jacket over the top and sandals on her feet. And as she stood and waved at the bus as it pulled from the curb in front of our house, the wind had blown, causing her golden brown hair to dance around her face and her dress to tangle itself around her calves. The image of my mother standing there in our driveway haunted me for years after that.
When Erika and I had gotten off the bus that afternoon, the blue �78 Pontiac Grand Prix that usually stayed put on our driveway was gone. The oil stain it had made over the years stood out on the grey cement like a dirty spot on our lives. Mom was ALWAYS home when we got home from school. Since neither Erika nor I carried a key, Mom had left the door unlocked. Some things were gone from our house, like the wooden jewelry box she always kept on the mantel and the dual picture frame that held Erika�s and my most recent school pictures. That�s how we knew she was gone for good.
Neither of us bothered to call Dad. We just sat on the front lawn all afternoon, watching. Hoping. Maybe Mom had taken the pictures to get prints made for Grandma. Maybe the twinkling song the jewelry box played when it was opened had stopped and Mom had taken it in to get it fixed. Our minds were filled with maybes.
As time passed, Dad, Erika and I learned to accept that Mom was gone. We went on with life as it would be. There was always an empty spot in my heart where Mom should have been, but I learned to compensate. Erika and I had succeeded without Mom�s help. It had been hard showing up at the mother/daughter Girl Scouts sleep over party by myself, or having that �talk� all pre-teens have with their mothers with Jill after all my friends already knew what I should have learned from my mom. But we became a close family, Dad, Erika and I. As time passed, we thought about Mom less and less.
That�s why it was such a surprise to see her that day in June, just standing in that strange driveway.
I must have sat in the car for fifteen minutes before I made myself open the door and step out. My gaze was transfixed on the woman before me and I moved toward her like an automaton. I didn�t bother to close my car door. My path was set.
�Samantha!� I turned at the squeal that erupted from the front door of Jill�s house. For a minute, I forgot about the woman in the red dress as I turned towards Jill Harrison. �Sam, how ARE you?� Jill ran from the front door, her arms spread wide. She wore a cute white skirt with a pale green shirt that contrasted perfectly with her copper hair, and no shoes. She bounded onto the grass bare-footed.
�Oh my God, how are you?� I countered, a wide grin spreading across my face. �You look wonderful!� Jill absolutely glowed. �Married life must be good for you.� We embraced, then stepped back, admiring each other. Taking in what we had missed in the past eight months.
Jill lead me toward the house. When I threw a glance back over my shoulder to the woman in front of 438, there was no one there. �Jill, who lives in that house?� I asked, pointing.
�An older couple,� she answered, closing the front door behind me.