Things We Don't Say

Marcus stood in the center of his mother's bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet half-filled with the debris of a life. The cat—Barnaby, a seventeen-year-old tabby who'd outlived his original owner by three years—paced the doorway, miaowing his demands for dinner. Marcus ignored him.

He picked up the hat from the top of the dresser: his father's fedora, smelling faintly of stale tobacco and the cheap cologne his father had worn until the day Marcus's mother finally changed the locks. Marcus had been twelve then. His father had taken his baseball glove in the divorce settlement—a petty cruelty that still stung, thirty years later. Marcus hadn't picked up a bat since.

The ceiling fan spun lazily above, circulating the humid afternoon air. Water stains bloomed across the plaster like dark thoughts, reminders of the pipe that had burst six months ago, while Marcus was too busy with his divorce to return his mother's calls. She'd hired someone to fix it herself. She'd hired someone for everything, those last years.

He should have come. Should have visited. Should have forgiven her for staying with his father those extra seven years, just as she should have forgiven him for the distance he'd put between them.

Barnaby rubbed against his ankle, purring. Marcus picked him up, the cat's weight substantial and warm in his arms. The old cat licked his wrist, sandpaper tongue against skin.

"Yeah," Marcus said. "Me too."

He set the cat down gently and placed his father's hat in the box. Then the photographs. Then the small ceramic urn that held what remained of Eleanor Chen, who had loved her son silently and awkwardly, who had waited too long to say the things that mattered.

Marcus sealed the box. Outside, summer pressed against the windows. He would take Barnaby home. He would call his ex-wife. He would not let another decade pass before speaking the words he'd never said to his mother. The house would be sold, the memories scattered like dandelion seeds in wind. But something would remain. Something had to.