church perfume

Previous chapters in this series: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

//

Thursdays are a wash, but she prefers it that way. Even on the cusp of being a septuagenarian, Ada Lorraine DeShields rises shakily with the sun for what an old friend of hers once called "movement medicine."

If she evaded her Thursday dawns, put aside her hand-scrawled itinerary to sleep in until 9:00, God-forbid 10:00, she'd surely wake with crusty, swollen eyes. Eyes prone to leak disoriented tears at all hours of the day.

If she did not shake loose and shuffle, collapsible cane in hand, she wouldn't be able to make it to each of her destinations minutes before they open: Post Office, IGA, Dry Cleaners (she could no longer traverse the basement stairs comfortably). She wouldn't be able to squeeze in her prescribed half hour of walking to and fro through the local dying mall.

"Walking without risk of heat exhaustion," Weston approvingly deemed over the phone when she 'graduated' from the inpatient rehabilitation center last spring.

"You mean heat stroke," she had corrected him. No need to avoid the word.

It was, in fact, a mini-stroke that had landed her in the two-week recovery circuit. Lyle, her first son, insisted on paying for everything and then some, overcome by gratitude that the diagnosis was so emphatically defined by brevity.

Still, she would have gotten to the hospital sooner if she didn't insist upon keeping her phone in another room while she slept. Another never-die habit stemming from Seraphine's over-dinner orations; no electronics where you sleep or, ideally, in the house at all. Perhaps it's for the best she didn't live to see the 21st century.

When Ada woke up in the hospital, only her Lyle was there to wag his finger at her. I told you to get one of those Life Alert buttons!

His work lanyard skimmed her face as he leaned over to adjust her pillow. He was a physical therapist in training at a clinic two towns over and reluctant to accept that she'd never agree to be his patient or, as she was wont to say, his test subject.

"I truly thought Tony Cat cared if I lived or died, and would trudge over to wail at the neighbors if need be." Ada was only kidding. Tony, her Siamese cat of 8 years, was perhaps the furthest thing from a medical alert animal.

Eventually, she got the same scolding from Weston, newly graduated from college and working as a bank teller. His twin brother, Emmett, was his polar opposite: a pro wrestler on a circuitous migration between Econo Lodges nationwide. She had a funny daydream of disrupting his next local show in California just to swing at one of those sweaty 20-something luchadors with her cane. All to rapturous high school gym applause, of course.

She'd told Emmett this reverie over the phone when they kept her overnight downtown at Saint Francis'. She was drowsy, and his laughter poured over the phone speaker and into the room, rattling off a list of mighty ring names for her: "What about Ada 'Da Cane' or Ada Grenade?"

They were about to decide on entrance music when one of the night nurses came in for vitals, and their conversation resolved into polite well wishes and see you soons. All the while, she knew Emmett wouldn't come home until Christmas, if that.

Ada hadn't been poked and prodded in a hospital bed so scopiously since she gave birth to her premature daughter back in 1975. Posthumously-named Maeve didn't make it, and she and her high school sweetheart couldn't emerge from the shock united. He would find another route to assembling a family by 25, and she'd stoically throw herself into a career as a doula and midwife. He viewed the body as a tool; she saw it more accurately as a see-sawing site of wonder and calamity.

Aw(e)fully, the years passed quite fast for her, being at the scene of so many birth-days.

Now consigned to the role of reluctant patient, Ada tried to shake off the familiar skips and eerie jerks of time that occurred here. Here, as in a few floors above the morgue. You could rest your eyes for a minute while one task-laden nurse enters, and open your eyes to a nurse from a different shift. Every face looks vaguely familiar, and you can never truly make out the clock hands.

Sometime early in the morning on night two, she was so sure the new-new nurse with the beautiful, tight coils that smelled of patchouli (who could surely have been, in another life, her daughter) imparted to her: "You have a friend here to see you. Sutton Lamastus."

The automatic lights dimmed marginally, and she tried to sit up. She became slightly dizzy, as if her head couldn't make out where it was in space. Her heart started to pound, confounded, akin to waking from a nightmare. The phantom promise half-confirmed her sleep/awake transition, temporarily paralyzing and enticingly blissful.

Her friend, Sutton (Seraphine) Lamastus, chose to die in the mountains, and Ada was charged with holding the ashes. For over two decades now, she stored the remains with a perennial expectation that Seraphine's daughter would come around to take them back. Yet, she was growing old now, older than Seraphine ever was, and left hand-wringing about such lofty, spectral things as legacy.

She closed her eyes and listened for footsteps. Let time gambol. The door opened and closed only once.

//

The last memory she deliberately captured of Sutton/Seraphine is obscured by a screen door: her friend, chin to knee, cutting her toenails on the back porch. Bony grasshopper shoulders and a long braid draped down her spine, heavy. 1999.

Ada had stared at her friend's tumor-infested skull, ignorant. The sweating glass of lemon-ginger water by her thigh. The dragonflies darting back and forth across the yard like helicopters.

She had tiptoed closer to the screen door. Closer still. Until the image became fuzzy from the hyper-segmentation. Indistinct.

Then, the phone rang. Ada startled, of course, but Seraphine didn't stir. Her mastery of meditative states, Ada thought, left her more supernaturally settled than the rest of us mortals. Never in a state of anticipation.

"Hi, Ada. I assume she's there." It was Autumn on the other line, forever chasing her mother. "'Cause it's Sunday night," she croaked.

If Seraphine knew she was being neglectful of her daughter (and granddaughter) in her arc of New Age celebrity, she never let on. Seraphine (her self-given name) was an energy healer so overextended that she was doomed to be evasive.

Ada had invited her to dinner, as she often did those summer Sundays. They would eat picnic fare at Seraphine's meticulous sourcing and preparation, merely arranged and served at Ada's rickety table. Seldom did anyone else join them, but it was never truly unlikely for someone to wander in. She had sensed that evening it would be Autumn and her daughter, Sadie.

With extra wicker placemats, she stepped out to suggest as much to Seraphine. Sitting cow-legged on the porch, her friend looked up at her from such a beautiful distance and said: "After my mother died, I kept smelling her church perfume - as if out of thin air. You can ask Autumn. She caught me sniffing around like a hound for months. Grief heightens the senses, I swear it."

//

It inched toward another deserted Thursday lunch hour. Ada was three laps into her mall-walking regimen, leaning against her CVS Rollator. There couldn't be more than 20 functioning stores now. Some of the lone survivors included a T-Mobile, a Kay Jewelers, a Finish Line, and a Pretzelmaker stall. They recently added an indoor Pickleball court space to incentivize the young people back into this beige maze.

Such long stretches of dark shop windows made it so that her shadowy reflection bubbled grimly in her peripheral vision. It made her walk faster, mouth dry.

When she made it back to her lap marker - a shut-in Macy's - a young woman was sitting in one of the squeaky recliners. She had a retro look about her: belted pedal pushers, kitten heels, and a green turtleneck blouse. Her red hair was kept at bay by a shiny black headband.

She looked up at Ada immediately and stood like a candidate called for an interview.

"Ada? I'm sure you don't remember me, and I don't mean to bother you, my apologies in advance, but sometimes you stumble back across people in bizarre, fated ways, you know," the woman spoke fast. Ada glanced over her, noticed she was pregnant, and on the cusp of needing a new wardrobe.

"Oh, sorry," she sputtered. "I didn't even introduce myself. I'm Sadie Aubert. You knew my grandmother. I spent some time at your house as a child."

"Sadie! Of course, sugar. I'm sorry. Old plodding brain takes a minute to come around. But it gets there! One way or another. How's your mother?"

"She's around, yeah. She's well."

Ada outstretched a grandmotherly hand to Sadie's shoulders, inviting them to relax. "You know, hon, I'm a bit parched. Would you want to come along to the food court with me?" she asked.

And so they walked. Sadie's posture was defensive, skittish. Likely nauseous. Ada had a disarming kindness that only grew as her stature shrank. She didn't really need to go to the food court (there were water bottles in her purse); she just wanted to get a good look at the mom-to-be.

"So, when are you due?" she said, sipping the cheap soft drink lemonade that makes your mandible ache.

"Right, I assumed you'd pick up on that. Babies are in your... line of business," Sadie paused. "January. He's due in January."

Sadie's eyes were glossed over, seemingly perplexed or distraught by the prospect of motherhood, so Ada refrained from prying. For many, pregnancy went hand in hand with violation - the emotion stew we roll into the phrase 'trials and tribulations.'

"So, dear, are you back in California visiting?"

"Yes, ma'am, just visiting. Little solo trip. I live in Portland with my partner. My husband," she corrected herself in a sigh, a trait that kept her child self startlingly intact. She began popping the buttons of the plastic soda lid with the same innocuous look of her youth that once accompanied tying cherry stems with her tongue and spitting them out with a pout.

Ada felt, all at once, heartened that her recollection of Sadie was so strong, so singular. Her memory was always potent and, therefore, prideful. The only true fear that arrested her at odd hours, in the check-out line, across from running birthday candles, was forgetfulness.

She fought time's estrangement as Sadie spoke about her return to the Bay Area. "I was actually just here in June, quite morbidly, for a funeral. An artist friend of mine. Marshall Tollis? Have you heard of him? He did portraits..."

Ada shook her head, feigning inquisitiveness in order to search her face freely. Sadie's face was always sharpened unapologetic by its indeterminacy. It refused to be confined to that which is quantifiably measured.

The last time Ada had shared a table with her was in the countdown to the year 2000 (that briefly-declared technological doomsday), and she had thought she looked no more than 10 or 11, though she must have been encroaching on a devastating 13. Ada had feared, even then, that this girl was hellbent on preening herself into yet another woman who ties herself up in knots.

In her knick knack-filled 90s kitchen, she had surveyed Sutton, Autumn, and Sadie - three generations of women, in upturned urgency, resorting to picking at placements, little digs, and desperate glances as scattered and silent as salt out of a shaker. There were times, like that very (last) meal, when Ada was embarrassingly grateful in hindsight that she knew only the lives of sons she didn't birth.

"Do you have her ashes?" this grown Sadie asks suddenly, returning her to the sticky food court table.

Ada lifts her life-guiding hands. "Scout's Honor, I didn't steal them."

For the first time, Sadie laughs. Tickled. "Of course not. What I meant to say is, do you still have her ashes. I'm well aware my mother left them with you. My mother is...angry. So -"

"Yes, I still have her tucked away safely," she interjects. Her mouth is cold, and although (that) summer has passed, she inexplicably smells water from a garden hose, wet cardboard, and the earthiness of discarded cherry pits languishing like a pinch bowl of torn-out hearts.

They drain the rest of their lemonade like two girls, at the beginning of a friendship, out on a school night.