That morning, Moselle had gone walking through the Saugus hills. It was early enough that pockets of dew still lingered in the shadows. In a few hours, however, the late summer heat would rise in waves and burn them all away. She reached the road, moving with an easy, hip-swinging stride, thumbs hooked in her belt loops. Crescents of sweat darkened her tank top below her breasts; the waistband of her jeans was already damp. Chicago-bred, she was still nervous about walking barelegged in rattlesnake country. She'd come to Southern California shortly after her marriage and still lived in the house she and Lewis built together. Now she paused just inside the door, caught by the familiar sensation of airlessness.
As if on cue, the phone rang. Moselle went to her desk, a door placed across two two-drawer metal filing cabinets, and cradled the phone between her shoulder and one ear.
"Hello?"
"It's me, Sadie."
Moselle had tuned Sadie's piano for years before they realized they'd become friends. Sadie, the art director for a small recording company in the San Fernando Valley, played long cool jazz into the evenings.
Now, Moselle heard the shift in Sadie's voice, as if her friend has just changed to a minor key. "What's wrong?"
Sadie said, with a quick, indrawn breath, "My mother died Tuesday. I took her in for a CAT scan of that shadow that showed up on her last chest x-ray. She went into cardiac arrest right there in the imaging center."
CAR-di-AC ar-REST. Moselle heard the words as a rhythm exercise.
Tuesday... three days ago. The sweat on Moselle's arms turned cold, as if it carried the memory of the December morning her own mother died. "Having lost a long and gallant battle with breast cancer," her aunts said, quoting the newspaper obituary as an incantation against their own advancing years. Now, ten years and two thousand miles away, Moselle could still smell the gray Chicago sky. Her father had died when she was too young to remember him. Sometimes the loss of her mother was the defining experience of her life.
"There's a memorial reception Sunday at her condo," Sadie said. "We're having it there because so many of her friends live in the complex. It's hard for them to travel."
Moselle lowered herself into the desk chair. "Are - are you all right?"
"It's better this way. She was eighty, you know, and didn't want extraordinary measures taken."
Extraordinary measures. Rhythms like the beating of a human heart.
"I met her only once, that time we went to visit, but I don't think she was the kind of person who would want to linger on," Moselle's voice said. Something within her stirred, inarticulate, almost passionate. "You know, when my mother died, I was the one who pulled everything together. I made all the arrangements..."
-the smell of the mortician's office, the waxy perfect petals, the way his mouth curled up at only one corner-
"...the phone calls, the newspapers, the lawyers..."
-sitting alone at the piano in the empty house, fingers on the keys, remembering the touch of her mother's hands resting on top of her own, closing her eyes and playing the opening movement of "Fur Elise" over and over-
"...and then when it was all over," Moselle finished, "I just fell apart." It was the wrong thing to say, telling Sadie the same thing was going to happen to her.
"What can I do to help?" she said too quickly.
"Oh, really... if you want any of her furniture. It's all good quality. She had what's called impeccable taste. I don't have room for it here, so I'll just have to give it to Goodwill. And come, if you can, on Sunday."
)
