Memory With a View
A man returns to his mother’s apartment to sell it. In a locked drawer, he finds what he could never say out loud.
He opened the shutters first. The apartment had been closed for three weeks and the air in it was old and flat. When he turned the latch the wood stuck once and then gave. The shutters went back against the wall and the harbor light came in all at once. It struck the tile and the glass-front cabinet and the framed print over the sofa that had gone pale from years.
Below, the street dropped toward the water. Taxis passed in short bursts of color. A bus made the turn wide and leaned. Beyond the roofs the bay lay bright and hard, the afternoon sun making a white path across it. The fort sat out on the point as it always had, stone and green, and the ferries moved in and out below it with a patience that looked like wandering slowness from here.
He stood with one hand on the shutter and listened. The apartment had its own sounds now that the air moved again. The hum from the refrigerator. The soft rattle in the kitchen vent. The tap in the bathroom that had never shut clean. From the street came music from somewhere unseen, a tinny trumpet and a voice singing just a single note too high.
