Signs

I am always hesitant to talk about any unusual things that have happened since Mark’s death as he was highly skeptical of that kind of stuff. I’d read my horoscope every day and over coffee tell him whether I was going to have a good day or not before it even started. Did I believe it? No, but Mark did outrage better than anyone, and so I’d read it out loud to him to get under his skin and he’d take the bait, mansplain the utter bullshitness of horoscopes, and then say, “Okay, Nancy Reagan, you better to call the Astrology Police and tell them they need to rearrange the stars to your liking.” Then he’d take a 45 minute shower to figure out his day and cleanse himself of my Pisces angst.

But odd things happen that defy explanation, most recently when I went to the dealership to trade my car in and pick up my new one. The entire car buying process was handled by my son-in-law who searched and negotiated and did everything but write the check. I had decided that I wanted a Honda CRV which was similar to what I had in size, but on a walk in the neighborhood I saw a Honda Fit, came home and read everything I could about it, changed my mind, and placed a new order with Nate. My only request was that it have a leather interior. He found one, met me at the house where they brought it over for me to test drive, and in that cute black leather interior that matches most of my wardrobe I said, “Is it bad to want to marry the first boy I date?” It wasn’t as I have no bandwidth to agonize over decisions. Nate worked out a deal for me and I went with my daughter on a Saturday morning to pick it up. I woke up that day, looked at the Escape in the driveway, cried, and left the house with the keys and title in my hand and all the enthusiasm of someone getting a root canal by a student in his first semester of dental school. But my daughter, who is like her dad in so many ways, bounced into my car like Tigger and was bound and determined to make this an adventure.

As is the strategy of car dealers, we were there forever so they could break me and wear me down with a $3000 extended warranty. Little did they know that this chick is so worn down already that an extended warranty (especially on a Honda) was never going to happen. But they have to do their thing and before we got to the hard sell, I said to the finance guy, “What’s with the old guys in this place who won’t wear a mask? All of you have to wear one and their wives are wearing one but they aren’t. Is it like this every day or do they just come out on Saturdays?” He looked at me and said, “Well, I’m not sure you are aware of this but men know everything,” and then he did a show and tell of the half-ass ways said men would try to comply, the favorite being the mask dangling from one ear. It was the snarky kind of humor I love and so I said, “Maybe they can be the sacrificial lambs for the murder hornets.” This was the invitation he needed to launch into an explanation of a Youtube video he’d watched of a murder hornet getting into a beehive. The bees (who never forget that it’s their job to save the queen) surrounded it and flapped their wings so fast that it created enough heat to kill the murder hornet. I said, “What??? Really? You just type in murder hornets and you get to see that? Get. Out. Of Here.” “Yep,” he said, and from there he talked about hummingbirds and the way they can see ultraviolet light, that the scales on sharks create no resistance in the water which is why they swim so fast, that a drop of water can sit on a leaf and not disperse and one day cars will have that kind of technology so that a wax job will last for the life of the car, that his mom has had breast cancer three times and how one day medicines will target the cancer only and not kill everything in its path. There was no end to the passion and enthusiasm he had and I turned to look at Maggie and she said, “I know, Mom.” “Know what,” our new friend Josh asked, and Maggie explained how this car thing was an emotional powder keg for me but he resembled her dad so much it was like he was here. I asked if he had any interest in science and he said a little bit and that as a kid he could not watch enough nature documentaries and grew up with David Attenborough. “Now when I watch them,” he said, “I have to turn it off before something gets killed because it gets to me,” and we talked about the cruelty of big game hunters and how elephants mourn when someone in the herd is killed. We were in his office way too long which was okay, and when I sat in the driver’s seat of my new car in the dealership parking lot I cried and said, “I’m a little bit happy today, Maggie, and I’m not faking it like I usually am,” and she said, “That’s good Mom. You deserve it.” “I think so too,” I said but did I think Josh the finance guy was a sign? Not really but it felt like a stamp of approval from another world that I was doing the right thing and I desperately needed that.

A few days after that I was going to walk and went into Mark’s closet for one of his shirts. When I was pregnant with Mallory, a pair of leggings and one of Mark’s big white shirts was my daily attire and I went in there to find one. I have been in Mark’s closet dozens and dozens and dozens of times. Usually it begins with a pep talk that I can clean it out, I can donate his clothes, I can fold them, box them, and let go. I can move forward in life without all his stuff, but the pep talk fizzles out as soon as I open the door and look at his shirts, dress pants, sports jackets, the shoes he wore until they fell apart, the shelf of ball caps stacked one on top of the other. On that day I looked over the big white shirts and wasn’t feeling it when I noticed a gray polo turned inside out on the shelf next to the ball caps. That is how all of Mark’s shirts ended up and many times we’d be out and I’d say, “Your shirt is inside out,” and he’d say, “It’s been on like that all day and I never noticed,” because in every single way Mark was the absent minded professor. I grabbed the polo, turned it right side out, and wore it to walk.

The next morning it was on the bedroom floor when I picked it up to put it in the laundry basket. I held it up to my face, this shirt that is one of the remains of a life that vanished, and it smelled just like Mark. I kept turning it over and every single spot smelled like Mark. I sat on the floor with it pressed again my sobs and was so grateful because I miss that smell so much, and so confused because I swear on all that is holy that that shirt was not there before. And how could it still smell like him when nothing else in his closet does?

The next day was Sunday and the kids came over for dinner. We took a walk afterwards and when they left I finished cleaning a few things up, got the coffee ready for the morning and started turning lights off downstairs. As I was turning the dining room light off I saw two pieces of paper sitting on the table. I had earlier wiped the table off and there was nothing on it so I walked over and picked them up. There were two receipts – an itemized receipt and a credit card receipt. They were from the IHOP across from the med center, the IHOP Mark was so excited to have close by because he could walk over there and have pancakes for lunch which was his kind of thing.

The receipt was dated November 6, 2015. He had the breakfast sampler.