yellow

The box of shoes rests in my living room. They are, after all, just shoes. Lacey, tall, dark, loud, and beautiful bought them and then needed to get rid of them. I took them as another measure of her generosity. Now they’re an assurance that she had it all planned out. So they reside here by the front door, jumbled in a cardboard box soiled with the invisible residue of loss.
“Lorrie,” my mother calls. “Lorrie, I bought the eggs.”
I tear my eyes from the box, and I meet her in the kitchen. I take some plastic grocery bags from her hands, and we both land our heavy loads on the counter. She massages her wrists and checks her watch before pushing her deep red curls out of her face. Her green eyes are still red from tears on the way home from the store.
In South Carolina, the dogwood trees blossom in the spring and her eyes constantly look just the way they are now. In April, she could get away with blaming her tears on the trees. The November chill outside the kitchen window, however, won’t let her get away with anything.
“You tell Lacey that she is welcome here anytime,” she started telling me in third grade. Even until high school, she made sure Lacey made regular visits to my house. Then in college, we planned to go to school together. I got into a university; she didn’t. She stayed behind to help out her single dad with a job as a waitress.
“I’m saving up,” she promised me with a wave of her hand and a nonchalant flick of dark hair over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you there.”
She won't meet me again.
“You have three hours, honey. Then you need to get ready for the funeral,” Mom says. I nod and pull my brown, thick hair into a frizzy ponytail down my back. She leaves the kitchen carrying the yellow carnations I knew Lacey would love.
This kitchen is at one foreign and familiar. It does not feel like the same one in which Lacey and I made cream cheese cookies on a midnight trip to my kitchen. Then, the dark room flickered with a soft yellow in the candlelight. We shared dozens of the golden treats, laughing and crying over our lives.
Now, the walls are an ugly tan. How is this the same room? Where are the bowls? Which drawer has the spoons? I let instinct tell me what I can’t immediately remember as I gather the items I need.
The recipe isn’t difficult. I know it without looking at the sheet Lacey wrote for me after our first sleepover in fourth grade. I set the oven to 375 degrees. My fingertips twitch as I pull the cream cheese and the butter from the refrigerator.
The cream cheese lands with a soft but solid thud in the plastic bowl. I take spoonfuls of butter fling them into the bowl. It clumps on top of the cream cheese in a greasy half-moon.
Is this why, I wonder, as I cream the two ingredients together with pressured strokes of my spoon. Is it because she felt mashed between life’s bowl and spoon? But, there is no answer to this question, just as there are no answers to any of the other millions of questions I never asked.
I pour vanilla extract into a teaspoon, and my hands tremble, spilling it onto the counter. Only a drop actually makes it near the bowl. It slides in a brown trail down the outside of the container.
Damnit. Why can’t I do this? Lacey did this. Lacey made these cookies any time I needed to be cheered up. I was the recipient of many a Tupperware container full of these golden treats, made with chocolate sprinkles when I argued with my mom, red sprinkles when I was single on Valentine’s Day.
Why, then, didn’t she make these cookies for herself? Green sprinkles for the thousands in debt she incurred over the past few years. We could have laughed about it, maybe even used copper-colored sprinkles to match the pennies we had to our names.
Or, why didn’t she let me make them for her? She only had to ask… or shouldn’t I have known? But, I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. She knew we had different debts. Mine was books, tuition, and boarding. Hers was clothes, jewelry, and… shoes.
I catch the salty droplets sliding from my eyes with a kitchen towel before they can fall into my bowl.
“Sweetheart.” My mom is behind me. “You don’t have to do this so soon.” Her aged hands are sources of soft strength on my shoulders. I shake both her hands away. I am even surprised at my reaction to her, but I know I have to continue.
She shrinks from the kitchen. I take a deep breath, knowing I shouldn’t have pushed her away. I wish I could wipe up our pain just as easily as I wipe up the vanilla on the counter. I can’t though. So, I will do what I can.
I pick up my teaspoon and the vanilla extract. I steadily measure out what I need, then tip it into the bowl. I pick up the white, foam carton containing the eggs. I pick out an egg and crack its shell. As I separate the yolk, I try to push away aching thoughts... thoughts of how the flow of the egg whites between my fingers resembles the red flow from the gunshot she put through her head. Pouring in the yellow cake mix, I push away thoughts of the crumbles she thought her life had become. But, watching the cookies rise in the oven, I did remember her low, genuine laugh, how people around her watched as she passed, and how, once, she met me in a coffee shop to consol me after another heartbreaking boyfriend. She spent her last ten dollars on Mocha Lattes for the two of us, and put the change in the tip jar.


The smell of the cookies floats faintly through the house, from the oven through the living room and into my bedroom. I know the cookies are almost finished. I walk past a mirror reflecting the black dress I’ve changed into for the funeral. I try to keep going, past the box and toward my cookies, toward my first steps of acceptance, but I stop. A pair of pale yellow pumps rests atop the others.
I sit down beside the box, and my hand impulsively reaches for one of the shoes. These were her addiction. She could never resist a pair of yellow heels. I want to pull it into my chest, to pull her more near, but I know these were a cause of her pain. I throw it as hard into the opposite living room wall as I can, and my mom is beside me once again. Finally, I release myself into her arms, and I let myself cry into her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my ear.
“Me too,” I tell her. She pulls away to look into my face. My first words since I’d heard the news. She wipes my eyes with her soft fingertips.
“Lacey loved you,” she says. “She just didn’t love herself.” My mom stands and helps me to my feet. I rise, knowing I will miss Lacey every day for the rest of my life.
The vanilla aroma is now rich and warm, drawing our noses toward the source. We travel together into the kitchen. She takes a mitt from the drawer and pulls out the cookies. They are a perfect golden yellow.


For Tara, who wanted a golden dog and taught me to make golden cookies... and most of all, had a golden heart.

.stuck.

It's a month and ten days later.
Tara is gone. You still see Rich outside of Wal-Mart. He sits, just hiding his face behind a person, a tree, a shopping cart... anything. Closer, it is not him.
"You won't be seeing him for a while," says Josh. "Actually... ever."

You entertain yourself with magazines, with plans, with trips... but you avoid those things, those people, that might actually move you forward. You shop, you read, you write painful fiction to put it out on paper. So desperate are you that you change what you wrote into what you will write.

Stuck.