'Porch Swing' by Kate Flannery

“You’re my best girl.  I don’t need anyone else,” my father used to say to my mother on those hot summer evenings when they sat in the swing on our front porch.  

I would peek out through the blinds of the front parlor window and watch them, his arm around her shoulders, as they rocked gently back and forth.  His beer bottle would be sweating.  He never did.  My mother, still holding the towel she had used to dry the washed dishes, would wipe her damp forehead and hum some tune I didn’t know.

It was one of my favorite memories of the two of them.

After the accident, I retrieved the contents of his pockets from the coroner’s office. I was only sixteen, but my mother couldn’t bring herself to go.  As I approached our front porch with the coroner’s brown paper bag tucked under my arm, my mother was sitting on the swing, rocking.  

“What did they give you?” she asked as she wiped her eyes with the dish towel.

“Nothing, really, Mom.”  I went upstairs as quickly as I could.

Over $700 in cash.  Plane tickets for two.  An almost-empty flask of rye.  The woman who was with him in the car was never identified.