SOMETHING FAMILIAR by Deborah Joy

“Hello, mom?” that voice coming through the phone speaks with a warm but eerily familiar lilt.

I see an Italianate armoire across a room taller than wide, the tiled roof beyond the patio outside her window thousands of miles from here.

But that voice is full with this moment and, at once, with all the years poured into that sound.

The sparkle-eye toddler drunk with joy flapping her arms as she runs across the yard.

The skinny sad-eyed preschooler in a whirl, a world of conflagration – a missing father – still tender deep pain and confusion in her brow.

Growing, skipping and running, summer school…

Forcing laughter. Pounding fists. Sitting silently slowly eating lunch, not noticing that everyone else had gone inside.

It’s Friday morning – before school with a rush to fill the fading blue Jansport pack with all the essentials for her weekend travel. Ticket, check. Snack, check. Book, check. Pad and crayons, check. Pajamas, check. I drop trinkets (sussies we call them) wrapped in colored tissue paper beneath her clothing. Hat, jacket. Call Gary to make sure he’ll get her on the bus – known locally as “the divorce express”—carrying those wistful wayward Woodstock children from the garden to the macadam. The dad to pick up the tender “cargo” in Port Authority.

Decades later – after her own divorce – I learn how many times she stood there waiting alone in Port Authority. Waiting too long.