Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #7

not entirely clear what was going on, but she felt tired and had swollen glands. The local doctors were puzzled too, and eventually my father, having grown more and more concerned, decided to take her to the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic was where people in West Virginia went when they had more serious maladies. My father had gone there in years past for treatment of migraine headaches, which he referred to as “dizzy spells.� It was at the Cleveland Clinic that they solved the riddle of my mother's illness. She had a form of acute leukemia, and although my brother and sister were not told until it happened, she was going to die. She would die at the tender age of 29, and with three young children.

It was on a dreary rainy day that we buried my mother. I remember standing at the cemetery where her casket was surrounded by an assortment of red and yellow roses. Yellow roses were her favorite but she had cried when my father brought her a bouquet from Memory Gardens, the cemetery where her lifeless body was lowered into the ground on that gloomy day. Apparently, it had not occurred to my father that his terminally ill wife might not want to get flowers from the owners of the cemetery where she knew she was going to be buried a short time later. But then again, my father was apt to overlook a lot of the more subtle things about intimate relationships. My mother had been dead for two weeks when he told me to wait in the car while he spoke to a young woman who worked in the local bakery. He had decided that starting to date again would be a good thing for him. He later told my grandmother that my mother’s illness had been hard on him because he had had to go for such a long time without sex, although it somehow came out later that he had been sleeping with a woman in Cleveland while my mother was hospitalized there.

Things always seemed to move expeditiously with my father and before too long he had found a woman who he was thinking of marrying. She was 12 years older than me. One day he asked me what I thought about this, and I told him that I preferred another woman to whom he had previously introduced me. Her name was Mary Jane and he had met her while taking classes at a nearby college. She had been kind to me and suggested that I sit up front with them in our car as we traveled to a college basketball game; however, my father promptly informed her that I was just fine sitting where I was in the backseat, and so there I remained. When I expressed