The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online Page B

same t-shirt that she has slept in for two nights, she fingers the pieces of paper in her pocket, and decides to give it one more day. Tomorrow, the 88th day, she’ll finish the garage if she is dauntless. She’ll wash the t-shirt and get on with the list.
    The plan starts out fabulously. Connie hoists open the garage door the next day only to discover that the 60-degree weather has cranked itself back down to 40. The door closes and she gets a sweatshirt. The first two boxes she picks up are photos. All the photos she took during the past three thousand—so it seems—years and then jammed into these very same boxes thinking like an ass that one day she’d make really beautiful photo albums and later some of those lovely scrapbooks made by women who did not have to hold a catheter in place when someone’s veins ruptured, raise three daughters almost alone, and keep a house from falling down around their ears by begging friends to help. She carries the boxes into the kitchen, deciding that she’ll simply divide the photos in three piles, give each daughter a box filled with them—even Jessica—and be done.
    What’s mostly left then are Jessica’s boxes. Two are obviously filled with old clothes with pilled sweaters falling out of the top; another is loaded with her old college textbooks. Connie pushes these towards the edge of the garage. She’ll give Macy a call and see if she wants to store them. Then they will be gone. There is no room left in Connie’s life or garage for Jessica’s shit.
    Three of the last boxes, Jessica’s boxes, appear to be filled with papers and documents. Connie brings them into the house, sets them on the table, and then goes back out to sweep the garage which, when she is finished, is about as good as it is ever going to get.
    “Hot damn,” she says, standing with her hands on her hips and smiling into the fabulously uncluttered space. “You could park a car and a half in here now and still fill up the side wall with more boxes.”
    Connie celebrates by opening up a bottle of wine. Her ridiculously small wine rack has five bottles in it, all dry reds, and she picks the best one—a lively Syrah from California that she lets breathe a bit while she washes off her face and hands, grabs her numbers out of the pocket to prop them in a line on the counter, and then takes her first drink.
    Before tackling Jessica’s SHIT, she decides to sort out the photographs. This is not on the list, she realizes, and then she remembers that there is a place for change, for adding new numbers, and she does it in her head. “Number whatever—Sort through the photos.”
    And she begins.
    Babies and Girl Scouts.
    Family reunions.
    Camping trips.
    The first day of school.
    Prom. Twirp. Homecoming.
    Tennis matches. Track. The three weeks Macy lasted in soccer.
    Drinking beer on the roof.
    The last trip to the lakeshore.
    Connie sits at the table and runs her fingers over the photographs as if she is touching the real faces of her daughters. Her left thumb brushes against glossy braids, a sunburned arm, the flushed curve of a cheek, legs that look like spring twigs. As she lays out a series of photos she is suddenly overcome by a crashing wave of emotion that she knows can only be called love.
    Babies growing into young girls. Young girls growing into teenagers. Teenagers turning into women. Grown women. Women who make love and cry into their own glasses of wine and who have stretched the connection between themselves and their mother long and hard and, in Jessica’s case, very near the breaking point.
    It takes her two hours and more than half a bottle of wine to sift through the stacks of photos and as the three piles grow she wraps the stacks with rubber bands. And she wonders, as she imagines she will wonder on and off for the rest of her life, if it was okay. Was she okay? Where did she fail them, frighten them, make them want to run and hide? Will they remember the good parts, the moments captured