In 2022 Snug Books had a short story contest and the theme was Baltimore, home. My story won first place. The story is fiction but the places are real. Here it is:

Earlier today a young woman knocked on my door and asked me if she could scatter her mother’s ashes in my back yard. I asked if she had them with her. She looked stricken and then I felt bad. I said it as a joke because I thought she must be kidding but she wasn’t. I wanted to say of course you can’t scatter your mother’s ashes in my back yard, you weirdo, now get off my porch. But she was so earnest.

Apparently, her mother grew up in this house, is now on her deathbed, and has asked her family to see about having her ashes scattered here. The girl told me that no one else in her family would even consider coming here to ask and they said she was foolish to do it. I wanted to tell her she should have listened to her family. It was too morbid. Too strange. Still, I told her I’d have to think about it. She gave me a letter to read but I set it on the little table next to the front door and went back to my Zoom meeting.

My wife and I are taking our daughter Mia to spend the night with her friend Isobel. Mia is seven and this is her first sleepover ever. Isobel only lives four houses away and the girls have been playing together since they were brought home from the hospital one day apart. Isobel’s mother Carla and I would lie them next to each other on a big blanket spread out on the living room floor like two pink burritos while we talked about cracked nipples and the consistency of newborn poop. My wife Rhonda has Mia’s overnight bag on her shoulder and we each have one of Mia’s hands.

“You know you can ask Isobel’s mom to call us no matter what time it is if you want to come home,” Rhonda says. Mia takes a giant leap across one of the sidewalk squares and I have to let go of her or get my arm pulled from the socket. She lands on both feet in a half squatting position and brushes her wild curls from her face.

“I know,” she says and makes another jump to the next sidewalk square. 

“Even if you wake up in the middle of the night,” I say. 

“I know,” she says again, and her third jump is her longest one yet, she makes it all the way to the yellow salt box on the corner. Isobel comes hopping down her front steps and the girls clasp hands and go skipping into the back yard. When Rhonda and I walk back to our house without our girl I want to run back and get her. 

We are on the couch in our fuzzy slippers with Netflix cued up when I remember the young woman from earlier today and her letter. I get up and get it from the table by the door and I tell Rhonda about her request. 

“Isn’t it morbid?” I say as I finish the story and pull the folded sheets of paper from the envelope.

Rhonda shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “The ashes will probably just blow away; they won’t really be in our backyard.”

“So you’re okay with strangers coming and dumping the remains of one of their family members on our property?”

“What does the letter say?” she asks instead of answering. 

I unfold the looseleaf and read.

My mother’s name is Bev Gardner and she is forty eight years old. 

I stop reading because this woman is only six years older than me. I look over at Rhonda, whose mother passed away two years ago when she was sixty-two, and we thought that was young. I keep reading.

Bev grew up in your house on Holder Avenue. She lived there until she was eighteen and then moved to a house on Ailsa Avenue with my dad. Once I was born my dad wanted to move us out of the city, but my mom wanted to stay. After a couple years my younger sister was born, and Dad won. We moved to the county, but mom always said she’d be back. 

She has small cell lung cancer and when the doctor told her she probably had less than a year she asked me to write down these things and share them with you. She said, “tell them my story, they’ll understand. They’ll say yes.” When she says that and things like that, no one in my family, not my sisters, or my dad, not my aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins will look her in the eye. None of them will come to your house and ask you. They all think you live “downtown” and “they might get shot.” 

Rhonda makes a huffy sound. I read on. 

Here is what my mother has said about growing up in your house:

When I was little the fruit man used to come down our street with his horse. You could hear him loud and clear before you could even hear the clip clop of the horses. STRAWWWW-Berr-EEZ! WAAUUGH-der melon! His booming voice was the cue for my siblings and I to grab a handful of change from the mason jar by the back porch and run outside to meet him. My mom would come outside and ask him to pick us the ripest watermelon or the juiciest berries from his cart and we would count out the coins to pay him. Then we’d go back inside, and mom would cut up the watermelon and put it into a big Tupperware. She’d let us have a few pieces right away and we’d take it out on the porch to eat it, the juice streaming between our fingers. Aunt Terry and I would bury the seeds in a corner of the yard in hopes of growing our own watermelons. 

On summer nights when school was out, we would walk to Walther Gardens Snowball stand, is it still there? My brothers always got sky blue, and my sister and I got egg custard. Sometimes, if we had the extra quarter, we’d get marshmallow on top and have sugary white mustaches by the time we got back home. Then we’d stay out catching lightning bugs as they emerged for the evening. Mom gave us old pickle jars and we poked holes in the lids and put some grass inside. We’d line the jars up on the porch steps and watch as the bugs inside glowed greenish yellow like tiny lights inside the glass. 

I used to play Barbies with Linda Chavione from next door in our blue plastic kiddie pool in the summer that sat so long in the yard we had a circle of dead grass by the time the pool cracked and warped and had to be thrown out.

My dad fell down the basement steps and broke his foot when I was a teenager. He had to stay home from work for several weeks. He said those basement steps needed a railing and I asked him if I could make one. He sat with his leg propped up on the hassock in the kitchen and called out instructions to me, as I measured and sawed and drilled holes. I attached the long wooden beam and Dad said it was the best-looking railing he’d ever seen and that no one would be in danger of falling any more. 

I had my first kiss with Henry Chuckwill under the awning in the back when I was fourteen. Ricky Pinkert took me to junior prom and when we came home Uncle Tommy and Uncle Jerry got Ricky drunk off peach schnapps in the basement and he puked in the corner near the sump pump. 

I move on to the second page. 

I chipped my tooth tripping up the back steps. At the time I thought it was the end of the world, I couldn’t imagine anything worse, I hated those stupid concrete steps. Now I think of that incident with fondness. Isn’t it funny how that works. 

There is a small page break and then the writing resumes. 

My mom has many more stories, these are just some of them. I hope I’ve conveyed what your house has meant for her. If you’d consider honoring her request, that would be amazing. You can call or text me at the number below, I hope to hear from you. 

Amy Gardner

Rhonda and I are both quiet as we finish reading. 

“What do you think?” I ask.

“I’m okay with it,” she says and by the way her voice sounds, I know she is thinking of her own mother. I’m still not sure.

My cell phone rings and I see that it’s Isobel’s mom. I answer and Carla tells me that Mia would like to talk to me. I look at Rhonda who is on alert.

“Hey baby, are you okay?”

“Hi momma. I’m okay.” She’s quiet and I can hear her breathing.

“Mia?”

“I want to come home,” she says simply. She doesn’t sound frightened or anxious, she says it conversationally. 

“Did something happen?” I ask.

“No, I just want to come home,” she says.

“Okay, mommy will come get you. Put Isobel’s mom back on the phone.” I hand my cell to Rhonda and throw a hoodie on over my pajamas. 

When I get home with Mia, the three of us snuggle up together on the couch. Mia seems totally fine. It’s late for her, after nine, and she’s sleepy. Rhonda asks what happened. She says that nothing happened. I ask if she had an argument with Isobel. 

“No.”

“So why did you want to come home?”

“Because her kitchen is shaped like our kitchen, but you know where we have our apples and bananas in a bowl on the counter near the sink?” Mia says and we nod. “At Isobel’s house they have a big coffee maker right there and no bowl with fruit in it.”

We wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t say anything else. Just as I open my mouth to ask another question she says, “While I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom at Isobel’s house, I was standing on the rug in front of her sink, but her rug doesn’t move.”

“What do you mean her rug doesn’t move baby?” Rhonda says and runs her hand across Mia’s forehead, pushing curls away. 

 “It stays still. In one place,” Mia says. “In our house I can move our rug with my foot. When I’m hot I slide the rug away from in front of the sink and my feet get cool from the floor. But Isobel’s rug doesn’t move.” She finishes and settles herself deeper into my lap.

“But you’ve been to Isobel’s house a million times and where her coffee maker is, or her bathroom rug never bothered you before did it?” I say. She’s so tired now I can feel her getting heavier in my lap and her head is buried near my armpit. 

“It’s not comfy,” she says softly and turns her face so that her cheek is against Rhonda’s arm but her body is still in my lap. She is practically asleep. Rhonda and I look at each other. We both smile. 

“You put Mia to bed,” she says and then pauses before saying, “I’m going to email Bev Gardner’s daughter.” She’s looking carefully at me, and I nod. Then I take our daughter up the steps that creak in all the familiar places and tuck her into bed.