There was a last time, of course, inside the little red house, like a last time for everything, except most of the time you don’t know it will be the last, which is why you don’t remember it, only the accumulation of trains rumbling just outside, each unremarkable visit fit in when it wasn’t too out of the way to head to Fort Worth and hold hands with strangers who were family somehow, saying grace before the meal, arms snaking through rooms around the whole house, babies upon babies, generations squeezed together like the stacks of sandwiches on your grandmother’s crystal plates, she, who grew up as a sharecropper, who’d never use the term, from an even smaller Texas town with a one-room schoolhouse, she who adored big families, but who could have only the one child, a son who would learn Latin and physics and philosophy and move away from all of them, and then that one would have more, and one would be you, and just maybe there’d be some eyes on you as you snuck away as a child to read Dickens in a quiet room when everyone else was talking, and it wasn’t that you thought you were better than anyone, only you weren’t sure how to talk to them or even who they were exactly, although your parents might’ve told you a hundred times, and maybe you did have a sense their lives were harder, and it wasn’t their fault or yours but it embarrassed you, and you still, even older, couldn’t remember their names, only there were some names you heard more than others, usually the ones who ran into trouble and needed money, who your dad would quietly help, and then a whole new generation of kids ran in and out of the glass door with the black storm door that smelled of fresh oil, and come to think of it, there was a last time for them too like there was for you, running outside along the train tracks while the whistle blew, putting pennies on rails, looking down the way for the place your dad might’ve worked that summer laying tracks, because although he knew Latin and physics, it didn’t mean he didn’t have to work too, and a last time, even before that, you lifted the tile in the closet that smelled of lemon polish and snuck under the floorboards to the original foundation, where you found a football from the last time your dad played with it, which must’ve been in the fifties, it wasn’t that you wouldn’t want to keep in touch with everyone, only the connective tissue wasn’t there after a point, certainly not after they had to sell the house, which was years before your grandmother passed, and it’s not like you couldn’t have seen them more, or they wouldn’t have wanted to see you either, only you were the daughter of the one who learned Latin and became a lawyer and moved to Dallas, and you moved even further, to Washington, DC, and weren’t you a little special too, but wasn’t the big joke on them when you had two kids, got divorced, lost your good job, and didn’t they know the last time they saw you too, that anything can happen to anyone, especially hard times, isn’t that why your grandmother insisted you come together several times a year, form a chain to hold hands before meals, a chain that snaked around the whole place, your grandmother, whose sister died of leukemia as a child, whose brother died fighting in Europe, whose husband died far too young, who didn’t ask that you know all the names only that you get along, since who knew when might be the last time, and didn’t she seem like a stranger when the relatives told stories about her years later, her sister sneaking cigarettes, smoke coming from the bathroom, wasn’t she a different woman from the one you thought, aren’t we all, maybe you didn’t ask her enough questions before the last time, because you didn’t know it would be the last time, and didn’t all the strangers in Fort Worth stop whatever they were doing that unseasonably warm fall afternoon, as you drove past the little red house and beyond, since there is one definite last to everything after all, to stand up out of respect and salute the line of cars, one final long chain snaking through the city.
Lauren Woods lives in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Fiction Southeast, The Forge, the Roanoke Review, Lit Hub, Wasafiri, Hobart, and other journals. She tweets @Ladiwoods1
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