After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. —W. S. Merwin

The kids all went back and sat still at the kitchen table as though if they moved it might make things worse.

She turned on the television and turned the sound down low, but she kept getting shows that had people laughing on them, so she finally put some news show on mute, just for a kind of company.

“You have children!” she shouted, even though it had never seemed like she liked her grandchildren that much.

But he couldn’t stop feeling like she was there, there all the time, and then gone, like a song from the radio of a car flying by.

You didn’t really talk about the big things because nothing started big. Everything big in their lives had started small. Annie leaning against the wall at that one party, saying, “Do you think Bill Brown is cute?” It was like a seed, and now there was a tree. “He’s a plumber,” Annemarie had said, and “Don’t be a snot,” Annie had replied, playing with the necklace she always wore, with the gold A hanging from a chain. Now the necklace had four letters, AABJ. Life got made that way, bit by bit, at the party, the doctor’s office, the stop sign, the grocery.

It made you think of how much of a person lived in their eyes.

Without Annie’s glittery gleeful eyes, there was no one home.

The problem with crying was that it made her believe it was all true, what was happening.

“People can’t be better than they are, sis,” Annie had said. “Your tolerance irritates me,” Kathy said back. Annie wasn’t really that tolerant when Kathy wasn’t around, but when the two of them were together Annie was definitely the tolerant one.

She looked around for Ali, didn’t hug her, but got right in front of her and stared into her eyes as though she were searching for something. Then she leaned in and put her forehead against Ali’s. “Your mother was the best person I ever knew,” she said. “She saved my life. I don’t know where I would be now if it wasn’t for her. I will be there for you. All of you. You and the boys and your father. That’s what she would want me to do. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry.”

Someone that night had said that having your mother die was the worst thing that could happen to a person, which Ali thought was stupid to say where Ant could hear it. But having your best friend die must be pretty bad too, especially if you were as close as the two Annes were, glare and stare and then a pair.

Annie wasn’t having any of what she called her mother-in-law’s negativity. “When Jesus rose from the dead she’d say that three days was too long to wait,” she said once to her husband, and instead of getting mad he’d started to laugh.

Just like that, Annemarie thought as she drove west, the world spins forward. The kids go back to school. The adults go back to work. The open rectangle of earth is filled in. People begin the work of forgetting. But not me, she thought.

After the funeral the women had all been in the kitchen at the house. It had always been that way. Holidays, parties, birthdays, tragedies. The kitchen full of women, and the men in the living room.