Monument

BY JONA WHIPPLE

He should have remembered the 12th, because of course they’d been putting a bright yellow paper on his windshield every day to let him know that the 11th was his last day to park in the lot. He’d been taking those papers out from under the wiper blade for weeks and piling them up in the passenger floorboard, where they sat in a stack like they were meant to be put on other people’s cars to advertise a daycare or the price of a used Honda. But they were meant as a warning just for him, and he’d somehow forgotten. The Super Saver manager stood waiting for him in the middle of the parking space next to the tiny building, holding up a hand in greeting. It slowly dawned on him that the manager was not there to make small talk, and a glance at the date printed on the pile on the floorboard confirmed that his last day had come and gone. He could barely hear the man say “Good morning, Mr. Rosefield” through his rolled-up windows as he turned the squeaky old sedan around. He drove four blocks west and took the first street space he found. By the time he walked back, the manager was gone. It was the first time anyone from the Super Saver had shown up outside; in the past, they had waited until he went across the street for a cup of coffee at lunch to come out and put the notices on his car, they had called in the evenings and left messages on the office answering machine. Before that, he’d only had construction workers and cement trucks to deal with as the Super Saver and its asphalt sea formed around him, and he’d much preferred that.

What used to be his parking spot was now officially part of the Super Saver parking lot, and was henceforth reserved for Super Saver customers, according to the notices and messages. “What I could do,” he said to his wife when they started calling, “is go in there every morning and buy a stick of gum, so I’d be a customer. Then I could park there anyway.” He imagined her saying, Well why on Earth didn’t you think to keep enough room on the lot for the car when you sold, or, Why don’t you just park on the street? You could use the exercise, or just shaking her head at him. But she didn’t do anything except stare at the armrest on her chair, or look out the window, her milky eyes focusing on nothing, and say “Well, I guess I don’t know.”

Her entertainment all day was the birds outside the window, the trees moving, the shadows falling across her house dress. The pink carpet seemed to hold her attention for hours. The young lady came and helped her wash, brushed her hair back and put a barrette in it to hold it out of her eyes. The lady watched TV while Mrs. Rosefield, her chair turned toward the window, sat in the soft sun and thought of nothing but the birds and leaves. He tried to keep this in mind when talking to her, but it was exhausting to talk and talk to someone who was fairly certain they had never met you, who had sent your wife of 35 years off somewhere and rooted down into her chair by the window. Some evenings, he found himself asking the young lady if she’d like to stay for dinner, but she always politely declined.

Dwarfed by the brand new storefront, in the yellow glow of the Super Saver sign, the Rosefield Monument Corp. was an almost silly-looking little place. The small metal building had once been a drive-up Frosty Queen, and had barely enough room inside for an office: it held just a desk, a filing cabinet, and enough small, uncomfortable chairs for Mr. Rosefield and two customers. He had to squeeze sideways between the desk and the wall to get to the chair on the other side. In the old drive-up window sat an ancient rusty window unit air conditioner, some kid had pressed the metal vents down in the shape of the word FUCK. The piece of cardboard taped over the expletive had blown off again and again until he’d gotten tired of going out there and taping it back up. Most days he paced around in the office, or strolled between the stone monuments standing on the several feet of grass he still owned in front of the office, absentmindedly running his hands over the rough humps of the heart on the “Mother” monument, then across the smooth top of the Commodore model. He kept the small patch of grass clean, picked dead leaves off the eight large, blank monuments, and collected endless amounts of garbage from in between the stones. The Super Saver had a hot dog stand inside, so most of the garbage was from there: oily hot dog wrappers, crushed plastic cups, aluminum cans.

Winded from the walk back, he sat for a moment behind the desk to catch his breath. He checked his watch, there were a good 2 hours before his only appointment of the day, but he went outside and began to clean up the little property anyway, just in case there were walk-ins.

There is a kind of loss that settles in all around a person, that covers the head and body, pools beneath the eyes and over the collarbone. It is a haunted house, loneliness peering from the upstairs windows. It is a shout on the streets of an abandoned city, a secret moss growing in the darkest corners. There is a loss that isolates and abandons its owner, sets its carrier out to sea on an invisible course, and this is the loss that took hold of the Rosefields. The fifteen years since their son had been found in his car under the train tracks with a needle in his cold, marbled arm felt like shorter years than all of those before them, the days seemed to end sooner, as if the world was caught in a perpetual winter. It was winter, January, the day Mr. Rosefield went to identify his son’s body, which, he’d noticed, didn’t have a coat. There was nothing in the car for warmth, except a square of flannel in the trunk, streaked with black grease. He had watched them tow the car away in the swirling snow, in the darkness of late afternoon. It was winter that day, and then it was always winter.

After the funeral, they had foolishly hoped that the meager leftovers in their bank account would finally stabilize, but neither said this aloud. It seemed unloving, now that he was gone, to be angry at Chris for wrecking family cars, for stealing from them and others, for dropping out of expensive rehabilitation programs and disappearing for months. It seemed like the only unforgivable sin to feel freed from the burden of their own child, to take some peace in the knowledge that there would be no more legal trouble. It had all ended in the car under the tracks.

For him, they had sold their home and moved to this creaking, peeling rental bungalow in an area with a rotating cast of neighbors who threw bags of garbage in the alley, who partied and fought at night until police were inevitably summoned to sort out the details from the loud, drunk monologues of the witnesses, often delivered beneath their bedroom window. For him, they had drained their savings and sold the majority of the lot around the Rosefield Monument Corp. For him, they had chosen a simple monument, short and square, proclaiming that he was their son, and placed it next to their empty graves.

“THIS monument,” Mr. Rosefield said, pointing at a photo in the binder on his desk, “is one of the more understated and elegant we offer.” The man glanced at the photo and turned the page. His wife, leaning back in her chair, winced at the word “elegant.”

“There was one on the website,” the man said, scratching at the skin beneath his watch. “It had a cross engraved on the left but it kind of came out of the top?” He raised his hands overhead and moved them through the air in front of him to illustrate the height of the cross. He pushed the binder back toward Mr. Rosefield.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Rosefield said. “That’s an older model we don’t have available to order anymore. There’s one on the lot I can show you, though, with a cross in the middle?” He gestured toward the window, and to the two pitiful rows of memorials in the square of grass beyond.

The man didn’t look outside. He squinted with a growing disdain. “Why do you have other ones on your website, if they’re not available anymore?”

Mr. Rosefield thought of ways to say that he didn’t know how to change the website, he didn’t even own a computer. The site had been set up years ago, in one of Chris’s more lucid and productive stages, and presented to him as “the future of the business.” Yet just as quickly as Chris ushered in the future, he lost interest in it, and forgot about it. In recent years, the answering machine in the little office had filled with messages referencing the “broken” website. Customers who visited the drafty little office began their appointments with mentions of unanswered e-mails. The website sat out there alone in a place that Mr. Rosefield couldn’t imagine, and preferred not to. He focused instead on the day when the thing would just disappear and he wouldn’t have to answer questions about it.

“That hasn’t been changed in quite a while, we’re looking for someone to manage that.”

“I’ll say,” the man scoffed. “There’s still a spinning logo at the top. The cursor is a hand! I haven’t seen that in ages.” He smirked at his wife, who slid the binder across the table toward them again.

“So we have to pick out of here, or from out there…and these are our color choices,” she said, flipping to the back to the dogeared pages with printed squares of granite options. “And if we want it engraved, you have to send it off somewhere else, and then we have to pay to have it delivered?”

“Yes ma’am,” Mr. Rosefield said, sinking into his chair. This was when he usually said “I just don’t have the space for on-site engraving. I recommend an excellent delivery company who can transport it to the engraver and then to the cemetery. And I can call you when it’s arrived!” He usually delivered the last line with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, but he knew from the brief eye contact she offered her husband, and from the way the man’s arms were folded, that the two would be leaving without making a purchase. He walked the couple to their car, which, when they had arrived, he’d had to sheepishly ask them to move from the Super Saver parking lot and park on the street instead. The wind had picked up, Super Saver customers pulled sweaters and scarves closer around themselves as they jogged across the lot and into the yellow light beyond the supermarket doors. He passed between the two short rows of monuments and entered the little office. The binder crackled noisily as he closed it. He sat watching shoppers pass his windows until the early evening darkened and red taillights flashed into the small room from all sides.

“There’s rats in the basement again,” she called to him from her chair as he removed his coat. The nurse just smiled and pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. “Goodnight, Mr. Rosefield,” she said, pulling her long hair out of the back of her coat. As soon as the door clicked behind her, he went for the flashlight. He made sure she saw him click it on from her chair by the window, then went around the corner into the kitchen. He opened the pantry door and stomped on the linoleum floor, a pantomime of footsteps, down the stairs that weren’t there into the basement that didn’t exist. He wondered again if it mattered how long he stood there, if the passage of a minute was the same as an hour. But it was nice to stand for a minute in the dark of the pantry, listening to nothing, until he could barely hear the clock tick in the kitchen.

He turned and stomped in place again, taking care to produce relatively the same amount of footsteps as he had on the way down. Back in the hallway, he turned off the flashlight and stowed it again above the grandfather clock, behind the decorative wooden top. “Well, that takes care of the rats. They’re gone now.”

She lifted her head slowly from the back of the chair, awakened with a soft snort. Her milky eyes searched for him in the dim light. “Who’s there?” she snapped. He reached over and turned on the hallway light, and her eyes settled on him. She rubbed her knuckles. “Rats?” she said, a question. Then, softly, sleepily, repeated the word as if she’d just learned it. “Rats. Rats.” He had to wake her again to bring her to the table for her Hungry Man dinner: chicken with mashed potatoes, peas, and a disk of chocolate cake, which she ate without protest. “Where’s Chris?” she asked, and as usual, he looked up at the clock in the kitchen and responded that he should be home from work any minute.

This question seemed to only present itself at the dinner table, when he was tired. It often made him wonder “Where is Chris?” for just a moment before he could stop himself. Chris was in Greenview Cemetery, in the south section, Plot 3370. Chris the dead man was there, and he was also in the newspaper clippings Mrs. Rosefield had saved and forgotten about when the disease progressed. But Chris the boy, the surprise baby they’d been graced with late in life, the kid who cried when his bike was stolen off the lawn in front of their house, the teenager who had just laughed when his father asked if there were Game Girls as well as Game Boys. Where was he? In his weary mind, under the dim kitchen light, he often thought of his memories as another version of his son, a version that had not died, but had gone somewhere else all alone, and was just as irretrievable as the other.

The hollow rapping on the glass door awakened Mr. Rosefield from the early morning nap he’d been accidentally having at his desk. It took him a moment to match the sound to the action, and to recognize where he was. He sat up straight and cleared his throat; the Super Saver manager was standing at the door, tapping at the glass with the end of a pen.

Mr. Rosefield squeezed around the desk and stepped out into the chilly air. A cloud moved across the sky and allowed the sun to blast through; for a moment, the parking lot was awash in a flash of yellow sunlight, the saturated, almost neon-yellow of the film inside fresh eggs.

The manager had parted his black vest in the front and squared off with his fists on his hips. “It’s the 13th, Mr. Rosefield.”

“Well, so it is,” he retorted, leaning to peer through the glass at the calendar. The doors and windows, he noticed, needed to be cleaned. “A happy 13th to you.”

The manager ignored the sarcasm as best he could. He’d had plenty of practice smoothing over situations with sarcastic young mothers who demanded rain checks even when the ad said NO RAIN CHECKS, he was an expert at handling lavender-haired old ladies who demanded refunds and insisted that the turkey legs they’d bought weeks ago had expired too soon. He was well-versed in patting problems on the shoulder until they went away. “You need to move your car, okay?” he said, tilting his head, nodding at Mr. Rosefield, who was now licking his thumb and wiping at a smudge on the front of a monument. “The lot is for Super Saver customers. You remember. Come on, now.”

“I believe I am a Super Saver customer,” said Mr. Rosefield as he reached into his breast pocket. He produced a crumpled receipt. As the manager studied the slip of paper, Mr. Rosefield dug the pack of Juicy Fruit from his pants pocket. “Ah, here it is. I bought some gum from your store this morning.”

“Mr. Rosefield, the lot is for customers only while they are shopping in the store. Anything else is loitering.” The manager’s face was turning red, he could feel it. “I don’t have time for this, and frankly I don’t find it very funny.”

“You’re right. It’s very serious. I intend to write several letters to the President of the United States of America.”

The manager expertly stabbed his pen into the slash pocket on the front of his vest. “That’s it,” he said. “You want to fuck with me? Fine. I’ll get the cops up here. I’ll call ‘em right now.” He pulled a shiny new touchscreen phone from his back pocket.

“Maybe I’ll come in for a hot dog while you call,” said Mr. Rosefield. The manager spit on the ground and strode around the office, stabbing at his phone all the way across the lot. The sliding doors hesitated, bringing him skidding to a stop in front of them, then slowly opened.

Mr. Rosefield put his hands in his pockets. He leaned on the glass door of the office and studied the footprints in the grass in front of him, between the rows of monuments. Clouds moved across the sun again, covering the lot in shadow. The wind blew a straw wrapper in from the parking lot and he bent to pick it up from the top of his brown leather shoe. He crunched it into a ball in his hand instead of taking it to the wastebasket inside. When the police showed, he wanted to be standing right where he was. He intended to stay.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

whipple_photoJona Whipple is a librarian and archivist living in Chicago. She is a graduate of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Department whose work has appeared in The Hairpin, The Flounce, The Chicago Reader’s Pure Fiction issues, and Housefire. When she is not reading dead people’s letters, she blogs at cupcakeheartbreak.com.

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