The CustomerRosalie McCracken
Wears a perfume behind her ear that smells like your dead Grandmother.
Musky, lilac-like. Pat into her collarbone right next to the garnet she refused
to be buried without. You breathe and it’s as if you could drown in it.
Resurface to recite your mantra.
Hi, how can I help you?
Her hair—brown frizz coiled into neck, reminds you of sitting at her vanity
table, bird-shaped frame draped over a velvet cushion.
When she asked you to curl it for the family picture.
You gently took strands into the iron til’ they snapped, artificially molded into a
head of disheveled waves
that would, in a few weeks, become an assortment of wigs in an emptying closet.

Mom started with the car seats. Then the empty boxes, comforters, broken
objects, curtains from the house in Winston Salem. She and her sister fought over the
jewelry box. Mom won, and you sift through the pieces like a graverobber. You wear the
pearl ones now. And the pictures. She hasn’t even breached the ones in the sewing closet.
Once, in the heat of an argument,
Mimi insisted that the photos on her camera were worth more than her father’s life.
Now, when you snap moments on your little blue Lumix, you feel a fear that you will
become fatally attached to the memories.
Her eyes were failing, and the photos were all she had left. Macular degeneration.
You have that gene, too.

And when you wheel her around the old house she calls out her sister’s name.
You realize she is addressing you.
The accordion-straws the cousins used, you bring to her lips. The little
butter- fly cups designated to us.
It circles back. Undulates. You are staring at a stranger. She is asking for her change.
You give her money, watch as she leaves the shop. When she’s gone, you
rush back and cry into your coworker’s arms.