A Closing Reverie

This piece was written based on a prompt from The Red Dress Club.

The instructions were as follows:
Pick four numbers, each between 1 and 10.

Write them down so you remember.

The first number will be for your character, the second your setting, the third the time and the fourth will be the situation.

Then take the four elements and combine them into a short story.

All four you picked MUST be your main elements, but you can add in other characters, settings, times and situations.

My numbers and corresponding assignments were:
1. A new mother
4. A restaurant
6. Midnight or Around Midnight
10. Someone has just gone to the doctor.

I am posting this because I did actually put a fair amount of work into it. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish it and didn’t even manage to get it linked up with everyone else over at Red Dress. *sniffles* I was kind of bummed but I think it’s worth sharing. This is the first piece of fiction I’ve written in many years, though, so it’s pretty rustic. Enjoy!

A Closing Reverie

Raucous laughter filtered into the kitchen from the dining room where her father, a few family members and her husband sat finishing up their night’s work. Wiping sweat from her brow, she turned her concentration away from the sink and focused instead on the steel shelves lining the south wall. Shooting a bemused look at her mother, Alice shoved her left sleeve back up past her elbow (it always slipped down when she was scrubbing dishes) and tackled the disarray that was the small restaurant’s storage shelves. It seemed that no matter how many times a week she wiped them down and neatly stacked the various cook-pots and pans, it was always back to chaos by the end of the next day.

“Ah, Alice, dear, he’s just so precious, sleeping away without a care in the world” crooned Maggie. She was sitting on a stool, rocking her new grandson as he slept in his bucket seat.
“I know, Mum. It is unbelievable how different they are when they’re asleep, hmm?” laughed Alice. James was 3wks old, her youngest of five children. He was her last, the long-awaited for son. The girls were so exuberant in their excitement over him that she felt bringing him to the family’s Diner for her shift was probably a gift to him. He was her easiest baby, always content and happy. He had her black hair and Tommy’s features and, when awake, was already smiling back at whoever cooed at him.

“Back to work, then, now that he’s asleep,” Maggie said. “If those hooligans haven’t woken him, my lack of rocking certainly isn’t going to bother him”. Maggie slowly rose from her stool, wincing a bit as she set her feet on the floor. Alice paused in her wiping to study her mother’s progress across the kitchen. This morning’s consult with Dr. Harman had not gone well and she was concerned her mother was dealing with the prognosis as she always did: by ignoring it.
“Mum, why don’t you let me do the mopping? We’re almost finished in here, maybe it would be better if you go out there and see if Pa and the boys are actually getting anything done. They sound like they’re having a bloody party.”
Maggie didn’t turn her head as she waved her hand in a poo-pooing fashion, “You have enough to worry about; the floor won’t mop itself. Thirty-three years I’ve been mopping this floor and frankly, I’m the only one that gets the corners.”
Alice smirked, green eyes twinkling. “Now that’s just not fair, Mum, I always get the corners!” Maggie pretended she hadn’t heard as she slowly got the mop and bucket together.

Returning to the project at hand, Alice thought about what the doctor had said. Despite the fact that her mother had been dealing with Rheumatoid Arthritis for as long as Alice could remember, the systemic disease had been dormant for most of her childhood, only rearing its ugly head a handful of times over the first twenty years of her memory. Now that her mother was well into her fifties, the disease had begun to take its toll. Her left elbow was completely fused, her back was bent and her hands bore the signs of her crippling disease. Recently, the problem area had been her feet, specifically her ankles. This morning the doctor said that despite her latest round of steroids and chemo, there had not been any affect on the advancement of the disease this time. In other words, modern medicine had done all it could to keep the monster at bay. Both of her ankles were terribly inflamed, the fusing process well on its way in the right foot. Her knees were beginning to pain her and with the back problems she’d had for years, a wheelchair was likely in her future.
Frowning, Alice tried to imagine her mother in a wheelchair. The image was preposterous to her. The very idea that her mother wouldn’t be able to walk soured her smile and drew a line across her freckled forehead. For the last few years, slowly but surely, Alice had been taking over more and more of Maggie’s duties at the Diner. She knew it bothered her Mum as the incessant micromanaging only got worse with each relinquished duty. Pa had been trying to get her into the office to work for years but Mum wanted nothing to do with it. The kitchen was where her dream was born and she had no interest at all in paperwork.

Realizing the shelves couldn’t get any more organized, Alice moved on to the grill and range. It really didn’t matter who was cooking was, the place got so busy during the dinner rush that cleaning wasn’t anyone’s top priority. Brushing her hair back towards her ponytail, she began cleaning out the grease traps. Her mother was almost finished swishing the mop back and forth across the floor and once the range was clean their work would be finished for the night.

As she worked, she mused. The diner had closed at 11 and it was just past midnight. Technically a new day had begun. Alice knew that she’d probably only get about 4 hours of sleep before it was time to get up and begin again. It didn’t matter though; the last shift of the day was her favorite to work. Midnight or thereabouts had always been a time of day she appreciated. She felt like she was standing on the cusp between the end and the beginning of time there.

At thirty-five years old, that concept had been on her mind a lot lately. James was definitely her last baby; she and Tommy made that decision upon his conception. Tommy had completed his doctorate and just got an offer for a nice position on the other side of town. They were looking at buying a bigger house and Kate was about to graduate from high school. After listening to Dr. Harman’s gentle speech today, she had that feeling again. As if she was standing on the edge of some great change that, as yet, she could only sense, but not see. The Doctor had been talking about her mother and yet Alice’s thoughts kept circling around their entire family. After all, Maggie was, in many ways, the heart of their family and anything that affected great change in her life rippled out to all of them.

Change is a funny thing, she thought as she took the wire brush to the top of the grill. It usually filled her with a sense of excitement, of anticipation. It wasn’t that this time didn’t, exactly, but she found herself also filled with a sense of loss and melancholy. She felt the presence of the end of an era drawing near. When she graduated high school, change was exciting. When she got married and had children, change was hard and involved some loss as well but for the most part, it was a change she was looking for and eager to make. The changes happening now, particularly with regard to her mother’s health, were not the same. All of the other changes had been beginnings. These changes felt like the end of a story to her and she wasn’t sure how to feel about them.

There was hope for the future coming from the family she and her husband had made. There was a sense of pride and accomplishment and belonging thanks to the family she came from. Yet, the unknown of the future contained an element of fear that had never been there before.

I must be feeling my age, she thought, amused with herself. Coming out of her reverie, she noticed her mother had finished mopping and joined the others in the main dining area. The stove sparkled, her hands so long accustomed to their job they had done the work on auto-pilot, her mind elsewhere. She looked around the kitchen and, satisfied that the place was clean, took off her apron and hung it on the hook by the kitchen door.

James still slept on the counter, making little half smiles as he dreamt. She paused, just taking him in, thinking about changes and time marching inevitably forward. She heard Tommy say something in a jocular tone and listened as Joe shot something back, causing another round of boisterous laughter. Peeking into the dining room, she saw her mother settling into a seat next to her father. The day’s work completed, it looked like a card game was underway. Cards were the family’s “national past-time”, as Pa called it.

Turning back to her son, she made sure he was covered with a blanket and lifted his bucket seat and switched the kitchen light off. Tommy was waiting for her, coat draped over an arm, keys to the van jangling in his hand. Cheerful calls of “Goodnight”, “See you tomorrow” and “Kiss those kids for me!” rang out as they made their way to the door.

Alice realized she was utterly content, unknowns or not. It didn’t make her happy to see her mother in pain and yet Maggie was sitting in there, laughing and teasing as she always had. She accepted the challenges life threw at her with a head-on defiance that was maddening, to be sure, but inspiring as well. There had been no tears or despair that morning at the Doctor’s. Maggie just nodded and said, “Well, I guess that’s that,” and went on to invite the doctor and his wife to the family’s annual Summer Fest. If she was afraid she didn’t show it nor was there any evidence of anger on her visage. She just accepted the situation and went back to her life.