Run-On, Run On

I parked at an angle in an empty spot right next to—by coincidence—the van owned and driven by one of my best friends and no more than thirty paces from the house in which I lived from the time of my birth to about the age of five. I entered the squat, non-descript commercial building next to the house. At one time, the building housed a Laundromat, one I used as a bachelor many years back. The woman inside the door (she looked, somehow, like she belonged in the building) recognized me. “Are you ready for this?” she asked, raising her brows, appraising me.
“Yes…I guess I am,” I answered.

The woman stepped into a back room, leaving me to evaluate the place. Big, distorted mirrors—I looked quite plump in one of them. Powder-blue walls. Fake flowers swaying at the work spaces from display shelves on the walls. Heavy, floor-length curtains drawn shut at all the outside windows so that passersby on Main Street could not see inside. The woman quickly returned and extended a cardboard box towards me. “Here she is,” the woman said, not entirely committed to sounding pleasant. I took the box in both hands, held the box, felt the perfectly smooth sides, the utility and completeness.

Stop. Stop and think, Mitch! Look at the box, Mitch. The box, Mitch! The box.

The woman had just handed my wife. Scenes flashed through my mind. Uyen fishing along the sparkles of Hogum Creek. Uyen hanging an angel made of straw and red thread on the Christmas tree, smiling. The box seemed ill-sized, not even big enough to hold a toaster or salad bowl, not particularly heavy, but not light as the ashes from the woodstove at our cabin. Not a wife in there—

Stop, Mitch! Why do you always find need to compare things, explain them, expand them? What the fuck is wrong with you? Stop and recognize that you are holding your wife. This is your wife! The box had a bright white label affixed to the top. I read the label: Uyen Hegman. How implausible, that? Mitch, listen, you have—had—a wife with that name. But this is a box.

“How did you meet her?” the woman asked, seeming suddenly nervous about the obvious withdrawal taking place within me, the silence.
I glanced at the fat me in the mirror and answered, “My mother set us up. She was worried about me. She worked with Uyen and really liked her. My mother did not like many people, but she liked Uyen very much.”
We spoke a bit more. I thanked the woman, left the building.

Outside, in the shadow-cross light, I took the box to my truck. I placed the box on the seat beside me, backed out of the parking spot, and drove across Prickly Pear Creek on the very bridge where, sixteen years ago, my sister and I poured my father’s ashes into the water. I drove by the house where I lived with my mother just before she fixed-me-up with Uyen. I stopped at a stop sign on the street where my friend who drives the van lives, took a moment to study the box, lurched away. I crossed the valley and drove along Dana’s Point Drive, where, only five weeks ago, on what turned out to be her last drive, ever, Uyen admonished me for making the very arrangements for cremation that delivered her into the box. “I don’t know why you did that,” she told me. “I am not going for a while. I’m still fighting.”

I rounded another corner. Wide open country with pine and sage and rabbitbrush and juniper. Fat clouds, white as the label on the box, scurried on above me. I studied the box again. Square and plain. A box.

Once home, I placed the box in Uyen’s chair in the living room, and then drifted back into my bedroom. There, in my closet, I found one of the red articles of clothing I kept—her red velvet jacket—and I took the jacket out to the living room, gingerly draped the jacket over the box, and then turned on the television for the evening news.

--Mitchell Hegman