By Alison Sanders

I never wanted her as a playmate. Our moms – best friends – would send us outside together. “You kids go play,” they’d say. But Emma was too timid, her hands too small, as we scampered through the woods behind our houses. She was not very good at climbing trees, and I was annoyed by her little-girl voice from below, warning me that I was going too high.

In high school I didn’t want her as a prom date. “There’s always Emma,” my mother suggested, and I thought my parents might make me take her. But I asked another girl, whose aerosol hair crunched against the headrest of my dad’s car. I saw her, though, at prom – Emma. She was standing against the wall, and the colored lights danced over her face. Her dress was too big, and the shallow plane of her chest was so pale I felt an urge to cover her. I said Hey Em, and she rolled her eyes with a tiny curl of her lip. She kept tugging it up, her dress.

I never wanted to sleep with Emma, not ever.  Once, the summer after high school graduation, we sat in the moonlight in her backyard while our parents laughed inside the house. They seemed very far away. Without thinking about it, I reached over and wrapped my fingers around her wrist and the tip of my thumb touched the tip of my pinky. I don’t remember why I did that. I called her scrawny and she seemed to shrink a bit when I said it, which I didn’t intend. Just joking, I said. Her wrist was cool under my hand, and bird bone delicate. We talked until very late that night, our shoulders touching lightly as the dew fell. I didn’t want anything more than that. 

A few years later, I was in a noisy bar when Emma walked in. I was holding a beer, and playing pool with a group of guys I didn’t really know. The music made the floors hum under my feet. I didn’t expect to see Emma there. She had gone off to college by then, and I’d started climbing poles for the phone company. And so I was surprised to see her. She looked around with her big, curious eyes, and when she saw me she came right over. She called me Andy, though I was Andrew to everyone by then. “You’re back,” I said and I heard relief in my voice. She looked like her mother in that moment, but also like her – Emma – when she was just a little girl. Someone jostled her from behind, and I thought she didn’t belong there, in that bar with sticky humming floors. I felt ashamed of my beer buzz and the worksite dirt under my nails. I didn’t want to see her there. 

I didn’t want to marry her. Of course our parents had always hoped we’d wind up together – especially our mothers. But, no. I married Sarah, with her big laugh, and I don’t even remember Emma at our wedding though I know she was there. Emma married a college guy. When I met him at their wedding reception he called me “Andy” too, and I wanted to say, “That’s not yours.” But that’s silly and I knew it. She looked happy that day, and I was glad. They moved up the coast, Emma and her husband, and over the years when I checked the weather every morning, I checked Emma’s town too. Funny the things we do. 

Over the years, we became Facebook friends, which I liked very much. In photos, her children smiled with closed lips and warm eyes just like their mother. I recall a picture of her kneeling on the beach with her arms wrapped around her children. The sun caught a strand of Emma’s hair blowing across her face, and it made me feel content somehow that her children leaned into her that way, that someone – her husband I suppose – saw that moment and captured it, that the sun was warm on the top of her head. I never commented; I had nothing to say in that place. Though it did make me happy to see.

When my mother died, I didn’t want anyone. The world felt suddenly cruel and cold, and I wanted to be alone in it for a while. But Emma sent me a card. Dear Andy, it said. Inside was a long note in her perfect chalkboard cursive and she recalled things about my mother that I had forgotten, or never noticed at all. I looked at that note for a long time after I finished reading it. I tucked it in my desk drawer, beneath the stamps and the scotch tape, and I wondered why I would do such a thing. But it made me feel less alone, that note.

But, today. Today my wife is gone, along with my mother and my father and one of my sweet boys, and I know it’s my time soon. I can feel the machinery winding down inside me like my father’s wristwatch used to do at the end of the day. The air around me is filled with the smell of soap and the whispers of nurses and grandchildren I do not recognize. Today’s date, I suddenly realize, will be carved into my gravestone, remembered every year, and I don’t know what today’s date is. I feel that is something I should know, and it worries me though I can’t form the words to ask. And today, I want Emma. Her half smile. The calm in her eyes – eyes which have seen me all of my days. I try to say her name but it comes out wrong, and someone holds a cup of water to my lips instead. I take a sip, and I close my eyes in thanks. And then – I know it before I even open my eyes—she’s here. I knew she would be. Her fingers are cool on my wrist, her voice soft like home. It was always Emma.

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Alison is a mother and an attorney living in Santa Cruz, California. Her writing has appeared in Stanford Magazine, Cleaver, Seaside Gothic, Bluebird Word, Flash Fiction Magazine, and the 2023 Swan Song anthology. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the WOW! Women on Writing Winter 2023 Flash Fiction Contest, and her work was shortlisted for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction and the Retreat West Short Story Contest. She is working on her first novel.