By Brian Gifford

Sarah prayed for a red light so she could have a few more minutes with her daughter. Because once she dropped Rachel off at her new apartment in The Bronx, Rachel’s destination would be like some kind of an ending, and it would be a long, lonely drive back home to Ohio. 

“Promise me you’ll always be sure to walk with somebody everywhere,” Sarah pleaded. Rachel promised she would. “And keep your head down while you walk. Make no eye contact with anyone.” 

“Mom, I’m going to be okay,” Rachel tried to reassure her mother. “This is a good place for me.”  

Graffiti marred the wall beyond which her apartment sat. There was a spelling error in the original graffiti, and another—obviously less talented graffiti artist than the first—had corrected it, even though it seemed clear that the mistake was intentionally ironic: “It’s all a mistace,” the original had read, and someone had crossed out the “c” and written in a “k.” Sarah just hoped Rachel was not making a mistake coming here. She was proud of her daughter when she took the fellowship teaching at the charter school, proud of her commitment to serve disadvantaged students; she only wished it would not take her so far away. 

“Be sure to call your father often,” Sarah said. 

“I will, every day after work,” Rachel promised. 

The drive home was as lonely as she anticipated it would be. Rachel’s father, John, was dying of brain cancer and was not well enough to make the trip. Rachel had accepted the fellowship before John received his diagnosis. If John was angry with his daughter for leaving while he lay dying, he did not show it. John had been given only months to live, and Rachel said she would be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. 

Sarah cared for John when hospice was away, and when hospice was there, she kept herself busy with the yardwork that she and John had always done together. 

John made it through Thanksgiving. Rachel stayed with her parents for the entire week that fall break. While Rachel was there, John beamed for the first time in a long time.

“It’s great to have her here,” Sarah said.  

“Yes, it is,” John said. “And she offered to stay with me rather than going back to The Bronx.”

“Good,” Sarah said.

“But I told her to keep her commitment, that I would be here waiting for her here at Christmas.”  

Despite her worries, Sarah was glad Rachel would be far away from home during the unbelievably hard times that were coming. She had watched her own father die of cancer just last year, and she could never get out of her head the vision of his being at the point where only a dose of morphine bordering on the lethal would take the pain away.     

“I love you so much,” John said to Rachel as she was preparing to leave. Sarah thought it sounded like a valediction, as though John knew he would not make it to Christmas. She thought it was the bravest thing she had ever witnessed.

Right up till the time the end came, in early December, Rachel called every day after work. Even when John was unconscious, Sarah would hold the phone up to his ear, and Rachel would tell her father about her day working with the children and say over and over again that she loved him.

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Brian Gifford has previously published short fiction in Agape Review and The Muleskinner Journal, which nominated one of his stories for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. He has work forthcoming in BULL and Does It Have Pockets? Valediction was written after obsessively listening to Noah Kahan’s You’re Gonna Go Far and reading some of the exceedingly poignant comments on YouTube.