By Angela Joynes
Mum had insisted the mall was a good place to shop for a snazzy dress and hat for Ginny’s wedding. “I’ll need…as a grandmother…”
“Of the bride,” I finished her thought which I often did lately. “But, Mum, I don’t see any nice ladies shops.” The place was polluted by vape shops and Forever 21.
“I know it’s here somewhere.” She sounded peeved. “You know the one.”
Actually I didn’t, but indulging was another skill I was mastering.
Mum furrowed her forehead. “It’ll be beside the place…the cinnamon sugary place.”
“Cinnabon? Look, it’s over there but no dress shop.”
Mum’s new dentures impaled her thin lower lip. Then she brightened. “I know, it’s by the citron place.”
What citron, citronella? An outdoors woodsman outlet?
“Sour,” Mum spit.
“You mean lemons?” Just like Mum to recall a French word from high school but not which dress shop. “The lemonade stand?” The rather excellent enterprise of freshly squeezed lemons, icy, crisp, wafting lemon oil wasn’t here, not for ages.
After two more excruciating laps of the entire maze, upstairs and down, every wobbly step onto or off the squeaking escalator potentially my mother’s last, we finally stopped, thank God, in the T-junction center. Under those unflattering fluorescents Mum looked elderly, utterly exhausted. Disguising my obsessive thought that we could’ve already ordered dresses and accessories for the whole wedding party online by now, I said, “Let’s go.”
“No! We keep hunting. I know that boutique is nearby. I’ll know it when I smell it.”
I sighed. The neurologist had explained the incongruities of memory loss, how Mum might clearly recall long past people and events, that scents would trigger strong memories much longer than touch, longer than my face or my voice, longer than the reserves in my tank.
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Angela Joynes (she/her) is a disabled Canadian writer who holds a BA, MD, and Certificate in Creative Writing. Words in The Ilanot Review, The West Trestle Review, National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies, Flash Flood, Fictive Dream, Susurrus Literary Journal, Trash Cat Lit and others. X@angela_joynes @angelajoynes.bsky.social