Every day of the two years since Sidney had died, Kay Berman had killed herself—in her thoughts, at least.
        Those disposable safety razors Sidney had used wouldn’t work, but he’d kept his grandfather’s old straight razor as a keepsake and she knew that would do. All she had to do was draw a tubful of hot water to numb the nerve endings and warm the blood so it would flow freely, then just open the veins in her wrists.
        She couldn’t stand the thought of having someone find her that way, though, or of making another person clean up the mess.
        Guns were out. Sidney had never cared for one, and neither had she.
       
Kay had walked through Sidney’s workshop: the one he’d added to the back of the garage to give himself a place to putz around in his retirement years. She was looking for a length of rope. The exposed rafters in the cathedral ceiling of the great room were too high to reach, but she thought the railing on the balcony overlooking that same room would hold her weight.
        She had saved the sedatives that Dr. Whiteside prescribed for her. True, she hardly slept. Only when she became so exhausted that her eyes wouldn’t stay open did she doze for a few precious minutes. No doubt the pills would have helped, but she thought she had a better use for them. She kept them in a drawer in the nightstand beside her bed and took them out from time to time, pouring them in the palm of her left hand and counting them: Twenty-nine. Dr. Whiteside had prescribed thirty.
        She wondered if the pharmacist had deliberately shorted her a pill, adding to a stash he’d accumulated by doing the same to other prescriptions until he had enough to sell. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he’d just miscounted. Or maybe one of her friends who’d come to console her had sneaked one.
       
Though her fantasies of suicide still occurred daily, Kay eventually realized that she was a coward and she would never carry out any of her plans. So she put the straight razor back in the closet where Sidney had kept it, and she flushed the pills.
        It wasn’t that she wanted to die. She didn’t. But she couldn’t live with half a soul. Her widowed friends assured her the savage grief that impaled her would fade in a year or two, and the memories of her life with Sidney would mellow the bitter taste of his loss. Well, that hadn’t happened. Each day was a test of her survival.
       
She had considered selling their house and moving to a condo. Each room held a memory which played in her head like a scene from a movie: Sidney sitting on a stool at the breakfast counter scanning The Wall Street Journal; Sidney standing before a steamy bathroom mirror, his face lathered with shaving cream; Sidney sitting in an Adirondack chair on the back deck, steaming mug of coffee in hand, gazing at the blue-tinged mountains across the lake.
        While moving might separate her from the memories stored in the house, it wouldn’t separate her from the memories in her head. No matter where she lived, Sidney would live with her.
    
Light faded in the great room as the sun dropped behind the horizon. Kay built a blazing fire and heated a mug of spiced cider. She sat facing the fireplace in a big wingback chair and covered her body in a fluffy llama’s wool afghan.
        The warmth from the fire crept over the room, compounding the warmth of the coverlet. The smoky tang from the burning wood blended with the aroma of the cider. It smelled like Christmas.
        Small sounds hypnotized her; the soft crackle of the blaze, the whisper of the wind through the eaves, the creak of timber as the walls warmed. She heard a faint clank, a sound which reminded her of the skillet when she put it on the range eye.
        She became mesmerized by the warmth and the fragrance.  Her eyes drooped.  Now, a new aroma appeared. After shave. Old Spice.
        “Sidney, you’ve come.”
        He knelt on one knee beside her chair. “I’ve come.”
       
He seemed so familiar, despite his absence. His green plaid flannel shirt still had the torn pocket, the one she never got around to mending. His scuffed L.L. Bean boots seemed to fit his feet like gloves. He touched her hand, and she felt it. His hands, always gnarled and weather-beaten in all the years she’d known him, seemed softer. His touch made her skin tingle.
        “How–” she began.
        He held up his hand. “That’s not important. Let’s just talk a bit. About the good times.”
        “Yes.”

        Sidney looked at her. “Do you remember when we first met?”
        “At a party hosted by that buddy of yours.” She frowned. “What was his name?”
        “Barry.”
        “That’s it. He was a law student or something, and you were finishing your studies in accounting.”
        “I spotted you right off, but you wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
        Kay shifted under her blanket. “Not my finest hour. But you were undaunted, as I recall. The next day I received a dozen long-stemmed roses at work.”
        She paused. Sidney waited silently while she savored the memory.
        “You didn’t sign the card,” she said. “In fact, it contained only one word, if word it was.”
        “SHMILY.”
        “SHMILY. I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a name? Or a place? I puzzled over that the rest of the day.”
        “The next day, I sent you a box of chocolates.”
        “Only you still didn’t sign your name. The card still had that one silly word.”
        A slab of wood shifted in the fireplace, casting sparks into the fire screen. The room had a faint, smoky air.
        “Yes. Well, you’d baited the trap good and proper. The third day, you showed up with box of lace handkerchiefs, and a card with that word on it.”
        Sidney laughed aloud. “You gave me the most perplexed look.”
        “I didn’t know what to think. I’d spent the previous two days fretting over who was teasing me so, and it turned out to be this young man I’d rebuffed at a party!”
        “I held up the card, and I said, ‘See how much I love you?’”
        Kay laughed musically. “That did it. You had my heart in a wicker basket. After we married, I kept finding notes everywhere. On my pillow, in my sewing basket. You once put a note in my coffee cup, and I didn’t see it until I’d poured my coffee. Each note had that one word.”
        “Yes.”
        “Oh, Sidney. Didn’t we share such good times?”
        The room brightened perceptibly. Kay pushed her afghan back. “Is it morning already?”
        Sidney gripped her hand tighter. “It’s time to go.”
       
“Suicide, do you think?”  the sergeant asked.
        The lieutenant shook his head. Kay Berman’s body sat before him in a wing-back chair, an afghan pulled around her. Her skin was tinged red, as if she were sunburned. “When she opened the flue in the fireplace chimney, it didn’t seat properly. Then she sat down in that chair and went to sleep. Sometime in the night, the flue slipped closed. The fire had almost burned down, so there wasn’t much smoke, but even a smoldering fire puts out a lethal amount of carbon dioxide. That’s why her complexion is so red.”
        The sergeant studied the still form. “She just went to sleep and never woke up. Her neighbor found her.” He sighed. “I want to go like that when my time comes.”
        The lieutenant looked more closely at her left hand. He gently pried her fist open. It held a note, which contained only one word, if word it was. 
    
   
                         About The Author
  
        Tom Hooker is a native of Thaxton, in Pontotoc County, Mississippi.  He graduated from Thaxton High School in 1969 and from the University of Mississippi in 1972.  He and his wife, the former Elaine Pannell of Union County, Mississippi, have been married for thirty-four years.  Tom has worked for the Social Security Administration for twenty-eight years.  He and Elaine have lived in Hendersonville, NC since 1988.
        Tom is the author of Calvary’s Child: The Life of Amanda Carol Hooker, a chronicle of his daughter’s mortal battle with cancer, and Season of Shadows: A Father’s Grief, about the year following her death.  He has completed a novel and is currently shopping for an agent.
        His short stories have been published in Nuthouse magazine, The MacGuffin, Calliope (Issue#118), Bellowing Ark and WNC Woman.  He is a member of the North Carolina Writers Network and the Appalachian Round Table.
        “Shmily” was first published in WNC Woman, Volume 7, Number 6 (June 2008).  It was the “Y Chromosome” issue, the only one in which men are allowed to participate. 
    
    
                                      Copyright © Tom Hooker