MOM'S COFFEE CUP

"...robe, slippers, two pieces of burnt toast with butter and Smucker’s...."

I love this cup more than anything else I brought home with me after Mom died—certainly more than her gold wedding band from Dad, which turned my finger an angry green. I took the chemical reaction as a sign that she still wasn’t over 27 years of ironing Dad’s undershirts.  

I think all those years of angry ironing explain why—three months after Dad moved out—she started dating, and then married, our mechanic. Rob (not his real name, but good enough) took her drag racing and boating. He brought out the dormant teenage farm girl who used to fly her father’s plane to the next town for ice cream.  

The cemetery where we buried Mom is directly behind my childhood home. The house had stone walls and a green-tiled roof and was truly grand, sitting on a hilltop with sweeping city views and overlooking our neighbors’ more modest places. In this house at dusk, 16 years ago, Mom died in her bed as I lay beside her whispering the names of all who loved her. 

After the funeral, Rob gave my brothers and me just a few days to pack up the things that were indisputably ours. Our relationship with him had soured during Mom’s final two months when the morning ritual of getting coffee to-go had, in my eyes, turned into a flirting session between him and the coffee lady. 

So we sifted through Mom’s worldly things, then left that beautiful house where Rob would continue to live, eventually with the coffee lady when they weren’t off traveling in his brand new Winnebago. Heading back to Brooklyn, my car was packed to the gills with Mom’s Amish quilts and heavy antique crocks. 

And the coffee cup. Perhaps I value it so much because school-aged me absorbed it as an integral part of Mom’s morning ritual at the kitchen table: robe, slippers, two pieces of burnt toast with butter and Smucker’s strawberry jelly, the newsy local paper, the coffee cup with one refill. No matter how the day turned out for Mom or for me, that’s how it always started. Now the cup has passed from her hands to mine, and every morning it brings me, just as she did, instant, quiet comfort.

—D.C.E.