Visitations

On Sundays, Ma and I go to the Walmart off I-95 to grieve. It’s our ritual that binds us over mist-thick mornings and asphalt, knees kissing the parking space. Five columns from the left, eighth row from the back. We arrive at 6 AM and kneel as dawn exhales above us, street lights flickering off. Dozens of blinking eyes, shutting along with ours.

Until last year, this was a cemetery. The town moved it because its proximity to the interstate was “hurting tourism”; because having a store there would “improve business”; because our ghosts were an inconvenience. The headstones now cluster on the outskirts of town, presumably in the same formation as before, but we’ve never gone to check. Hollow graves are bad luck, Ma says. They draw death to untainted land, forever filling its mouths. I doubt there’s untainted land in America, but still we avoid the cemetery and the decorative graves that shoppers wheel out in October, skulls yawning from their crowns.

My father lies under a sign that declares this part of the lot as section S, and as I bend toward his body, I rehearse words that start in its quiet: slipknot, shadow, sleeve. In life, he spent each day at an Amazon call center, giving strangers customer service. Repeating return policies and gift card redemption codes, wearing his mouth thin with the language of merchandise. By the time he returned home, his lips would curl inside his mouth, as if recoiling from the prospect of speech. He’d hover in the living room with his dinner, fork halfway to his mouth, staring at the empty TV screen. When I tucked myself next to him on the couch, we’d commiserate through quiet, through the gentle brush of his thumb against my forehead. The first time Ma and I swerved into the Walmart parking lot, squinting at fresh asphalt and glossy signs, I realized I couldn’t recall his laugh.

We’ve never been inside the store—an act of protest from Ma—but I peer at the doors from our haunt, 400 feet away, the dark shine of their glass. I’m never close enough to see, but I imagine my face doubled around the handles. A blurred moon blocking my view inside.

We used to arrive later in the day, when shoppers and cars thronged the parking lot, their movements rushed and slick with heat. Cars honking as they dodged our heels. But the manager soon came to chase us away. She gestured at the parking space with hands that fluttered like fledglings, while she outlined all the shapes our hazard took: you’re endangering other customers too, we cannot be held liable for any accidents, please, please leave.

So now we come in the morning when the town is small and our dead loom in the beats between each song on the radio. White space. White cars pulling off South Street to the church while we hold our course, rolling windows down so the rising sun can land in our laps. We aren’t religious because there’s nothing holy here, or at least nothing holier than my mother’s voice, parroting the advertisements on the radio, saying “This is how I learned the language of this country,” by which she means she played reality TV in the background of her house for years, copying their dramatized lilts and all the commercials in between. She says this is why she speaks English like every syllable is chasing the next—too many ads for prescription medications and their never ending risks, warning death death death.

These words she fits in her mouth like a prayer as we turn onto the highway, hurtling past billboards and fluorescent lights. Dodging the widening gash of horizon as we careen toward our best approximation of home.

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