Nancy’s in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn’t seen a weather report in days – no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won.
It’s the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke – but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that’s not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time.
She didn’t know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn’t know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not dead, because the jacket was possibility and death was not. She had once decided to live and not the other. It wasn’t taken for granted. The jacket. The cigarette smell. She hadn’t felt this way in a while. If he were dead, surely his ghost was there in the closet. If not, she like to think of him as dead so his ghost could possibly be there in the closet with her.
There was one other storm. It came toward the end. She hid in the closet during that one too. He sat in the living room watching the TV and drinking until the power went out. Then he listened to the emergency radio, the one with the hand crank, and drank until he could not crank the radio. Then he started throwing dishes across the kitchen and yelling his mother’s name. His mother had died the previous spring. His father was dead, or at least dead in the way that he was now dead to her, for many years. The father’s name never crossed the mind. He thought of himself as an immaculate conception. He prayed at night, but the storm still came. His mother’s ghost seem to live with him.

After that storm, she swept the kitchen and waited for him to come back home, and he did, but he didn’t. Lost in the storm along with the neighbors chimney, the neighbor girl’s tricycle, and the sign at the supermarket, was something inside of him that had come loose long before the storm, but untethered itself that night and was blown away in the wind, washed away in the flood.
Last she would see him he was walking on the tracks, and her father had always told her as a girl to be wary of the men who walked the tracks. That was when the train still ran those tracks. Within a couple of weeks the line would be abandoned and she imagined that if he walked far enough, there would be nothing that could bring him back. The storm had washed away a part of her too, the part that wanted him there, and seeing him on those tracks, not knowing if he could find his way back, did not hurt then like it does now. It had become a sunset and a silhouette, when it was cloudy and he looked like a hobo.
She thinks that if she had just made him get in the cedar closet with her, made him turn off the TV, that she could have saved him – all of him – and then she could’ve gone on loving him as always, because it was all of him that she had loved, and part neer seemed enough. They both had died a little, for him, possibly totally.
Sitting in the cedar closet during this storm, she thought, a part would be enough. She had known alone would follow, and some lonely, but never imagined lonely like this. Waiting in the closet for the storm of the century, or so they say, just a portion would do. The smell of sweat on him. Faint aftershave. The feel of stubble on the cheek. Hands on breasts. Lips. Head on shoulder. Tears. Mother’s name, and hers.