Letting go had never been easy for Marjorie. Once her son moved out––and only called to ask for a favor––her collections multiplied. She started to save what others considered trash: the strings of tea bags, stickers she peeled off fruit, expired coupons from her favorite gardening store.

         Her most precious collection, and the one she’d kept the longest, was an assortment of perennials, annuals, and even weeds––what she considered her “bouquet of regrets.” Because they served as important reminders, it never seemed like the right time to dispose of them. As months trickled into years, Marjorie and the desiccated buds aged in tandem. She never told anyone about the skeletal stems or withered leaves that she stored in the bottom drawer of her nightstand––close enough that they were within reach, but far enough that they didn’t prick her hand every time she reached for the aspirin bottle.

         As penance each month––or was it every week?––Marjorie pressed her palms into the remnants’ stems, stabbed her fingertips against the thorns, though it was the sharp stalks of the evening primrose that drew the most blood.

         Back when she was a new mom, she’d heard a psychologist on the radio talking about self-esteem. He said that the way in which you greet your children will either build or deplete their confidence. As one of eight siblings, Marjorie felt her own mother would only acknowledge her existence when she needed something. Marjorie would hear: “Oh there you are!” followed by: “Can you please go get your brother?” When eight-year-old Marjorie confided in her mother about her struggles with the other girls in the school cafeteria, her mother scoffed at her daughter’s “silly” complaint, reminding Marjorie that she should be grateful she even had food for lunch. And to never again bother her with something so trivial.

         As a young adult, Marjorie decided early on that she wanted one child. When her son Corey entered nursery school, she worked there as a part-time aide, and then when he started kindergarten, she volunteered at his elementary school. Not only would their schedules match, but her son could remain her axis. She existed only to be his mother; therefore, she worried incessantly about his safety. Whenever Corey played outside––because of stranger danger, speeding cars, and neighborhood bullies––she’d either tinker in the nearby garden or lounge on the grass out back and peruse magazines.

         On one of those long afternoons, as the sun shot straight through her chest and beads of sweat collected on her brow and below her knees, Marjorie struggled to get comfortable. Even though Corey was almost four, the baby weight still clung to her abdomen and lumped below her bra straps. Heavier than normal, she was reminded of being weighed down as a child, tugged closer to earth and dirt every time she carted her younger brothers up the stairs or down to the corner store when their mother needed milk or cigarettes. Until Marjorie lost another twenty pounds, she’d be reminded that her value was once based on how much extra weight she could bear.

         As Marjorie was blotting away sweat with the bottom of her shirt and skimming low-cal recipes in Good Housekeeping, her son tapped her on the shoulder. From behind his back he brandished a bouquet of evening primroses, each flower a bright chickadee yellow. Perhaps it was the humidity, or the way her stomach folded and squished, or how the sweat streamed down her legs and stung like the dripping urine from her little brother’s soiled diapers once had, but she slapped the flowers out of Corey’s hands. She could tell by the trail of dirt that he’d ripped them from a patch of yard just beyond her vegetable garden, and she scolded him for trudging through her freshly planted seeds. She no longer recalled the tomatoes and zucchini that did not grow that year––nor did she remember any of the low-fat recipes––but she would never forget how she’d made her son’s eyes drop to his feet.

         Earlier today, she called Corey inviting him and his fiancée to Sunday dinner. Knowing he would not return her call, her skin started to flake and itch. Upon her doctor’s advice, she reached into her medicine cabinet for a supplement of evening primrose oil. She set a capsule on her pillowed tongue, thought of her son––and his clipped tone during their most recent phone conversation––and swallowed it whole without water. It lodged in her throat before her gut yanked it down. If she could do it all again, she would have birthed her child a sibling. If only to give him some reprieve. If only she’d found a happy medium where eight children wasn’t an overrun field of crab grass and one wasn’t the lone vine of a strangle weed.

         She tiptoed up to her bedroom, removed the entire drawer where the crispy petals and needles of twigs were stored. She scattered them on her bedspread. She lay there, too––imagined doing snow angels in the mess, knowing that one day she may die in this bed, alone, atop her collection, and whoever removed her body would be jabbed and nicked by the debris. Hear the crunching, deafening echo of a lifetime of regret.

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