Posted By startswithanx on August 25, 2008

**Shelby passed away a year ago yesterday. This is the last of three posts in her honor. The first is here, the other here.

One of the last photos Shelby and I took together is framed in my office at home. Every time I look at it I remember exactly where we were going, who took it, what we were wearing and what happened immediately after.

I was having boyfriend problems. The kind that Lifetime movies are made of. Shelby spent several nights consoling me over the phone. She’d end every call with: “Don’t hesitate to call. No matter what time it is.”

So I did and she answered. And she listened. During one call she pleaded for me to catch the next flight to Dallas, which was the nearest airport to where her husband was stationed at the time.

I stayed with her for a week. She did the kinds of things for me in those seven days that made me realize she was destined to be a mother. A great one. She raked my hair with her fingers while I cried. She fixed me comfort food. She talked to me in a voice so soothing, the only one I can compare it with is my own mom’s.

I don’t know which I did more of that weekend, cry or laugh.

One of her favorite phrases was “smokin’ crack.” As in, “You must be smokin’ crack to do something that stupid.” She used it all the time. The first day she and her four-year-old daughter, “A,” brought a tray of breakfast into the room I was staying in, Shelby clapped her hands together and asked, “OK, what should we do today?”

“A” answered, “Let’s smoke crack!”

We laughed AND cried at the same time that morning.

One of the last days I spent in Texas, Shelby and I decided to go out. We got dolled up and were ready to paint the town. But there was this one little obstacle. “A” wanted nothing more than to join us at the hip-hop nightclub we’d chosen as our destination for the evening.

She wasn’t even tired yet, didn’t wanna stay home with Daddy and could easily change out of her “Little Mermaid” jammies, she pleaded. As Shelby began explaining that it was a place for grown-ups and that she’d see her in the morning and tell her all about it, I started to wonder how we’d ever get out the door.

That’s when Shelby brought out the camera and asked “A” to take our picture. Like that, the tantrum stopped. There was a new fixation and it put her in charge of something she was used to the grown-ups handling.

In the photo, Shelby and I are crouched down to meet “A” at eye-level. The front door is behind us, slightly cracked. We’re both wearing dark tans and ear-to-ear smiles.

When we finally walked out of her apartment and started down the stairs, we heard the door open again and a little voice followed. “Mommy, Mommy!” I watched Shelby go back and before she could get a word in, “A” asked what seemed to be a burning question.

“When I grow up will you promise me one thing?”

“What, lover?”

“Can we be mermaids together and swim in the sea?”

Shelby didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, I promise. We’ll be mermaids together and it will be lovely.”

I’ve never forgotten that question or Shelby’s answer. When I think of her daughters and the Shelby-less lives ahead of them, I remember that and I imagine them swimming together. Whether “A” and her little sister realize it yet or not.

Categories: characters, memories, tribute