It smelled like home in Melanie’s brother’s bathroom; a strange wonderful smell that I never knew I’d been looking for; a few dozen bars of cheap super-market soap wreaking their sweet too perfumy scent pushed out from them by months in the damp underbelly of the sink, the musty mildew of linoleum cleaned but never in the cracks and the gentle waft of creme hair conditioner from weeks of steamy showers.

Home, I whispered, sniffing the air, finding many reasons to come back into the cluttered blue bathroom just to sniff again.

This was a shiva. Mel’s mom had died over the weekend and the family, neighbors and school buddies of Mel’s tough-guy-brother were there to pay their respects and to feast on the seemingly endless supply of corned beef, pastrami, bagels, tuna fish, potato salad, cole-slaw, pickles and rye bread spread out over the plastic clothed dinette table. Half of the kitchen floor was crowded with bottles of cream soda, seltzer and Diet Coke. “Get yer soda from the floor, the ice is in the fridge,” explained Mel’s friend the kitchen hostess for the evening.

Home; surely I was there; watching Mel’s dad babbling about nothing, not sure he was dreaming that his wife was dead or that he was too and Mel asking all to eat because there is so much, too much and the cousins who showed up late to eat quickly and leave before anyone noticed they didn’t bring anything.

The girlfriend of the youngest brother read her list of prices at Lord and Taylor with the 15% discount chart lovingly prepared by Mel’s mom and all chime in to offer their tales of Tilly the marathon shopper and champion deal-maker and I am home, home, home, so dizzy in my fall, so unsure of who I am and where I am and I am back in 1992 in an instant and my mother’s shiva, slicing bagels for the sisterhood, asking all to eat, eat, eat because there is so much and nobody cries, nobody ever cries until I do 8 years later at Mel’s place when I read the story of how Tilly showed her daughter the proper way to test a bra.

I go back into the bathroom to smell the musty-Ivory soap-conditioner-mildew-love again and stare at my face in the medicine cabinet and look for her to come out of my eyes, as she does, whenever I’m quite sure she’s gone for good and then she’s there smiling in my pupils saying,”No more tears my shana madelah, eat something, there’s so much, too much. Eat something and make your mother happy.”