Flash #8

Word count: 15,934
Here's Sally MacNamara, Mac's mother, on a morning in January.

Sally MacNamara is making her breakfast when she thinks to look at the calendar. Brand new and turned to a fresh January, she see it is the fifth, and for some reason that fact gives her a shiver. She watches the snow fall out her kitchen window for a couple of minutes as she sorts out that feeling. Nobody in the hospital, no anniversary of tragedy on this day, and Neil…well, Neill seemed pretty good at Christmas although Lord knows about New years Eve with that boy. Still, she would have had a call by now if something happened, at least that is what she will tell herself this morning.
Then she hears Curtis in his boots coming down the stairs. Without another thought she rushes to the front door, wrapping her robe tighter around her. Sally swings her front door open, just in time to catch him before he goes down the porch steps.
“Hey Ma,” he says, looking a little surprised. “I shoveled the walk, but it’s supposed to snow all day.”
“You’re not going to work are you?” she asks, and she gets the shiver again.
“Go inside,” he tells her. “Don’t want you to catch cold now.”
“Curtis,” she starts, but doesn’t have the rest of what to say. “If you’ve gotta go in then be careful,” she finally adds.
Her boy smiles at her warmly, but with a twinkle in his eye. It reminds her that he looks more like a Reilly, her people, than the MacNamaras.
He hugs her and then tells her, “Go back in Ma. All is well.”
Sally locks her front door and tells herself she is getting batty in her old age. Curtis has been doing that job for years and years and nothing has ever happened to him. She goes back to her breakfast, talking herself out of the feeling; reminding herself that the day it happened to her husband she had felt it so bad she was nauseous. This is nothing like that. It’s probably just the snow. All that weather kicking up, it’s enough to unsettle an old girl.