I keep my mother's perfume bottle in the top drawer of my nightstand. White Linen, nearly empty but not quite.
Some mornings I unscrew the cap and hold it right under my nose for five seconds. That's all. Then I close the drawer and go to work.
Nobody knows I do this. My husband thinks I stopped wearing perfume years ago.
The morning of my road test — I'd been putting it off for eleven years — I dabbed some on both wrists instead of just breathing it in.
I could hear her voice saying you parallel park better than I ever did, which was a lie she told me at sixteen and again at thirty.
In the visor I found her old coffee loyalty card, half-punched, from a shop that closed years ago. I left it there.
I passed. I drove home with the windows down and her perfume on my wrists, crying the kind of tears that don't need explaining.