Wicherek Way

By Callie J. Smith

My mother talked to dead people, and I hated her for it. 

At 10 years old, I remember pressing myself into the wall beside an old rosewood buffet in the family room. It sat by the doorway to the kitchen, where I’d hear my mother talking with her parents as if they sat right there drinking coffee. But they didn’t. My grandparents were dead. Somehow, my mother had missed that fact. Not that she didn’t know they’d died. She did, but that never stopped her from carrying on big, long conversations with them. 

It scared me, if I’m honest. I tried to ignore my fear and bewilderment at her behavior, and I’d almost finished junior high before the first time it all bubbled up and spilled out of me in a burning anger. I’d found my mother in the kitchen, leaning back against a counter, gesturing and arguing with someone who was, quite unfortunately, nowhere in sight.

“But all the possibilities!” she was saying, throwing up her hands. Her shoulder-length mahogany hair had frizzed out in every direction with the humid summer air. She looked a little wild. “I don’t understand why you’d settle for Wicherek Way.” She shook her head. “Don’t you think it’s a little … prosaic?” 

Instead of slinking away like I usually did, I strode into the kitchen and yelled. “You’re crazy!” 

My mother startled and turned wide hazel eyes on me.

“Can’t you act normal?!” I enunciated each word carefully, like an insult. “Look around, Mom. There’s no one else in the room. You’re nuts!” I turned on my heel and left.

Yelling at my mother did not, of course, accomplish anything. Lettie Wicherek was how she was, and growing up with her left me craving things firmly lodged in reality. Like Tae Kwon Do. I studied it and learned how to kick people in the head. That was real. That was a skill I could use on the school bully. It worked, too. And I loved spreadsheets and numbers. They told a person what she had to work with. The truth sat right there on the page in front of me. I took comfort in that. 

My mother took comfort in other things. She’d opened a yarn shop in the front room of our house and ran a tutoring business there, too, somehow content with making only just enough money to get by. It surprised she made even that much money. It never made sense to me how a woman who functioned well enough to tutor students for SATs in our front room could then walk back into the kitchen and argue with her dead grandmother about how many butterscotch chips to add to a cookie recipe. But that was my mother. 

“This was three generations in coming!” she’d declare sometimes, grinning and pointing at a long table with bench seats that ran the length of the yarn shop – the centerpiece of the room. My grandmother and great-grandmother had both dreamed about opening a yarn shop. “Jennifer Belle,” my mother would say when she really got into the topic, “this’ll be yours one day. The house, the business – all of it.”

I had mixed feelings about that. I’d decided early on that I wanted to study accounting and marketing when I grew up. I wanted to do things that actually earned more than enough money, things that would impact more than only the random few people who found their way to our doorstep. Besides, when it came right down to it, knowing that my mother talked to people who weren’t there left me distrusting her evaluations and opinions on just about everything.

Like her ideas for street names. For all she talked about them, my mother took years to decide what she wanted to name the little drive out in front of our house. Every time she talked with me about it, I got more frustrated. I knew the cutesy little names probably shouldn’t have bothered me like they did, but they reminded me of why I felt too embarrassed to bring friends home, never quite knowing what my mother would say or do. 

“What about Heaven Hill Drive?” she asked without preamble one day. She was taking a mug from the microwave as I sat at the kitchen table doing homework. “Wouldn’t that make a nice name?” Pause. “Or maybe Windhaven Hill.” She took a tin of cocoa mix from the cabinet. “That’s got a ring to it.”

Suspecting I already knew what she was talking about, I asked anyway, “A name for what?”

“Our street.”

“You mean 69^th Street?” When she pressed her lips together, I insisted, “It’s our only street.”

“I mean the street connecting us to 69^th Street.”

Still under the illusion that I could reason with her, I said, “It’s a driveway, Mom, not a street.”

“It leads to three driveways: Uncle John’s place, the Millers’ place, and ours. That’s a street.” She stirred cocoa into her coffee. “Your grandma voted for Wicherek Way, but I’m not sold on the idea.”

I didn’t ask her when or how Grandma had voted. I only huffed and said, “We don’t get to name streets, Mom. Sticking a sign on the mailbox won’t make any difference. It isn’t a real street, and you won’t be giving it a real name.” 

My words seemed to amuse her. She took a sip from her mug. “What would make it a real street with a real name?”

I rolled my eyes. “Nothing. Mail won’t go to any of your made-up street names. Google Maps won’t show anything you decide. Why are we even talking about this?” 

She took a thoughtful sip from her mug. “Google and the postal service define reality?”

“Better than you do.” I scooted back my chair and gathered my homework, done with the conversation. 

She grinned as I left.

My relationship with my mother went pretty much like that until I graduated from college. Moving out on my own gave me some helpful distance. I decided she could talk to whomever and make up all the street names she wanted. They weren’t hurting anyone, and it didn’t really matter. I felt downright proud of myself the day she and I visited over coffee in the empty yarn shop and a super heavy package arrived. 

“Tada!” she said, pulling an iron sign out of bubble packing and holding it up for me to see. 

“327 Wicherek Way,” it read. 

“For the mailbox,” she explained, setting it proudly on the table. “Your grandmother finally brought me around to her way of thinking.”

My back teeth ground together. I tried to make my jaw relax, but it wouldn’t.

“You don’t like it?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I made myself say. Though, I couldn’t help but ask, “What finally changed your mind?” 

Bright hazel eyes studied my face. She was probably waiting for me to tell her that the dead are gone, or that cutesy little names don’t make an ounce of difference in the real world. But I didn’t. She eventually shrugged. “Your grandmother finally heard me about some things.” A pause and a smile. “We bickered for the first 40 years of my life …,” 

I didn’t remind my mother that she’d only been 36 when her mother died.

“… but our relationship has improved over time. We’ll never see eye to eye, but still.” She took a sip of coffee, as if deciding what more to say about that. Finally, she sat up a little straighter and said the last thing I’d have expected her to say. “You can reject your family, or you can make peace with them. So,” she reached over and flicked the iron sign with her index finger, “this is me making a little more peace.”

Struck by the words, I stared at her. Then I took a sip of coffee, thinking. 

I didn’t hate my mother anymore. I’d even developed some sympathy. In retrospect, I knew very well when my mother’s conversations with dead people had started. There was that space of about three years when Grandma and Grandpa had both died, and Uncle John had moved away for a while. Something inside my mother had cracked. I got it. I’d lost them, too. My entire world had shifted. 

I could imagine the comfort of dreaming that I still played checkers with Grandpa Michael, and poked at my strait-laced Grandma Lydia, and made s’mores with Uncle John by his fire pit. That dream wouldn’t have been real, of course, but I could still imagine how a person, in her grief, might not mind blurring the edges of reality with her dreams. Some days I’d have given anything to plop down on the couch again with Grandma and Grandpa on either side of me and feel the world set right again, even if only for a moment.

As I helped my mother later, affixing the iron sign to the top of her mailbox, I wondered about things that made the world feel right. I wondered about them, too, on the day a few weeks later that I accompanied my mother to her closing for a home equity loan. My mother meant to get some money to repair the aging house. I, her accountant and her “expert” who’d recently been through the closing on my own house, went with her. 

Mid-way through the process, the closing agent stopped with a confused expression on her face. An oddly old-school woman with a binder full of printouts, her eyes had fixed on one particular page. Then she flipped through several more pages and stopped, again. “I’ve never seen this before,” she said finally. “This residence has four different addresses associated with it.”

“What?” the lender representative and I both asked. 

“Four addresses,” she repeated. “They each have the 327 number, but … look here,” she pointed to one paper. “The homeowner’s insurance is using a 69^th Street address, while,” she pointed to another form, “Ms. Wicherek has ‘Wicherek Way’ on her drivers’ license.”

My eyes cut to my mother. 

The lender representative, meanwhile, had screwed up his face. “This is the house at the dead end three blocks from Gaia’s Grocery?” he confirmed, watching for a nod before typing on his phone. His brow furrowed even further. “Google Maps is calling it ‘Heaven Hill Drive.’” 

“Yes,” the closing agent agreed, “I’m seeing that name as well as ‘Windhaven Lane’.” 

Frowning, I watched my mother, who appeared not at all surprised about any of this. For better or for worse, she’d never given any hint of discomfort when her dreams had to face reality. 

Leaning over, I whispered as quietly as I could, “What did you do? Order a bunch of return address labels or something?”

She thought about it. “For Heaven Hill – I guess I did. I used them a while. But not Windhaven Lane.” Pause. “Maybe that was …”

“A problem with the postal service database?” the lender representative asked.

“Do we even want to know what’s going on with the postal service?” asked the closing agent.

Everyone chuckled at that. Except for me. I was staring at my mother again. She’d leaned back in her chair with an amused expression. She gave me a wink and then said to the group, “It is Wicherek Way.”

I’d have expected to keep quiet, myself, letting the whole thing play out however it would. But I didn’t. To my surprise, I found myself already nodding.

My mother’s smile deepened.

“It is,” I agreed.

“I understand,” said the agent, making notes.

But I didn’t think she did. I didn’t know if I did, either. All I knew was that by the end of the day, we’d gotten my mother her honest-to-goodness, real live loan on the house at 327 Wicherek Way. I even drove home with a little smile at the thought of it.

Callie J. Smith is author of the Sacred Grounds Novels trilogy (Clay Patin Press), and her essays have received the 2025 Award of Merit (Best in Book) prize from The Polk Street Review and a third place medal in the 2025 Gals Guide Anthology. She’s a member of the Indiana Writers Center and is online at www.calliejsmith.net.