They are like yellow eyes staring from the buttered skillet. Their centers are slightly runny, their whites sizzle softly, and they never stick to the pan.

There is no question of how she would prepare them. "Sunny side up, comin’ right up!” her voice ringing out in a strong alto tone and proclaiming the arrival of what might have been her favorite thing to eat. Two were for me and one for her, along with toast and coffee. My first meal of the day but her second.

“Woke up at two a.m., starving,” she’d announce. “Made myself an egg. Then I went back to sleep.”  As long as I could remember, my mother got up in the middle of the night to cook and devour one of her matchlessly prepared picture-perfect eggs.

By seven a.m. we are both up. Dressed in our nighties, bra-less, with mussed bed-hair, we will be at the kitchen table until past noon, good-naturedly dissecting the life of every cousin, sister, brother-in-law, crazy uncle, and the details of my ill-fated romances. Years later, the smell of butter melting and the sound of eggs cracking, my brain replays this scene of my mother and me, easily recalled as if it were a video stored on my phone.

She was fascinated by human behavior. I’ve yet to encounter anyone so interested in others or in trying to figure out why anyone did what they did.  Our intimate ritual dance of girly gossip mixed with serious psychology and conducted in a breakfast setting, traced the steps not only of family members but also of ourselves. We passed judgment on who succeeded and who failed and kept as secrets between the two of us.

 She traveled little, living most of her life in the same Connecticut house built by my dad. But once, accompanying me on a business trip to British Columbia, she was awed by the Pacific coast scenery and said, “Drop me off and pick me up in 20 years.”  We were at a funky inn which tried to be chic, advertising itself as having suites. But the rooms were chopped up, like they had once been something else. A narrow hallway within the suite had a tiny window placed at eye level where you could see and hear the waves rhythmically lapping against a sea wall.  We stood in that passageway again and again, up against the window, listening, with our shoulders touching.

My college graduation gift was a trip with her to Nantucket Island.  One day, we biked close to 20 miles, from one end of the isle near Madaket to Sconset Beach at the eastern tip. I struggled to keep up with her. “I thought I would have to carry you,” she laughed and shook her finger at me. “Me, almost thirty years older than you!”

The day my husband and I followed her casket out of the church, I frantically searched for her face among the funeral’s attendees.

All my life I’d heard stories that a passed loved one may hover near for a few fleeting seconds. That in unfiltered moments, a feather-light featherlight caress, grazes a shoulder or brushes the top of one’s head.  There is no one there but the sensation is that someone has been.

That didn’t happen when she left.

Was it what I held back about my life that disappointed her? That when she saw what she hadn’t known, she chose not to come?

Perhaps I didn’t recognize her touch when she did?

Or was it that day at the assisted living facility when I checked her in, and she sat with her shoulders hunched and her eyes downcast and she sobbed “You don’t love me.”

I thought that placing her there was my ultimate act of love.

Once she died, I could never face sunny side up and stayed with over easy.

It was a year and a half after my mom passed away, and I was prepping the home my father had built to pass into a stranger’s hands. I was there to sort, to discard, and to donate their life’s belongings. And some things to treasure. Like the Corning Ware casserole dish with blue corn flowers she used for macaroni and cheese. And the turquoise polyester dress she made to wear to a cousin’s wedding, once too big that now fits me perfectly.

My daughters typically accompanied me on the Connecticut trips. The girls would do the dishes, side by side, perched on step stools so their 7-7 and 5-year-old bodies could just reach the sink to wash and dry. This one time I was alone. I glanced at the few plates, glasses and silverware and at the dishwasher alongside, which hadn’t worked in years. For she had refused to get it fixed. As she had refused to move, until I moved her.

The white sink stared back at me with a palm-sized black scar, where something had violently scraped the porcelain away, the metal laid bare. It too had never been fixed. But the sink had a window above it, and from there I could see the semi-commercial, semi-residential sprawl encroaching upon what had been the less-developed neighborhood where I grew up.  “November is the best,” she’d pronounced about the sky’s afternoon display she’d repeatedly witnessed standing in that spot where I now stood.

 I saw the November twilight fill the sky, as the soap suds and the water ran.  A bank of clouds, edged in charcoal gray, churned into a royal purple, the center of which was slashed by a sharp sliver of unexpected orange. It was watching this final remnant of the day’s light that I felt the feather light caress brush my shoulder, like a breath that moved the air around me. I turned my head. No one was there. From somewhere that was both in the room and inside me, with the sunset hanging above her scarred sink, I heard her voice, “Remember, I told you that November is the best.”

She had come on her own terms, in her own time, in the place that had only been hers.

It was past time to see the yellow yoke eyes of sunny side up stare from a sizzling buttered  skillet.

But I’ll never have them any way but over easy.