Mother

When my mother was younger, she had long brown hair and could list on two hands the number of boys she had kissed. When she got to her ring finger, she took it as a sign it was time to marry. My father was not so careful in his counting, and decided later he needed to add some more. What he didn’t know is that there is no counting backwards in love. His hands kept moving forward, fingers ticking off, a poor excuse for a wave goodbye. My mother took my hand and my sister’s hand. She took our hands in her hands, and she showed us how to make birds of them.

Once, my mother boiled water over an open flame to feed us. The spaghetti tasted of campfire, but my sister and I cleaned our bowls, love hunger rising in our bellies. We have never been without dinner, though there were days I could only chew apples on the driveway, throwing the cores down the road like they were some kind of charm against anyone else taking off.

In my dreams, my mother is a prophetess in the woods, foretelling a forest fire. She teaches the oaks how to grow legs and follow the deer to the clearing. Her eyes are that of an owl: large and brown and forward facing. But when my father left us, she didn’t see it coming, like a tornado with no funnel cloud, no weather channel warning. My mother told me about the tornadoes that tore over our home when I was a child, how they sounded like trains on the roof. In the morning, the lawn was littered with shingles and glass. But my mother, she has always been good with a hammer and nails. She patched our roof right up.