will tell her is not how much I owe her, not how much I need her. It is eggs.
She’s tough, so tough: I find her alive and well in the kitchen, curls arranged sloppily, cheeks freckled, shoulders pink, wearing a tank top and cutoffs and red flip-flops, hunched bored in front of a frying pan. It’s all for me, this tedious routine. She could’ve been a nuclear physicist, a powerhouse attorney, a mountaineer. Her intelligence and ingenuity are proven on a daily basis—she knows all the Jeopardy! answers, can disassemble and reconstruct a toaster oven in under five minutes, is steely in the face of injuries, crafty in the face of collection agencies—yet for me she accepts the indignities of raising an ungrateful sixteen-year-old, the stultifying grind of an insulting desk job. Despite these sacrifices, I won’t eat. How can I? The room twitches with menace. Grease pops in the pan; it will burn holes in her ever-watchful eyes and she will flail, and I do not have to list the number of sharp objects waiting for her on the counter.
I choke down the eggs. I watch her as she cleans up. She raises the edge of her cutoffs to brood over cellulite. Contorted in this way I can see the unnatural groove that passes through the curvatures of her left ear. It is a wound she suffered from my father. I don’t know my father and she has offered neither information nor emotion. The injury is part of a puzzle I’ve been too self-absorbed to wonder about, the true origin of her sleepless nights. The pitiful little I know is this: to draw attention away from the disfigurement, she stretches her lobes with extravagant earrings; those she wears now are turquoise with mini-dangles that swirl and catch themselves in knots. So this is how she dies. Today’s chores include mowing the grass along the building’s front lawn (for a few bucks off our rent), changing the oil in the car, and cleaning dust from fans that over the summer have caked. It seems inconceivable that such trifling devices could take down my invincible guardian, but they will. Mower, car, fan: each has spinning components that will snatch dangling earrings, gears that will pinch the skin, then shudder against live meat before self-lubricating with blood. I have time to disable only one device, and the choice immobilizes me.
She’s unrelenting. As usual. Already she’s down the stairs seeking my dirty laundry. There is a rip in the carpet on the third stair, wide enough to snare a flip-flopped toe. When she somehow survives, she is out the door, laundry basket on her hip, shouting to me that I need to get off my butt and practice my trumpet. The door bangs shut. Outside there is nothing but trouble. Strung-out punks with knives and a need. Gang members not caring who gets caught in the cross fire. There are a million ways to bite it in the big city, even if you’re as fearless as my mother. I lift my trumpet. The song I play will be her requiem.
I play poorly. My fingers stiffen in sympathy with the rigor mortis already setting her joints. I am one month away from beginning my junior year in high school, and this room of mine provides further proof that I am helpless without her as my vigilant protector. Tacked to my bulletin board are the past six years of straight As, a testament to her skillful badgering. Scattered around the room is evidence of too many weekends spent together playing board games. She should not have sheltered me so much. I try to get mad about it. It might make losing her a little bit easier.
The flops have been replaced with flats, the tank top with a blouse. I must leave the house. She says so. Summer is half over and my face, she says, looks like Wonder Bread. She is leaving, too—groceries don’t buy themselves. She moves fast, mirrored sunglasses planted, purse shouldered. I stand there in bare feet. This unstoppable force is my mother and I will never see her again. I need to thank her and tell her the truth: I love her. Her perfunctory smile tells me she has other things on her mind. She is saying something about how I should shut the windows before it rains, and do I want Thai later, no, no—let’s do Vietnamese. It is food I will never taste. The space between us plummets and