Pieces of My Mother Read Online Free PDF Page A

stuff? It’s bad for you, Mom,” says Jamie. Jamie knows because he’s tasted it before. He says it tastes worse than cough medicine.
    â€œNo, it’s good for me on days like this. Believe me, it’s goddamn good. Your dad is going to have a fit when he sees those stitches in Melissa’s head.”
    I steal a sideways glance at my mom. I am looking for something in her face that tells me she is going to come back and stay with us, but I can’t tell.
    When we pull up alongside our house, Dad’s waiting in the front yard for us. Jamie and Eden and I stay in the car as we watch our mom get out and stand in the driveway. As she talks to our dad, her body sways in the breeze and her eyes search the ground as if she’s lost something. They start arguing.
    â€œIt wasn’t my fault…”
    â€œIt’s never your fault,” he says. “Get out of the car, kids.”
    We don’t move, terrified to make things worse.
    My dad confronts her: “Have you been drinking ?”
    â€œNo,” she shouts. I get lost in the argument’s details but remember the last thing Mom says to him: “ One at a time. I can’t do all three kids, you understand? If you want me to show up—then one at a time.”
    The skin on my head stings, expands, then feels like it might rip open any second.
    I look at Eden and then at Jamie and then at myself in the small mirror. Eden is cranking his pinky finger into his ear, searching for wax. Jamie spits a loogie onto the sidewalk. I lift my hand to feel the knots of black thread.
    One at a time. How will she decide which one of us to pick?

NOW
brown speckled hen
    The sound of rain wakes me on my first morning at my mom’s house in Olympia. It’s not a hard or heavy downpour, but the kind of intermittent rain that sounds like someone is tapping at the window.
    I pull on an oversized sweater I picked up at Goodwill and packed at the last minute. As I descend the stairs, I wonder if my mother will recognize me today or if I will ever hear her voice again.
    Outside the kitchen window, I see my aunt tossing compost scraps to the chickens and ducks. They scramble over moldy fruit rinds, burnt toast, and bruised apples. My mom’s husband, Kim, has brewed a pot of coffee and is already headed out the driveway with a truck full of Washington apples to be sold at the local farmers market. They married thirteen years ago. The wedding took place here in Olympia, out in their garden, when I was three weeks pregnant with my son Dominic.
    Kim is the strong, silent type. Smart, kind, and able to conceal his emotions. The opposite of my father, who always wore his opinions and emotions on the tip of his Irish nose. Since my mom has been sick, I’ve witnessed Kim’s affection for her. He stirs the cream and sugar into her coffee just the way she likes it. I’ve seen him enough over the past year and watched his large, callused hands feeding her spoonfuls of Cream of Wheat and gifting her with exquisite pieces of jewelry and tin boxes of licorice pastilles. I’m thankful for this.
    Alone, I walk into my mom’s room on the first floor and sit down next to her. I watch her breathe in and out as she sleeps. Her hands move slightly, rubbing the edge of a blanket between her fingers like babies sometimes do. Her fingers look as if they are dreaming.
    I love her hands in this moment. They bring me back to the early days of standing over my newborn baby boy in complete awe. I would often put my fingers near his lips to make sure he was still breathing. I needed to be there every time he opened his eyes from a nap. If I heard a cry coming from his crib, I would sprint into his room certain he was filled with panic—panic and fear that his mother had abandoned him.
    Whenever I went to the basement to fold laundry during his nap time, I couldn’t stay more than a few minutes without running back upstairs to check on him. I