Word Count: 430
I counted only five stars in the western sky this morning, the rest lost to the reach of the slow rising sun. They cluster together as if there is safety in number, as if they could stand by in the safe glow of the moon. It doesn’t work that way.
We were just children, the oldest fifteen, the baby, two years. The moon was our mother, our father, the angry flame of the sun. Yet we survived, if dysfunctional, to grow into some form of adults.
I look at the faces in the soft glow of the candlelit table. A giant turkey, the glimmer of cranberry sauce catching the light. Conversations are discordant hums but the overall image is one of a family. There’s Lucy, the oldest, who saw more than the rest of us knew. Her pinched mouth holds back more than polite talk, more than the baby, now twenty-four, would ever have guessed since our father died when she was ten. She experienced only the sad illness of his last years and he’d mellowed, his strength drained, his anger turned into mere grumpy self-pity. But each of us had memories of dinners that exploded like land mines. A word, a look, a childish fidget that lit a fuse in his head.
This is the first family dinner without my mother seated at the head of the table. Why had we never questioned her, never sought explanation, never accused her of complicity in the fear and noise that was home? I think of her fragile nature, of her sparrow quick hopping about, of the skeletal frame of her that elicited pity rather than real understanding.
Yet here we are, free to examine, free to express our realities and still, there’s a cloud that covers the room like a fog to silence emotion. We pretend it didn’t exist, this past that we shared. We make small talk of small rare memories, like the time mom forgot to make gravy and forget how she sprang up and boiled skin and wings in a rush with water and flour, crying over the stove. Shaking with expectation. All that buried deep in the closets while the turkey shines in a glorious display of plenty. A delicious aroma that permeates the cloud, drenches it and all of us with selective recall.
Smiles and hugs at the door, then the silence of being alone. In the house, in each car, in each mind driving away from more than the past and desperately creating a new present that allows us each to be happy.
