I answered when I could.
My mother came home in December.
She came through the door the way she always came through the door, leaving her work somewhere between the base and our front step, arriving as the version of herself that asked about homework and made rice the way I liked it. She was tired in the specific way she was always tired, the kind of tired that required days to fully surface from.
The night she arrived, I made dinner for her instead.
I was not a good cook — I was fifteen and had learned to make three things and this was the easiest of them — but I made it and set the table and she sat down and we ate, and she asked about school the way she always asked about school.
I told her about the semester.
Not the assembly part — she knew that. The rest of it. The things that had happened after, the small shifts in how rooms felt when I walked into them, the boys who had apologized in the specific sideways manner of teenagers who have decided apology is necessary but are not entirely sure how to execute it. The girl who had come up to me the week after and said, quietly: “I didn’t laugh. I just want you to know I didn’t laugh.”
