At two o clock the next afternoon, I sat in my mother’s living room on Cherry Lane, watching her organize her collection of old local history books. The room smelled of lavender and old paper.
My mother, Eleanor, was sixty-eight years old, and she lived in a small brick cottage exactly two miles from our ranch house on Maple Street. She adjusted her reading glasses by the bridge, pushing them slightly higher on her nose before sliding a heavy leather-bound volume into a gap on the third shelf.
She was organizing her shelves of historical biographies, alphabetically by author, a task she had started three Tuesdays ago. She had exactly ninety-four books left to catalog.
“You are holding your head to the side again, Lyla,” she said without turning around.
“The straps are digging in,” I admitted, my hand going to my left shoulder. “I had to put gauze under them this morning because the skin was raw and bleeding.”
My mother stopped her work and turned to face me. She adjusted her glasses again, her blue eyes sharp behind the lenses. Her fingers were dry and smelled of lemon furniture polish.
“Listen to me closely, Lyla,” she said. “Your health has to come before Gerald’s budget concerns. A marriage is not a business partnership where one person gets to veto the other person’s physical survival.”
She walked to the kitchen and returned with a steaming cup of chamomile tea, setting it on the small table beside my chair. The tea was hot, three dollars a box from the local grocery, but the warmth in the mug was the only comfort I had felt all day.
“He is worried about the garage roof,” I said, staring into the amber liquid.
“He is worried about control,” she said, her voice quiet and firm. “You need to stand firm on this. If you do not schedule that consultation now, you never will.”
“He said we should wait until winter,” I said.
