Winter 2023

We left the park at the end of the street and headed home to finish our school assignments before dinner. Mom’s bright face, waiting at the screen door, made the nights seem less frightening. Weekends passed too quickly. On Saturdays, Mom usually asked Dad for five donation dollars. Sunday mornings, she’d root around for the tithing envelope stuffed somewhere in her exploding bag before we packed into the station wagon bound for church. Upon arriving, my siblings and I jammed ourselves into a pew, like six little ducks in a row flapping silent wings for our mom’s heavenly choir solos.

You remember, the Italian place across from the Park Plaza Hotel? I don’t know how we could afford it— spending our car payment on a single meal. Maybe I had just gotten a bonus.

2.

Pack your child’s lunch—a sandwich made from soft bread, baby carrots, apple slices, a piece of chocolate candy. Imagine the crusts of bread strewn across the floor, trampled under escaping feet. Wince when you take a bite of carrot and hear the snap-crack echo through your kitchen.

On a good day, the one-way trip takes two hours and change, on a bad day, four or more. It’s taxing emotionally, too. Her health issues are many—COPD necessitating 24/7 oxygen, kidney failure requiring three times a week dialysis, congestive heart failure, incessant infections around a recent surgical site, and more. Due to Covid restrictions I can’t enter the rehab facility, so I’ve planned this visit to coincide with warmish early winter weather on a non- dialysis day. I’ve stowed a camping chair in the trunk. We will visit through the window.

Is it the curved U placed just under the nose, or the hills of an M produced by the eyes? But those other voices—of nurses, friends, co-workers, strangers, family—don’t seem to shush.

Not as soft as the sand, though it holds sand in tiny clumps along the part. The bottom half blonde and beachy. The top half natural with springy silver strands urgent through thickly chunked bangs that I’ve been cutting myself. It’s been a year since I visited a salon, had a cut, indulged in color. For most of my life I cut my own hair. I kept it short after high school. I layered. I fringed. I lined my bangs parallel with and just below my brows. I colored from a box. I could do that. Why pay fifty bucks for someone else to do it.

Her booth, decorated with seashells, mirrors, and scarves, is in Emancipation Park crowded with Carnival food stands and steel-drum bands. I’m only vaguely aware of the Calypso music, the swarm of dancers. The fortune teller, in a red madras dress, sets down her palm-leaf fan. Bending close, she traces the lines on my sweating hand as the blue scarves billow in trade winds. Her predictions are soft blossoming promises—sweet love, sweet marriage, sweet babies. In fourth grade, I am young enough to believe her foretelling, to believe the story she tells is my story.