My Mother Recognized My Fake Fiance From an Autumn Night Five Years Ago
I stared at my mother’s wrist, my thumb turning my silver ring faster now.
I remembered that winter five years ago very differently.
I had come home from college for the Thanksgiving holiday, just three weeks after her accident on Oakridge Road.
My mother had met me at the door, and she had been wearing nothing more than a thin, beige elastic brace on her wrist.
She had spent that entire afternoon in the kitchen, carving the turkey and lifting heavy iron pans from the oven without a single flinch of pain.
There had been no plaster cast, and certainly no year of grueling physical therapy.
I looked at my father, expecting him to correct her, but his face remained a blank mask of dry wrinkles, his eyes fixed on the floorboards.
“The healing process cannot be rushed,” my mother said, taking a delicate sip of her coffee. “But we must look to the future now. Let us put this unpleasant business behind us for the sake of the holiday.”
“A clean slate,” Christopher said, his voice level and flat.
