Three Mothers
A Prologue
This is the opening of a longer piece I have been writing quietly.
It lives somewhere between memory and fiction, though I am not sure those are different things when you are the one remembering.
I am sharing it as it is.
“Mother.”
Fifty years had passed since I last heard his voice, yet I knew it before he finished the word. Not the clear, ringing voice of the nine-year-old boy I had lost, but something lower now, gravelly, worn down by a life I had not seen. My heart seized in my chest, almost leaping out of my body.
Then something colder followed. I had prayed to hear that word again, spoken by that son. I had built a life around it, the same way I measured flour and water each morning, steady and exact, so nothing would fall apart.
But sitting there in the dark that had become my world, where morning and night had long since stopped meaning anything, I was not ready for what came after.
For half a century, I had lived on a single hope: that the world had not hardened him. I fed that belief like a fire I could not let go out. When everything around me was rigid and cold and hard, he would remain soft. Now he stood in front of me, and hope was no longer enough.
My fingers trembled as I lifted them, slowly, into the space between us. For a moment, there was nothing. And my heart stopped. My worst fear settled in: that he believed I had not wanted him, that he hated me.
Then I felt a rough, large hand take hold of mine. I had carried the memory of his small fingers for so long, sticky with pine sap, smelling of river mud and the fish he was never meant to catch alone, always slipping into mine. But this hand was large, the skin thick and rough, the calluses catching against my palm. It spoke of work I had not seen. Of a life I had not known. I did not recognize it. How did I not know my own son?
I wanted to bolt from the bed and run through prairie grass with my sisters, our knees pumping, the wind pushing the blades low, the sharp sting against our shins. Before age had taken my eyes and my knees. Before life had taken everything.
So instead, I held still.
Then his hand tightened around mine, and his thumb moved slowly, back and forth across my knuckles. A sob rose in my throat, but the moment was too quiet for a sound. So I swallowed it, dry and cloying like stale corn cake. Every second was the most precious of my entire life. I wouldn’t waste a single one.
The tears slipped down the sides of my face, pooling and filling my ears, dulling everything until all I could feel was his hand and his thumb softly moving. And I squeezed it, the heavy, callused hand of my son.