We wind our way along the canal ribboned with trees shifting into fall brilliance, sky an azure stillness and everything turning.
Before I begin this chapter of my life, Sandy should know about my past.
The face is friendly, with slender, graceful arms that I can’t see moving.
There wasn't enough entertainment when I was growing up.
My mother tells me her new boyfriend calls her every day at seven.
Mile eighteen. My body speaks to me; it tells me to stop.
Lying still, curled tight, I try to calm my frenetic mind by focusing on the inaudible breaths of my two young sons asleep down the hall.
Just a few short months into a makeshift marriage—husband again seeing the woman he promised he’d left behind—I sat in our ’67 Plymouth . . .
Your father is in good health? my doctor inquires, updating my family medical history.
My mom and I made the trek to downtown Nairobi to buy a wrought-iron lamp to hang above her dining room table.
Everyone, including white people, sees it.
I call to see if you’d like my mother’s diamonds.
The closest I ever got to New York was Las Vegas. Nearly two hundred feet atop the roof of a casino.
Another girl brings him to the party. We yell Surprise! and they beam at each other.
Three blocks away, my husband and I hear the rolling, roaring, rushing of 3,160 tons of water plummeting over a cliff on the US-Canada border.
I press my fingers against the foggy glass, soaking in the last lingering glows.
You lift a fold of wrapping paper, winter blue with curls of silver, peeling back the foil with more care than it deserves.
I stood at the mirror and traced my childhood with my finger along the white roots that appeared in my part.
We walk through cathedrals of chalk. The place is wild and unfamiliar, although only a few hours from home.
When I was six, the story of Mom hopping a train to NYC at sixteen was legend.