A wrist with a bracelet that wasn’t hospital plastic. “Thanks, brother,” she wrote once, as if it were a joke only she could hear. “You always come through.”
My money had become their lifestyle, and the only reason I hadn’t seen it was because I’d been looking through the lens they handed me: sickness, crisis, family.
On that porch, seeing her skin glowing in the sun, I felt twenty years of life rearrange themselves inside my chest. Every skipped meal. Every cancelled vacation.
Every argument with my husband that ended in quiet resentment because we were always “waiting until after Shell got better.” Every time I watched my friends’ kids grow from photos while I told myself I’d be next. Shell leaned forward, delighted. “Say something,” she teased.
“Aren’t you mad? Aren’t you going to cry?”
My mother’s hand fluttered toward her chest as if rehearsing concern. “Be nice to your brother, honey.
He paid for all this.”
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