Chapter 14: Ordinary Months
Spring returned to Mom’s garden before it returned to my nervous system.
We planted tomatoes again. The teenager from last summer came back without being asked and refused payment until Mom forced a folded bill into his hand. Neighbors who had heard only fragments of the story offered rhubarb and silence—the good kind. Church remained a place I did not pretend to reclaim; faith, if I needed it, did not require sharing a pew with people who had prayed for a narrative instead of a fractured rib.
I dated no one. Curiosity from well-meaning friends met a boundary that was not bitterness, only bandwidth. Noah—no, that was another story’s name. My life had room for duty, for Mom’s orthopedics follow-ups, for long runs on post roads where the only voice in my ear was breath. Enough.
Daniel was not in this story. Ryan was a decree and a criminal record and a man who had stepped on a gold rim in the dark. I practiced speaking of him in the past tense until the tense stuck.
On a Sunday in May, Mom walked the whole garden path without a cane. She paused at the fence and said, “He didn’t take this.”
May you like
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
We drank iced tea on the step. A car backfired on the next block and I did not reach for a phantom bat. Progress was a nervous system relearning that not every sharp sound was 9:30 p.m. at a kitchen door.
