CHAPTER 31
My Mother’s Hands
Grief doesn’t come with a name tag. It doesn’t say, Hi, I’m what you feel when your mother buries you in the dirt behind your own house. It doesn’t come in pieces you can sort through or fold away neatly.
It comes like a storm: full-bodied, irrational, wet with memory and sharp at the edges.
I stood in the hallway for a long time after Glory left the room. The silence felt enormous. Like the air had been gutted and all that remained was the echo of her words:
“You were mine. And I couldn’t lose you again.”
As if that justified everything.
As if that made me less dead.
I stared down at my hands. They looked normal. Brown skin, chipped nail polish, the faint scar from when I sliced my finger on a broken Coke bottle in JSS3. But now they looked like impost
