I hated your carrot salad, how you dressed me
in sweet manners. I picture you standing beneath
your high-strung pot rack, hands fluttering over the stove. 
At breakfast, you opened vocabulary books, 
offered me words to use in sentences. You lit 
the candles. I won the third-grade spelling bee for exterior. 
I think you had an inkling I’d become a writer. I was one 
of those kids: nervous introvert, meaning outsider. 
I believed it your fault. Now, I’m a mother and see 
how easily children lay blame. Don’t they fill you 
with wonder? you say when I come home. Your fingers 
unpetal to show me chives from the garden, 
your cheeks suffused with light. Then you are off, 
swishing past drawers that once held yearbooks 
and your vocabulary stash. The floor squeaks 
the treble register of your feet. Emptied of you, 
the living room hums uncertainly, like the radiator 
at school on the day girls took turns complaining 
about their moms. Bitch, sneered one as she jawed her gum. 
I considered you at home scrubbing dishes, indulging
your irritating need to tidy my room. I stood apart 
from the other girls, knowing nothing bad to say 
about you and at least three ways to say it.