Nobody Was Laughing
My mother never talked about her work at home.
This is the first thing you need to understand, because it explains almost everything else — the secondhand sneakers, the quiet, the keeping my head down, the way I had learned to exist in rooms without taking up too much space. My mother was not home very much, and when she was, she was not a person who brought her work through the door with her. She left it somewhere between the base and our front step, deliberately, and
what came through the door was the version of her that asked about my homework and made the rice the way I liked it and fell asleep on the couch watching the nature channel because she was always, always tired.
I did not know, exactly, what she did.
I knew she flew. I had known that since I was small — the flight suit, the photograph she kept on the dresser of herself on a runway somewhere I couldn’t identify, the way she walked with a specific quality of controlled awareness
