still something you’re carrying, and that the carrying is its own kind of work.
I carried it.
I thought about calling her. She had a cell phone but it was often off — the nature of her work meant communication windows were irregular and unpredictable, and I had learned not to expect her to pick up. I thought about the photograph in my notebook, the one of her on the runway in the flight suit with one hand resting near the cockpit ladder and her dark sunglasses on and her expression
that looked to other people like blankness but that I knew was the face she made when she was completely in her element. She never liked posing for photographs because posing required you to perform something, and my mother did not perform things.
I thought about the assembly.
Heroes’ Week at Northwood always ended with an assembly — the whole school together in the auditorium, honored guests from the community, the kind of event that was mostly administrative but occasionally, when the guest list was right, became something else.
I had
