“Do you still love Dad?”

Flat blue eyes and brown once blonde hair, dry and dead from too many curlings (too many attempts at looking beautiful) meet mine in the mirror. There is a mistake in those eyes, an uncertain silence my mother is unwilling to let hang there, but neither is she willing to break.

I lay beside her on the bed she and my dad share, my spread-eagled body on a worn blue-grey coverlet with white flowers, an armoire two feet from my toes. I stretch toward it, but not too hopefully. I can see my mother only by looking in the mirror, her forty-three year old body set against a back door made of sliding glass. (The wrinkles are showing on your face, in your eyes, Mom. You’re getting old - does Dad see it?) She drops her eyes, still silent, but I don’t press her.

I could tell her so many things to make her speak: the words I’ve read in my older sister’s journal, entries proving I’m not the only one to feel this way (my younger siblings are gloriously blind to it still, if not my younger sister, then my brother. He is content to make my Dad happy, a typical idolatry, and he’s a boy besides that, doomed to short-sightedness). I could tell her what Dad’s sarcastic comments really mean, or why she clings to religion as she does.

(Life can never satisfy us. People can never love us as we need to be loved, and we must depend on something…. We must pretend - pathetically, foolishly, perhaps admirably - that things are still alright.)

“Mom?”

There are footsteps down the hall, and my mother looks up, pretending not to hear me. She slides off the bed and checks her face in the mirror, knowing there’s no point in trying any more.

“I should start getting dinner ready.”

I trace the white flowers on the coverlet as she leaves the room, one white loop after another, four white petals. Four leaf clovers, nearly - I thought we were lucky, because all around us families were getting divorced, getting separated, and here we were, still strong…. And how long will we last? How long before this worn out thing falls to pieces - or will we keep stumbling on, stumbling on, until we die?