The moment Adam and his friends take the stage, their faces lighten with sudden recognition, as though with the stage lights beaming and the violins singing and the performance blooming, they have all at the same moment just realized they can dance.   Their mouths relax into broad grins, and gradually their lips slide apart, and […]

Josh and Riley bend over the island in the kitchen, a wedding planner splayed open in front of them.  Riley’s hand bobs over the cover page, where she carefully writes their names, not formally, the way I would have, just Riley and Josh. In truth, almost everything about this is different for them than it […]

Beside me, my phone vibrates like a bee trapped in a jar, zooming frantically from side to side, beating its wings against the glass.  I lift it and flip it over so that the screen blinks on and I can see that the vibrating heyheyheyhey is not the emergency I had imagined it could be […]

“Mom Jones, how’s your voice today?” Riley asks, pajama-clad and still rumpled with sleep, leaning against the doorjamb in my office, one hand solidly planted on a curvy hip.  She straightens, gathering her hair into a ponytail with her other hand, flipping it absently as she watches my face. “It’s still gone,” I croak, only […]

“Mom Jones?”  Riley’s voice stops me mid-confession. Jones, what Riley calls “our funny last name,” is a silly joke from years ago that eventually became a sign of Riley’s affection. I look at her, startled out of a full-on run to Jesus.  In the space of the last hour, pride and comparison, mistaken identity and […]

In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness […]

On Saturday morning, Kevin makes a sticky note schedule for Adam, then takes a picture of it and sends the picture as a text.  Roughly sketched, it says, we will go to the grocery store, and then we will go for a hike.  He leaves the actual note pressed on the edge of Adam’s favorite […]

Josh hands Riley a gift bag, jolly red and green, plump with surprises and spilling over with tissue, and we all sit forward, anticipating grace. All through Advent, I have been thinking:  On the surface of things, at least according to the understanding of their time, Mary and Joseph should never have married.  I’ve been […]

I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting.  Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God […]

Home from carpool, I pull the wet, clean clothes from our washer and toss them, with a shake, into the dryer.  I can hear Riley in the kitchen, her voice bright and morning-new, counting to Christmas.  “Just 18 more,” she says, with enthusiasm, but I push the button on the machine and lose the rest […]