waking up
Fresh morning and the coffee steams; my pen scrolls over a page in my journal. Out on the porch, by flickering candlelight and the dim glow of twinkle lights, I list gifts–morning stillness, early light, sleep-rumpled skin, a bed piled high with quilts—while the birds sing. Those birds, they’re only this loud at dawn. I pause, looking out past grids of screen, trying to see them.
The door opens with a click and the faint groan of hinges. Riley steps outside, tucking bed-tossed hair behind her ears. I grin; when she was a girl, I read her a book called The Tangle Fairies because of those morning knots. The ghost line of Riley’s pillow still creases her cheek. I drop the pen, standing for a hug, reaching with my arms. She inclines her head, bending a little because she’s taller, and presses that warm cheek against me. Her brassy hair falls loose over my shoulder. “Mom Jones?” She says, her voice still clogged with dreams.
“Mmmhmm?” I stop time just a moment with my close-wrapped arms.
Riley asks me about a lady we know, someone never much interested in friendship, someone who nods politely but never speaks. “I haven’t seen her in a while,” Riley observes softly. Riley works her mouth like she’s tasting the day; I can feel her ready to yawn. “Is she okay?”
I rub my hand over Riley’s warm back, patting a little the way I did when she was small. I tell her what I know, which isn’t much; she’s asking about a very private person, someone who feels closed to me. Riley murmurs acknowledgement, standing as I release her. She turns, as if drifting toward her breakfast, but stops. As if reminded by the one, she asks me of another, someone similarly distant, someone who has probably only given Riley the barest notice–a tight nod, a strained smile. In their interactions, Riley appears overeager, as though the cheery, boisterous volume of Riley’s voice tries too hard to balance the chill. “How is she doing?” Riley asks. “I haven’t seen her very much lately either.”
I touch the journal with my hand, feeling my entire body orient toward it while my heart calls me to be still, to pay attention to my daughter, to understand the gift of her questions. “I really don’t know,” I say lamely. “I’m not one of the people she talks to.”
Riley nods, turning again toward the door. I pick up my pen. Her hand on the knob, she stops. “Mom Jones?”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Are their husbands with them?”
“Yes.” I answer definitively, imagining the men, neither one well known to me, both now actually bent and gray and struggling to walk, but still moving, still driving cars, still fumbling with keys at the front door.
“And their husbands take care of them?”
“Yes, I’m sure they do, sweet girl.”
She considers this and nods, stepping up on the threshold. “Good,” she says.
Turning again to my journal, I write her name, treasuring this: Riley, the way she loves.
Hinges creak and I look up. Riley stands again in the doorway, holding an empty coffee mug, the carafe poised in her other hand. “Mom Jones, when will I see them again?”
“I honestly don’t know, sweet girl.”
“And their husbands are with them?” I nod, and she continues speaking, frozen in the doorway with the coffee. “I hope they’re taking really good care of them.”
“I would expect that they are, but I hope so too,” I say. The light finally falls on my face, bolder now as the morning blooms. “You know, you could write them notes and tell them you’re thinking about them and that you miss them.”
Riley smiles, pleased. “I’m on it, Mom Jones.” On comes out forceful and determined, written and re-written, engraved, like her memory. It’s the first thing she’s said that sounds fully awake. And I realize, as she returns to the kitchen to fill her mug, that most often I wake up thinking of me, and she wakes up thinking of others.
