I slipped out of bed. I pulled on yesterday’s sweatshirt from the chair in the corner. Gray, with a coffee stain on the cuff. I tiptoed across the old wooden floor, avoiding the board by the door that creaks, and I crept downstairs.
The house was still dark.
Outside the big kitchen window, the lake was a flat sheet of black glass. No wind. No birds yet. The only sound was the old refrigerator humming in the corner of my mother’s kitchen.
My mother’s kitchen.
That mattered to me a lot more that morning than it had a week before.
My mom has a little place by the lake.
It’s not fancy. It’s a two-story cedar cabin with a green metal roof and a screened porch and a wooden deck that looks out over the water. It has three bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom that everybody fights over. The kitchen still has the orange countertops from 1978. The couch in the living room is older than I am.
