Beckett
I find her where I always do.
My mother kneels on the damp grass, her hands sunk into the soil as she arranges flowers at the base of my father’s headstone. Pink and white today. Roses and lilies. She’s particular about it, always has been. Even now, she lines them up with the same care she used to give to Sunday dinners and pressed shirts.
I stop a few feet behind her and wait.
She doesn’t startle because she recognizes the sound of my footsteps.
“I thought I’d find you here,” I say.
The corner of her mouth curves as she looks up.After pressing the final stem into place, she brushes dirt from her palms, then sits back on her heels to study her work.
“I was going to call you,” she says. “But I knew you’d come eventually.”
I shove my hands into my pockets, step closer, and look down at the stone. His name still catches me every time. Familiar, but wrong.
“You didn’t have to come out alone,” I tell her.
She straightens with a small grunt, joints stiff in a way she pretends not to notice. “I wasn’t alone. He keeps me company.”
There’s no arguing with that.
When she’s finished, I offer my arm. She takes it, and we walk toward the bench beneath the oak tree. We’ve been doing this long enough that the rhythm feels practiced. I don’t know whether that’s comforting or unsettling, so I don’t dwell on it.
She lowers herself onto the bench with a sigh, smoothing her trousers before her hand comes to rest on my thigh. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
She tips her head, eyes narrowing. It’s the look that’s been dismantling my lies since I was six.
I exhale. “Let me take you for lunch?”
A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “That would be nice.”
We sit for a moment, listening to the wind through the trees, before she asks, “Work still stealing you away?”
I don’t answer right away because answering would mean telling her about the nights that bleed into mornings, about how time fractures in the trauma bay, about how bodies are broken open, and about how Imake decisions in seconds that echo for years. It would mean telling her how exhaustion settles into my bones, how some faces follow me home, and how some screams never quite leave.
Hers most of all.
Instead, I shrug and let the truth sit between us without giving it a name.
Work is blood under my nails and coffee gone cold.
It’s doing everything right and still losing people.
It’s doing everything wrong and saving them anyway.
It’s walking a line so thin it cuts.
“More like I let it,” I say eventually.
She hums. “I remember when you were little, you never wanted to nap, not even when you needed it.”
A laugh slips out of me. “I wish I still had the option to take a nap.”
Her mouth tilts. “Your father would be so proud of you.”
