Her mother doesn’t speak again, and the kitchen lapses into silence. Sam can feel herself tensing up, her muscles turning stiff, her posture curving in the way that she always did when she was a child, making herself smaller, giving herself less room.
“Do you need help?” Sam asks, watching as her mother switches from pounding meat to preparing an egg batter.
“Get me some flour,” her mother says.
Sam obeys, pours a bit of the flour into a bowl, and then heads back to the pantry to fetch a bag of baked breadcrumbs. They fall again into silence.
At last, her mother says, “You didn’t go to Berlin.”
Sam frowns. “I did.”
“I checked your itinerary online,” her mother replies. “It didn’t match what you gave me.”
Sam relaxes a little. Is that all? “The itineraries change all the time. We had a delayed flight.”
“That Berlin flight was canceled the day you left. There were no other flights out to Berlin until twenty-four hours later, and yet you still arrived overseas around the same time.”
Now Sam can feel a slight twinge of annoyance. “I think you just got the dates wrong.”
Her mother doesn’t say anything for a moment. She dips the meat in the egg batter, then into the flour. “I did find a match for one that arrived around the same time that you landed,” she says. “But it wasn’t for a flight to Berlin.”
“Mom.”
“It was to Londinium.”
Sam sighs. “You need to stop tracking my behavior like I’m a teenager.”
At that, her mother stops in the middle of her meal preparation to look up at her daughter. A buzzing has begun in the back of Sam’s mind.She knows.
“Where did you really go?” her mother asks her.
Now Sam is getting annoyed. “Ididwork in Berlin—we just had to travel around a bit.”
Her mother frowns at her. “Why did you lie about it?”
“About what?”
“About your travel.”
Sam turns it around. “Well, what about you? You once said you called my college about my record because you were filing paperwork. What paperwork? Or did you just lie about that as an excuse to dig into my business?”
“And did you ever follow up with your college about that?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m an adult now and I don’t need to report my every move back to you.”
Perhaps there’s too much venom in Sam’s words, because it surprises even her. Her mother quiets a little after this, and the two of them fall backinto silence. The oil in the pot is hot now. Her mother puts the chicken in, and the sound of the sizzle fills the kitchen.
“You’re doing very well for yourself,” her mother tells her after a while. An olive branch.
Sam leans against the counter and tries to calm her voice back down. “I’ve been working hard,” she says, and it’s the truth. “It’s what you’ve told me my entire life. If I reach for the stars, I can make things happen. Isn’t that right? That’s what you’ve done. Well, here are the stars.” Her voice softens, and she adds, “Do you like the house?” She realizes she’s already asked this.
“I love it,” her mother responds again. The words are hollow and tired.
“You can move in anytime. We can make it easy. Do you want help?”
