The Love That Opened the Door

Hurricane, West Virginia

Scene 1: I was nine years old that Fri-day night. We were about to sit down to dinner, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. It was another of my mother’s “blue days,” as we called them, when she seemed to be only a shadow of herself. In truth, these blue days often stretched into weeks.

“Should we wait on Jimmy?” my sister-in-law asked. Jimmy was my dad.

“No,” my mother said. “He can eat whenever.”

On blue days, my mother didn’t really react to anything. She didn’t seem to care that my father worked late and usually holed up in the basement after he came home. When the anger rose from her, it scared me.

My brother, who had left home as soon as he was old enough, quickly gestured for us to take our places at the table. He was 10 years older than me, and I felt so alone in this house without him.

We stared at our plates waiting for my mother to say something. Not grace. We didn’t do that. Then the phone rang. My mother got up