The smell of bacon reached the kitchen before I did, which meant my mother had been up for at least twenty minutes, which meant she had been awake long enough to form a plan, and the plan, as usual, was not for me.crsaid
I stood at the kitchen island in my scrubs, car keys not on the hook where I had left them the night before, and took the kind of breath that is less about oxygen and more about deciding whether this morning was going to cost me something I could not afford to spend. My shift started in forty minutes. The hospital was twenty-two minutes away with good traffic. I had already done the math, which is what nurses do: we run the numbers before we run out of options.
My mother, Sandra, was standing at the stove with her back to me, constructing a breakfast sandwich with the focused attention she reserved for things she actually cared about. Extra bacon, the kind she bought specifically for Ethan and kept on the second refrigerator shelf, the one with the silent understanding that it was not for me. A perfectly fried egg, the white set and the yolk barely trembling, the egg she made for her twenty-four-year-old son who was currently producing a sound from the back bedroom that was less sleeping and more a continuous announcement of his presence in the world.
