I’m ten minutes late to the interview to be my mother’s daughter. I’m confident, as her actual daughter, her only child, that I’ll have a leg up.

We didn’t wear swimsuits because the water was supposed to be all gone, and who’d want to swim in dead-ten-year-old-kid soup anyway?

You used to cook for four, now after the kids have gone to college, and the divorce is finalized, and you and your husband, you keep forgetting to put the ex in front of this yoking title, have downgraded to shared-walled duplexes.

Because the internet said, children who lose a parent to suicide are more likely to die from suicide.

They sit in camping chairs, at the edge of the lake, the water murky as they wait for the dark to crown the night and the fireworks to start.

The old lady raising her arm at the Co-op bus stop has a jaunty feather in her hat, like William Tell.

When you called me to tell me about Charlie, I was weeding the garden, my knees pressed into the soil and the sun sharp on my neck.

You gave up chocolate for Lent but it didn’t take. You aren’t good at saying no. Hungry girls want everything.

In the museum of trauma, you stand back at least ten feet from each painting. Out of respect for other patrons mainly and the tacit rules of viewing.