Broken Wings

You laughed at me.

We were waiting for the kids to come out. Riley’s legs are so long that I automatically move from the front passenger seat to the back. This started back when he was a seventh-grader. He’s fifteen now, so I do this without thinking. It always makes Madison laugh.

Dad’s your chauffeur, Mom, she says.

Glad she sees you as the driver, always the driver, the caretaker.

We held our Starbucks cups aloft in the fading light, flecks of snow blanketing the ground, the trees that skirt the edge of the parking lot huddling closer, the steam curling into the air. We were waiting for Riley’s football practice and Maddie’s Student Council meeting to end.

You’re the driver, and you and I are a united team. That’s what they think. Good.

So we held our cups aloft, and as ever, I broke the silence. A thought had kept me awake the night before. It was more a phrase, the words creeping into my ears, roaring into the silence and then retreating, like waves against the shore.

Nancy always said you and I are very much alike, I said.

Nancy? Nancy who, you asked.

Nancy, the school psychologist. She worked at Pine Grove with us.

God, her. Alike? She thought that? In what way?

I don’t know. She never said.

You said nothing after this, just tapped the steering wheel in time to invisible music. I waited.

I think she was right.

Really?

Yeah. We’re two birds, you and I. With broken wings.

That’s when you laughed. I usually don’t mind your laugh, but this time, it was the version that mocked, that pierced my gut like a sword.

You laughed at this idea, eagle that you are. Or is it vulture? I still haven’t made up my mind.

Speak for yourself, you said. And nothing else.

I’d braced myself for the big argument. The one I’ve been waiting to have for sixteen years, the one that might’ve taught us both how to fight in just the right way.

I would’ve brought up how your father left you when you were five, how you watched him drive down the street, out of your life for good. How our mothers deposited both of us with our grandparents. The tears of skin and feather, the splinters of bone are identical.

But you’re an eagle, and I’m not.