I hear my mom howling over Patsy Cline’s croon. Her shoulders are shaking. Her mouth is all twisted. I’m face down on the carpet, the fibres sticking to my eyelashes like the Velcro on my shoes. The howling stops. When I look up and see her eyebrows buckle, I know she knows what he told me not to say: Dad’s got a secret family with my grade one teacher. She pulls me off the floor. Runs a scruffy pink face cloth under the bathroom faucet and says, “Put this on your face so he won’t see that we’ve been crying.”
Meli Walker is an arts worker, facilitator, and graduate of SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. She loves supporting writers in the Writerly Love community.