I kept walking.
This is what I want to say about that day at lunch, the hour I spent in the cafeteria with my tray and my notebook and the accumulated weight of the morning: not reacting did not mean not feeling. My mother had taught me those were different things. She had taught me that control is not the same as absence, that what you choose not to show is still something you’re carrying, and that the carrying is its own kind of work.
I carried it.
I thought about calling her. She had a cell phone but it was often off — the nature of her work meant communication windows were irregular and unpredictable, and I had learned not to expect her to pick up. I thought about the photograph in my notebook, the one of her on the runway in the flight suit with one hand resting near the cockpit ladder and her dark sunglasses on and her expression that looked to other people like blankness but that I knew was the face she made when she was completely in her element. She never liked posing for photographs because posing required you to perform something, and my mother did not perform things.
