Chapter 9: Good Morning, Meg

"What did you call me?"

"Meg," my mother said. "That's your name, isn't it?"

She looked at my face and her own face softened.

"Oh, honey. Come here."

She held me in the middle of the lobby with the bolts open and the sun coming up pink over the ice.

I don't cry in front of people.

I cried into my mother's shoulder until I couldn't breathe, and Neil went and stood at the window with his back to us.

Upstairs in 214, she made her own bed with hospital corners.

She hadn't made a bed in two years.

She dressed herself in her good blue sweater and found her earrings in the dish without asking me where they were.

"Merry Christmas," she said. "We didn't make tourtière last night. That's the first year we've missed it since you were born."

"You remember tourtière."

"I remember everything this morning." She laughed. "Isn't that the strangest thing?"

I sat her at the mirror to brush her hair.

I had done it every morning for three years, and I didn't know how to stop.

I drew the brush through it, and it fell into a part on the right.

I stopped with the brush in the air.

"You've parted it on the left my whole life," I said.

She met my eyes in the mirror.

"I like it this way now. New year, new part."

"It isn't the new year."

"Then I'm early."

I put the brush down and took her hands.

My father's ring was on her right hand.

"Your ring's on the wrong hand," I said.