When I was little, maybe four, maybe five, I had a butterscotch coloured mouse and I would cuddle it and play with it and carry it with me around our house in the pocket of my shirt. It would sit on my shoulders sometimes and make a nest in my hair and I could hear it hiding and chewing and squeaking a little. It had a cage with a blue ceramic bowl for its pellets and a water bottle that I decorated with stickers. I didn’t play with it when I was alone though, I wasn’t old enough. My mother watched me.

Until she didn’t, until one day she wasn’t there and I got out the mouse and played with it and it bit me so hard that I squeezed it and it went limp in my hands and I put it back inside its cage and left it there and waited for it to wake up. Of course it didn’t, and we buried it under the plum tree in our front yard. The whole summer I watched the plums on that tree fatten, turning from green to dark purple to almost black. In the late summer, when we ate them, they were the most delicious plums we’d ever tasted. The best that had ever grown on that old tree. Perhaps my mother and I decided then that we were forgiven and who anyway is to say forgiveness isn’t a thing we all deserve? The plums were so good that we ate them for months, in pies, in jam, and fresh too, all on their own, sitting at the base of the tree with the juice running down our cheeks, our chins, our arms.

It was getting late. I tried to hold dinner so we could all eat together but the pasta was going hard on the top and grey at the bottom while we waited and the sauce was bubbling away to nothing on the back of the stove. In the end it did, bubble away to nothing, and the tomatoes burned and stuck to the bottom of the pot. I gave E a slimy plate of cold pasta and hoped that M wouldn’t come home before everything could be cleaned up, the pot scrubbed, dinner cleared away.

At least we could still make the cookies. It was my mother’s recipe, the cookie dough, which she had gotten from her mother, so there were always comparisons, glances, the taking of tiny bites, the saying of nice things. Only I was the only one here now making it. I pulled the dough out of the refrigerator and E jumped up, greedy for it, grabbing at me at the bowl all at once and this was of course really such a wonderful thing, that she was happy, jumping. I jumped too a little bit to show that I thought this was all wonderful. We rolled the dough out into little balls and I let her press them into any shape that she wanted to.