“You!”

It was now Dorothy’s turn. Spending time with my mother meant there would be many places where you’d never want to go back.

“Such stupidity, never I see, to pu’ a stupid ban’age on de inside of a lip! You! You go to school to learn dat?! Even a child, she know a ban’age, it will not adhere onto de inside of a lip!”

“I was just trying,” retorted Dorothy with a sarcastic tone and a toss of her sleek blonde hair to the back, “is that okay with you??” She rolled her eyes again.

“You need try to know? Me, I don’ need try to know, I see, I use my brains, see!”

At this, my mother indignantly lifted the bloody bandage out of my mouth and let it drop into the waste basket.

“An’ you teach our chil’ren! Kate, honey, pu’ you shoes back on.”

“If it’s true you see so well, you might have noticed I’m a nurse, I don’t teach,” retorted Dorothy on our way out.

My mother was holding my hand, which made me feel like I was on her side when I was strenuously trying to relax my facial expression to appear neutral.

“Tank Guard! Maybe dere is a future for our chil’ren, af’er all.” My mother slammed the door so everyone in the hallway could share her exit.

CHAPTER 5

“Never, I can take my eye off you,” repeated my mother.

It had become a musical phrase, as she went about her own kitchen business, lifting the steam-jingling pot covers and dropping them back down like cymbals.

“Never, I can take my eye off you …”

“Then why do you close the door??”

The short pause was to me a long stretch of hope, broken by another, “Never, I can take my eye off you,” the sighing version.

I supposed even as a suggestion to crack open the pantry door, she wasn’t about to give in. My mother wasn’t that mad at me about the forged signature. After the number of “stolen” solitary diamond and ruby rings she had had converted into pendant necklaces before filing insurance claims, she wasn’t one to talk. What got her was the admission price that I’d stolen from her purse. If it had been to open up a savings account, maybe I’d have been rewarded. But not for wanting to see, “Dose poor animals, half’sleep in a cage! You see better in TV, in natur’l, witout all de aggravation an’ stink!”

I heard ceramic cymbals in the darkness. Cecilia was setting the table but whatever it was that my mother was concocting, smelt obnoxious. Red wine was evaporating, but there was a worse smell, similar to the sharp odour of goats. Cecilia opened the pantry door and I was drowned in it.

“Come and get your din-din,” chuckled Cecilia.

It was not the right time or the right place to be picky. But two real life kidneys in the middle of my plate was going too far.