That first week home, I was whizzy on pain meds. Mom stayed home and the only visitors were family, and they didn’t stay to chat for very long. There were no phone calls for me and I didn’t make any. I watched a lot of cable TV and picked my way through a book about Thor Heyerdahl’s homemade raft ride thousands of miles to Easter Island. I still associate that week with drifting through the Pacific alongside Thor on the Kon-Tiki. I took two showers a day to help my back shed the last of the butterfly-winged Steri-Strips. I didn’t have the range of motion to rotate my torso enough to display the entirety of my nearly spine-length scar within the small window of the medicine cabinet mirror. What I did see was thick and red, as was the smirking mouth above my right hip, the site at which the doctor harvested bone to be reassigned to my spine. After the showers and scar inspection, I’d step on the scale. Not only was I not gaining weight, by the end of the first week home, I was down to one hundred twenty pounds. I didn’t tell Mom, as she would’ve panicked, which wouldn’t have been unreasonable. As it was, she asked me every hour on the hour if I wanted ice cream or a shake or if there was anything special I wanted her to cook or bake. I didn’t, so I wasn’t eating much besides cereal and peanut butter slathered on Ritz crackers. I finally gave in to her offer of French toast the night before she returned to working at the bank.