Before Everything

“I can eat a little.” Anna was, surprisingly, a little hungry. She immediately regretted that she’d said it. Too much eagerness on her friends’ faces. All that commotion to bring her more food. Impossibly active. And hopeful. Helen propped the beige velvet pillows behind Anna so that she was upright.

“Too much,” she said when Ming put the bowl on the cobbler’s table. Molly followed, placing a wood board with bread and salmon next to the soup. They looked all too ready to feed her like a child. “Just eat what you want,” Ming bubbled triumphant, when Anna sipped from the spoon. It made Ming so happy to watch her spoon the cream of spinach and mushroom soup into her mouth. Her full cheeks blushing in anticipation.

Anna forced the spoon to her lips again. So that, too—Anna wasn’t entirely beyond wanting to make someone happy. Especially Ming. Anna knew she couldn’t have managed what Ming had managed—her daughter Lily’s seizures. The everyday terror of the grand mal, ambulances, and deadening medications. Then that cutting-edge brain operation. A success, but still a lifetime of children’s taunts and all the constant special accommodations—no, Anna thought, it would have broken her to have a child so compromised.

The creamy, warm spread of soup tasted good. There was this, too. Food had been a pleasure. Another kind of beauty. She’d never understood the desire for eating in company. Food was pleasure for the mouth. Talking was also pleasure. But together, less. The conversation veered newsy. That was a screen. They were always watching, measuring how much she ate. She cut a small piece of salmon and let it melt against her palate.

Molly worried to the others about a baggie of weed she’d found in Tessa’s desk drawer. How much was her daughter smoking? She was so uncommunicative most days. There have been terrible fights. Molly raked her fingers through her cropped hair. “She’s not a girl you’d at all recognize.” Anna thought it would help to remind Molly how when they were in eleventh grade they’d snuck out every afternoon that spring to smoke pot behind the woods near school. There’d been no shortage of baggies and film canisters of pot. There’d been no shortage of battles with parents.

But it took such effort to bring the spoon to her mouth, to swallow the soup. It was enough to think, Molly, it will be fine. Molly and Serena. Their two children. Once, all of that had been radical—a woman, a mixed-race couple, children—these had been the battles Molly had fought. Eighteen years later they’d all danced at the wedding. Molly had a house in the Boston suburbs just miles from where they’d all grown up. A thriving therapy practice.

Now Molly’s golden mane of hair was silver, cut in her mother’s short, blunt cut. Serena was talking about retiring from her surgery team. We were children. Give it enough time, Anna thought, and The Old Friends actually become old. Then she remembered what her son had told her. His beautiful secret. The beginning of his fatherhood. Was it just yesterday he’d come to her room to tell her the secret?

These were her dear friends. She could boast to them. They had been children together, and then they were mothers together. They would know what this meant to her. But she would not tell. Not even Helen, her ultimate secret sharer. She could barely look at Helen. Still, she would say nothing. She had nothing left to give her son except her word."

Victoria Redel, Before Everything