She set her gardening gloves beside her as she knelt into a patch of grass. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand made their way to the ring finger on her left, only to be stopped by the awkward feeling of…feeling nothing at all. A sigh seemed to trigger her to sit back on her heels. She watched a pair of tiny palms shake a package of sunflower seeds and pour them into a hole in the ground.
Something about the mud crusted under his fingernails launched a firecracker in her throat, almost intense enough to surface her internal tears. Instead, it sparked a series of uneasy questioning with even more difficult answers. When will he first realize that the pictures hanging above the fireplace are meant to contain three happy faces, not two? And despite her best efforts to suffocate the idea through therapeutic distractions, like gardening, she knows that it’s only a matter of time before he discovers that those midnight sobs aren’t coming from a late night soap opera after all. But it seemed like each of her thoughts ended with arrows all pointing to a neon sign saying, “This is life. Come on in!”
Slipping her back into reality was the sound of his little voice – his smooth, giggly, little four-year-old voice – that reminded her of watching bubbles float through a wand toward a sun the same color. Here, mommy. She smiled at the stripes of dirt on his chubby cheeks as he looked up into a pair of eyes identical to his. She glanced again at those small, muddy fingers and watched them stumble to place the gloves into her own palms. She slid one onto her left hand. No sense in reminding yourself of what isn’t there.
