Page 47 of Changing the Playbook
“That’s my girl.” Mike’s hand finds mine under the table. His thumb brushes my knuckles, and suddenly I can’t remember why boundaries seemed so important.
My girl.
Two words that shouldn’t make my chest crack open like this. Two words that suggest belonging, possession, care—everything I swore I didn’t want after Jimmy proved love was just another word for abandonment. But God help me, I want to be his girl, want it with a fervor that terrifies me more than any poem.
The walk to the platform stretches like taffy. My legs have apparently decided bones are optional. The microphone, when I grab it, slides against my palm. I scan the crowd, caught up in their conversations and their drinks, and hope that, as one, they lose the ability to see, hear, and move.
Then there’s Mike.
He watches me with total focus, those dark eyes locked on me like I’m performing surgery and he’s studying my technique. Like I matter. Like my words matter. Like I matter beyond my ability to drive Hazel to gymnastics or count my mother’s pills.
Fuck it.
The first words scratch out of my throat:
“My mother runs marathons,
With a disease that steals mobility.”
The bar quiets.
Not the polite quiet of earlier performances, but something attentive.
“She plants gardens, trees that will stand forever,
While her hands shake and fumble.
She works twelve-hour shifts,
When fatigue is a constant companion.”
My voice cracks. Tears build behind my eyes, hot and unwelcome.
I should stop. Should make a joke, deflect, protect myself?—
But then Mike nods. Just once.
“She adapts, she says.
She doesn’t let it define her, she says.
She lives fully, she says.”
The words taste like confession. Like the secret I’ve carried since that Tuesday when Dad called me at school. Since I raced home to learn that she’d collapsed at Hazel’s soccer game, and saw Hazel frozen in the lounge with her soccer cleats still on, shock on her face.
“But I sleep with my phone on loud,
Jumping at every late-night ring.
I memorize symptoms of relapse,
Count her good days like a miser with coins.”
My throat closes around the next line.
The truest line.
The one that reveals me for the selfish daughter I am.
