The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

Anyway, that was how I knew being dead wasn’t forever. Not always. People who talked about dying as if it was forever were either lying or stupid, because I knew two people who definitely, definitely came back from being dead. One was Da and the other was Jesus.

“Well it wasn’t his fault. He had other stuff on. It was your job to look after me, not his.” “Why?” “Because you were the mam.”

I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t.

“Because you never did anything for me. Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”

Perhaps that was what felt biggest of all—having found Mam unrotted. She was smaller and quieter and better than before. She was clean. She was stable. She was earning money and stocking her cupboards.

They had all been written in black ink, with letters that grew and shrank and moved up and down across the page, and not one of them had been written by me. It was Mam’s writing. They were Mam’s words.

the vicious notes she said had been posted through her door. I wondered whether Mam ever felt stooped under the weight of her strange, sad charade. It wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else, but it did to me. “I am here, I am here, I am here,” she was saying, scrawling threats to herself from herself. “You will not forget me.”

hadn’t wanted a kid, couldn’t cope with a kid, couldn’t cope with that kid. Whatever. But you looked at what was going on with them two, and it was hard to believe she cared about Chrissie at all.”

I didn’t want people

thinking of them as a pair.” She coughed a wet-sounding cough and wiped something off her cheek. “She did terrible things. She did. But she’s just a kid. She needed people like me to come through for her and I didn’t. I failed her. We all did. She’s just a little girl.”

“We are best friends,” I whispered when I was by myself. “Me and Linda are best friends. And I didn’t need you. And Mam does care about me.”

She was never going to give me enough. I knew, because when she had told me what she wanted, she had talked about going back and making things different for her. She hadn’t talked about doing things better for me.

Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary, everyday way, the way you love salt or sunlight.