The Kitchen Table
The fluorescent tube above our kitchen table buzzed with a sound I would recognize for the rest of my life—a thin, electric hum that flickered half a second before it caught, so that the whole room seemed to blink like something waking from a bad dream. I was nine years old, folded beneath that table on a strip of cracked linoleum, pushing a dented metal truck back and forth across a crack in the floor that ran from the leg of the table to the edge of the refrigerator. The truck had lost one wheel months earlier, so it listed to the side as I rolled it, a small broken thing moving in small broken circles. I didn't mind. The limp made it mine.
Above me, the table held a different kind of wreckage.
I could see my mother's hands first—she always sat with her palms flat against whatever surface held her trouble, as though she could press the problem down into the wood grain and keep it from rising. My father's hands were different, restless, drumming once, twice, then stilling altogether when he caught himself doing it. Between them lay a fan of envelopes, torn open at odd angles, some already stamped in red ink I couldn't read from below but somehow understood anyway. Red meant…
