Mama

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My mother had also been married before, to a man named Eddie. I don’t know much about him—she rarely spoke to or about him, which was often how she moved through life with my father as well. My mother was quiet in that way, reserved, but deeply loving beneath the stillness. Her marriage to Eddie had produced two boys, Ronnie and Richard—called Ricky—and when that marriage ended, the loss was not just of a husband, but of her sons. The divorce took them from her, and it was a grief she carried silently, without complaint, folding it into herself the way she did so many other pains.