Some things did not come back.
My ribs.
Three of them, and a lung that never quite fully reinflated, and eleven years of a sc*r I hid under jackets because a man had told a nurse I’d fallen at home and I had, for a long time, let that be the story, because the other story meant admitting I’d asked him twice to put the guard back and stayed anyway.
I’ve stopped hiding it.
That took a year.
And my mother.
She watched him for sixteen years and never said a word to me, because she’d learned to wait for the paper, and she d*ed before the paper was ready, and I have decided that is the only thing about her I’d change.
She should have gotten to be in the room.
Vincent left on day eighty-eight.
Not the restaurant — the restaurant is still there; the half that’s mine is mine, and the half that’s his is being sold to satisfy a judgment, and the buyer is a woman named Priya who ran his kitchen for six years and was, it turns out, on the payroll, which is how she had the credit to buy him out.
