Coming home from school in the afternoon, I would pile in the back door and dump my books on the landing. “Hello!” I would call to my mother.
“Hello,” she would answer from the kitchen or the living room. She only had to say that one word and I knew exactly what to expect. “Hello” could have a lilt of cheerfulness or an edge of anger or a vague, blurry sense of sadness.
My mother’s inflections were the barometer of my world. And I could read that barometer with my ears. I didn’t even need to see her face. A cheerful voice invited me to sit at the kitchen table with a snack and tell her about my day. An angry voice advised me to hang up my coat and clean up my room.
Sadness was more mysterious because I didn’t know how to fix it. She seemed to go away to a dark place where I couldn’t follow.
She pretended to be fine every day, of course, but I got the weather report directly from her inflections and they were always accurate. That climate controlled my whole life so I paid attention.
Sometimes I can still hear her voice—except now it’s mine.
