I would give a great deal to have my mother’s face never bruised, to have my seven years back, to have never learned what I learned about the man I married.

But I cannot have those things, and wishing for them is another kind of translating, another way of refusing to live in the true story.

So instead I keep the vase on the shelf with its gold seams showing, and every morning I wake to my mother making a beautiful racket in the kitchen, and I sit at the counter in the light and I am, for the first time in longer than I can remember, entirely myself — not a resource, not a translator, not a wife clearing a bar on the floor.

Just a woman, at home, in the life she chose, beside the person who chose it with her.