“No,” she said.
“They should be in my handwriting.
I’m the one who didn’t call them.”
I got the tattoo in September.
Mom did not ask me to.
Mom, in fact, argued with me about it for three weeks — “it’s not a decoration, honey” — until Corinne’s granddaughter told her, at the funeral, that eleven women in that atrium had asked the same question, and that Corinne had said, before she passed, “Then it worked.”
So there are twelve of us now.
Inside of the left wrist.
Five petals, split stem, the notch on the left leaf.
Delphine’s granddaughter does them; she has a proper shop and an autoclave and considerably better ink than a sewing needle in a kitchen in 1982.
My daughter is nineteen.
She has not asked yet.
When she does, I am not going to say “I got it when I was young.”
I’m going to turn my palm up, the way you do when you’re handing someone something, and I’m going to tell her about a nurse who walked out of a pre-op room and came back with two officers, and about a door nobody ever repainted, and about her grandmother, who ran house eleven, and who was so good at keeping a promise that she kept it twenty-seven years past the end of the world it was made in.
And then I’m going to teach her the question.
Because that’s the whole thing, in the end.
Not the flower.
The flower was just how you found out who was already awake at four in the morning.
THE END
