The steel ladle connected with the side of my head with a sound like a muffled bell, followed immediately by the wet, searing heat of boiling vegetable broth cascading down my neck and soaking into the collar of my gray dress. For a moment, everything went white—not from pain, though there was plenty of that, but from the sheer disbelief that this was actually happening. “Who cooks like that, you incompetent old woman?” Dawn’s voice was shrill, vibrating with a fury that seemed grotesquely disproportionate to the crime of over-salting soup.
“Are you trying to poison us?”
My knees buckled. I gripped the edge of the stove, knuckles going white as I fought to keep the kitchen from tilting sideways. Through the ringing in my ears and the throbbing in my skull, I heard another sound—one that hurt more than the blow itself.
From the living room, where my son Robert sat on the leather sectional we’d helped him buy three years ago, came the unmistakable sound of the television volume increasing. He was drowning out the sound of his wife assaulting his mother. He didn’t turn his head.
He didn’t pause his show. He just turned up the volume and kept staring at the screen as if nothing unusual was happening in the kitchen, as if his seventy-one-year-old mother wasn’t bleeding from a head wound inflicted by the woman he’d chosen to marry. Something inside me—something that had been bending for six months, maybe for my whole life—finally snapped clean.
I released my grip on the stove, turned slowly to face the counter full of dinner preparations, and with deliberate, methodical fury, swept everything onto the floor. Pots, bowls, cutting boards, the soup tureen I’d spent forty minutes preparing, vegetables I’d chopped with arthritic hands—all of it crashed to the tile in a spectacular symphony of destruction. The sound brought Robert running.
He appeared in the doorway, his face not concerned but horrified—not for me, but for the mess, for the disruption, for the inconvenience of it all. He stood there in his expensive loungewear, staring at the wreckage of carrots and porcelain, at me sprawled among the debris with soup soaking into my dress and blood trickling down my temple. “Mom, what did you do?” he whispered, and the question contained no curiosity about what had happened to me, only accusation about what I had done to his kitchen.
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