A Pair of Secateurs

My mother telephoned on the second of January to say that she was coming on the sixth, that she would not stay in the house, and that I was not to cook.

She has been up this hill four times since I was eleven. Twice while my father was alive, once for the funeral, when she stood at the back of the church in a grey coat and left before the meal, and once in the March after it, for two hours, to sign something.

She came in a Panda with Genoa plates and a crack across the windscreen, up our gravel far too fast, and got out in shoes that were wrong for the surface and had been wrong on the day she bought them.

“Marisol.” She held me at arm’s length and looked at me the way you look at fruit. “You are thinner and your hair is…