Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn

operation was really for,” my mother said to me, and I saw the fear skate across her eyes, cold in the blue light of the kitchen’s fluorescent bulb. “If any of your aunts and uncles find out that it was something really serious, they’ll keep asking how I am.” I understood then how a question about one’s health can be like a sheath on a sword, hiding the real question: “When will you die?”
    Now my mother and I visit as we always have the first night I am home in Ohio. We sit in front of the television in separate chintz-covered chairs, our feet propped on a shared footstool, a box of chocolate buttercreams on the table between us. This year, however, I have come home early to deal with what my mother says is a “new wrinkle.” For one year, she has led a healthy, normal life. She has gained weight, she has bought new clothes. She has visited me in California. But two weeks ago, during a quarterly checkup, something unexpected appeared in the X rays.
    “You look healthy,” I tell her. “You look wonderful.”
    “I feel fine,” she says. “I can eat anything.”
    We invent a dessert menu for the next week. Chocolate mousse, peach Melba, apple spice cake, banana cream pie, cherries in cognac. In the muted light of the television screen, in the old hollows of familiar furniture, we feel protected.
    • • •
    Usually in June there is a milky haze lying among the wooded hills and the steaming crops—young corn, ripe wheat, silvery middle-aged oats. Today, the landscape surprises us with its sparkle and clarity, as if we have driven into the center of a crystal prism. I can see the way a slender leaf of corn ripples along its center vein. I can see the fanning seed head on a stalk of yellow wheat.
    “Ironwort, tiger lily.” My mother gives me back names from my youth, identifying the wildflowers that lean frailly away from the edge of the road.
    When I was a child, I suffered from frequent kidney infections, which my mother called “attacks.” It was not until years later, when I casually used the term during a college physical examination, that I recognized its benign absurdity. “An attack?” said the doctor. “A kidney
attack
?” At once, I saw the image it must have called up, of a scowling cartoon kidney, with thin arms and mitten-shaped hands carrying its muggers’ weapons. Now we drive back through the Ohio countryside. We are on our way home from the university hospital, where a second opinion has been offered on the spot that showed up on the X rays of my mother’s liver. She calls the spot a “development,” as if it is something promising, like a housing project. Her hands move quickly as she talks. The backs of them are tanned from her work in the garden. The palms, flashing white as she speaks, remind me of the undersides of maple leaves exposedin a wind. With her hands my mother can make small houses, a street intersection, a car going out of control.
    “Well, it just went poof,” she said once, explaining to my father and grandmother where the grocery money had gone and why we were having hot dogs once again for our Sunday dinner. “Like that,” she said, and her hands described baroque scrolls of smoke above her dinner plate. It seemed to me that with her hands she might produce, out of the imaginary smoke, an emerald bird, inside of which would be a golden egg, inside of which would be a lifetime supply of grocery money.
    My father, ever mindful of my education, cast a meaningful eye my way and said, “Although a hot dog on a bun is not the feast we had all hoped for this afternoon, let us remember that it contains more protein than the average Chinese person eats in a week.”
    “I am not a Chinese,” my grandmother said, looking sideways at my mother. “I am a Protestant.”
    “I’ll need time to think about this new development,” my mother says now. “I’ll need time to plan.” My father has been dead for five years, and my grandmother three. Not long before