Eppie and Silas

"She can't stand being at the dinner table with us," Eppie shares
with a toothy grin. As soon as the words have been spoken her heart
stops because she forgot they were untrue.
What Mom would give to sit down and listen to medical talk
with those three bores! Louie brimming with enthusiasm for a
shared moment (otherwise unattainable for eighteen years), Silas
nodding patiently and chiming in with decades of bookish wisdom,
Eppie only conversational, not yet fluent--still but a listener
whose lips lack wings.

It has been one year since dinner. One solid year.
One solid slab of mahogany that swelled under the wrath of
rainwater leaking through a roof reshingled by underpaid Mexicans.
Lightning zapped the power and Mom thought, "I told you so," with
buckets and pots in a storm all over the house,
but she never said it.

The wood they replaced with something darker.

Silas is too true to his word to dine on pathology again.
Louie's lost himself in losing his liver.
How Mom longs for medicine.
Eppie finally learned how to speak it
(but that painful longing,
that knotted ball of fear and sorrow in her throat,
lodged in her heart like an unmentionable thrombus), but Eppie,
she will not talk.