Frying Trout while Drunk

Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations: come with me he whispered and she went in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street and mother, wrist deep in red water, laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit. I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner, the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor, buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate. When I drink I am too much like her— the knife in one hand and the trout with a belly white as my wrist. I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself, she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk handed him the plate.