The way you give your mother the cheek when she goes for the mouth.

The necessary retirement of her once irrefutable “Because I said so.”

The time she smelled your winter cap to make sure your hair still grew the same way.

The nights she wakes in terror, mistaking dreams of your death for premonitions of the same.

The hesitant way her hand waves each time she sends you off into the freeway world.

The grey in her hair: how much of it was your doing?

That her back gave out, but she paid off your braces instead of ever standing comfortably again.

Her promise to never ask you for grandchildren.

That you were a bossy kid and a mean pre-teen. That she never publicly doubted that those qualities were merely phaseal.

That upper inner thigh freckle that she knows you have but that you yourself have never seen.

The chameleon blue that her eyes handed down to yours.

The way she lies in bed, no longer with a little you curled up in the crook of her knees.

The Christmases she and your father gift-wrapped in months worth of check stubs. The string-lit tree made of money that they didn't have.

That there are rapists and murderers and bad cops and good liars; that her baby girl lives among them.

The respect she had for you, even when you were half her size, even after you grew tall enough to look down on her.

That you and your brother came from her and that she came from you two, too.

The rules she didn't enforce. The way she trusted you to be a smart kid in a stupid world.

How she looks at you like you could disappear at any second and change everything.