The kettle whistled at five forty-five in the morning, just like it did every morning. I poured two cups of tea, one for me and one for Brenda, and listened to the soft creak of my mother’s hospital bed down the hallway. The morning light was beginning to slide across the kitchen tiles, that pale, tentative light that comes just before dawn fully breaks. My hands moved through these motions without thought because after twelve years of repeating them, they’d become pure muscle memory. Kettle. Cups. Tea bag. Water. Two sugars for Brenda. No sugar for me anymore because somewhere in the past decade, I’d lost the habit of tasting anything sweetly.
Brenda let herself in without knocking, the way she’d been doing for over a decade. She was a good woman. Reliable in a way that had become the bedrock of my existence. She’d been there through the worst of it, the early years when I was still learning how to bathe someone who couldn’t stand, how to feed someone who couldn’t lift their head, how to maintain dignity for a person whose body no longer permitted any.