For thirty five years, my mother has continued to run. Now she lives in rural Western Massachusetts, and our winter phone conversations often include her accounts of running on snowy roads, undaunted by icy winds. Years before I began running, I listened with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement as she told me how getting out for a run on a cold, grim day made her feel like she'd triumphed over the weather.
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"Hey, Bug."

Caroline could barely hear her own words. (Had she said them?) The oxygen hissed up her nose through the plastic prongs. The pull of the Vicodin lured her toward sleep. Sam didn't look up from his Spirograph, but Caroline knew that that didn't mean he hadn't heard her.

"Bug?" she said again. This time she detected a slight hesitation in the whirring of his pen. The symmetric designs stopped spilling onto his spiral-bound notebook.
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Need some more Mother's Day reading? Take a look at what our editors and columnists are reading this month.
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Elizabeth Mosier's recent novella, The Playgroup (GemmaMedia, 2011), explores that intense time when the children are small, toys constantly litter the floor, and mothers -- especially playgroup mothers -- become central to each others' worlds.
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I had things to do, so many things. I had to write this column, finish a book proposal, edit two reviews and write another. The Easter Bunny required provisions and the daily tasks called -- the groceries, meals, homework, laundry. I also needed to hire a moving company, buy a house on the other side of the world, and figure out how to ship our cat across three continents. We're moving back to Canada in June; I've a lot to arrange, kitty included. I did none of these things. I skipped town.
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we met two days after her birthday
we planned it all for her
remembering what we had promised
carefully sitting around the table...
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Things We Didn't Say, Kristina Riggle's third novel, explores the fecund, complicated morass of personal history and how our stories haunt us even as we try to leave them behind. Narrated in chapters that alternate points of view, Things We Didn't Say introduces Michael, a divorced dad with three school-aged children, Michael's younger, live-in fiancée Casey, and his ex-wife Mallory. As these six people encircle one another, we learn who they are, who they want to be, and the perilous gulf that lies between.
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