Mercy
She called from Louisa, the mouth of the holler slurring syllables like muddy water dragging branches downstream. Said she missed me. Said she was coming. Said her husband was helping his ex-wife again, and the anger bloomed like bruises under her tongue.
I said come on, I said I could use some family time. But what responded wasn’t a cousin—it was the ghost of every drunk and addict I ever loved or tried to save.
She poured herself into my ear like whiskey from the bottle— confession without repentance. Memory opened its floodgates: the sister with a needle smile, the daughter who vanished into a high I couldn’t reach, the husband who coughed blood in a hospice bed, the gurgle of his breath sounding the end of our story.
I felt selfish for wanting her to stay away. But selfishness is what we call survival when it wears a woman’s name.
And I wondered— what fork did I miss, what turn off the path left me standing here, again, at the edge of someone else’s undoing?
There is no one left but me. She has burned her bridges into ash. Her trailer sits borrowed, her bank account emptied by the price of being needed by a man who wrecked her toys and called it love.
And I— I have peace now. A husband who doesn’t shout. A home where silence means comfort, not warning.
But guilt—it is a parasite with clever hands. It tells me I should, it tells me I must. It whispers you are the last one she has. It never tells me what it costs.
I want to unlearn the way I was taught to hold burning things.
And yet— there’s a voice beneath the floorboards of my chest, saying if you were good enough, clever enough, holy enough— you’d fix it.
Some part of me still believes I am going to hell because I cannot save the world with casseroles and calm phone voices.
I am not a shelter. I am not a sister-savior, cousin-caretaker, mother of the broken and the breaking.
I am in the remaking. The child in me still watches from beneath the floorboards but she no longer runs toward the fire.
I am not cruel. I am not heartless. But I am not the answer to a question she refuses to ask herself.
I light a candle for her pain, then shut the door against its storm.
This is mercy too: to love someone enough to let them find their own way home.
Even if part of me stays kneeling, in the dark pew of my own doubt, whispering prayers I don’t believe— forgiveness for the sin of survival.
And still I ask: Was there a fork I missed— a kindness not given, a visit not made, a silence that echoed too loudly?
Or have I always walked this road, faithful to the map of my own becoming, learning too late that not every call must be answered just because it sounds like family.
