Nobody laughed.
My mother never talked about her work at home.
This is the first thing you need to understand, because it explains almost everything else: the secondhand slippers, the silence, keeping my head down, the way I learned to exist in rooms without taking up much space. My mother wasn't home much, and when she was, she wasn't the type to bring her work through the door. She purposefully left it somewhere between the baseboard and the entrance step, and what came through the door was the version of her that asked me about my homework, cooked rice the way I liked it, and slept on the sofa watching the nature channel because she was always, always tired.
I didn't know exactly what I was doing.
She knew she was a pilot. She'd known it since she was little—the flight suit, the photograph she kept on her dresser of herself on a runway she couldn't identify, the way she walked with a certain controlled awareness that she would later understand better as the posture of someone trained to maintain situational awareness at all times, in all environments. She knew she was piloting something fast and important. She knew it required years of training, regular recertification, and that kind of mental concentration that sometimes made her wake up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen with a glass of water and an expression on her face that she had learned not to lose.
