Most of the swelling had disappeared.
She was still healing.
Still not perfectly symmetrical.
But she looked more like herself.
She rolled her shoulders backward.
Then forward.
“How’s your back?”
She smiled at me through the mirror.
“Better.”
Dad appeared in the doorway.
For once, he didn’t say:
“You’re perfect the way you are.”
He didn’t tell her she was beautiful.
He didn’t tell her what she should see.
Instead, he asked:
“How do you feel?”
Mom studied herself for a moment.
“Like I’m seventy.”
Dad laughed.
She smiled.
“And like I finally did something good for myself.”
Beside her reflection sat the old vanity mirror.
And beside that, the photograph of her mother.
The picture itself had not changed.
Grandma was still standing there after her mastectomy, smiling between her daughters.
What had changed was what Mom saw when she looked at it.
