Life’s Funky Dance

When no one answered the doorbell, July slipped her key into the lock. It always gave her pause to find her mother’s apartment quiet and dark so late in the morning. As a child, she remembered a woman who always arose at 6 a.m., and finished fifty things before her husband and daughter sat down at the breakfast table. Instead of the smell of percolating coffee and freshly made cinnamon rolls, the room had the sour odor of a woman who had recently decided the shower stall was her sworn enemy. July surmised that her mother was afraid that she would choose the wrong faucet, and burn herself before she could get the water stopped. So they had made it a hard and fast rule that she would only take a shower on Wednesdays, July’s one day off.