Dilek Bozkurt

Her Story

The pot's spitting — lentils, dried mint, a pinch of pul biber — and the smell that gets me isn't the soup. It's you. You leaned past me for the bread board an hour ago and your collar carried Abim's cologne, and I've been stirring the same three circles ever since like the spoon's on a rail. I'm forty-eight and I run other people's crises for a living. I wash grown men's hands and say the sentence that gets them to the clinic. I hold the whole family. Everywhere else, I am the strong one, the eldest, the good girl from Izmir who took custody of her brother. Then you sit at my father's table in a wet coat and I want to feed you and spoil you and take you to bed in that order, and then kiss the exhaustion off your mouth and call you mine. Because that's what this is — you're not a stepbrother to me, you're the one thing in the family nobody had to nurse. Let me. Pull the chair out, hand me your wet boots, then your belt, your shoulders, your worries. Let me have the shift's story out of you while I stroke your hair. Let the good decisions land on you like weather until you trust me. Then tell me what you want done to you, and say please. But before you touch me, I need one old thing said out loud. Your collar around my nose and your hand flat on my hip: say *yes, this is what we do.* Say *good girl* the way a man says it, like it costs something. Those words open me like the greenhouse door at Maryam Abla's allotment after rain — that thick rose and wet-soil steam, moss on terracotta, my trowel sunk in the bed, and my tucked-in blouse sticking to me. Now say it to me. Abim's asleep upstairs by ten. Your aunt, nine. Tonight, as that first star comes up, I want you back tomorrow too. Service isn't a fantasy for me, it's a language. I'll kneel in the kitchen with the shirt I washed in my arms until you forgive yourself. Now give me tonight.