She asked me “what did you do today” as I was humming a tik tok song. “I went outside and tanned, then made myself a burrito. OH! and I found a bunch of things on Amazon, they’re in my cart do you want to see?” I started going through my phone and flipped it around to show her the art supplies I had picked out. 

“Looks like you’ve had a very productive day,” she mumbled while scrolling with her index finger, like mom’s do. “It says it won’t be delivered ‘til two weeks.”

“Yeah it takes a while now, but it’s okay. They’re definitely going to put off school another month, and I’m gonna run out of canvas.”

“You think so?”

“Well we can’t go back now, it’s getting worse and worse every day.” I took my phone back. “I don’t want to go back if we do.”

“Did you have a meet today?”

  I stalled and moved my tongue around the grooves of my teeth to get a raspberry seed, “Kinda.”

“For physics? Or English?”

“Physics, but it was optional. Only, like, three people actually go so…”

“Well it’s still good to go, even if it is pass fail now.” I gave her a look and said, “There’s no point,” before dad walked in. “Hi girls! Did you hear the numbers today? Crazy!” he said while digging through the couch to find the remote. He got cut off by Ed Harding’s voice saying, “56 new cases in Massachusetts.” Then he went to go take a shower since he’d been working outside all day. I hated when he left the room after turning on the tv, what was the point?

“… I think that you’ve had a lot of free time which is nice, but now that you’re at home and it looks like it’s going to be a while you should start doing more things around the house, like helping with me with yardwork.”  I took a big chug of water because I didn’t want to respond to her. I was about to give her a snarky remark when  I looked at her face. She was tired, really tired. I hadn’t noticed because I was on my phone putting stuff I didn’t need into my cart up until then, but her eyes were hollow, meaning she was stressed. As she cut the ends off of the flowers she picked earlier, it was obvious she was thinking hard about something.

“Soo… have you talked to anyone at work?” I asked.

She looked up but didn’t say anything. She was thinking about how to word her thoughts. “Nothing new. They still want me to go back after this week.” I was worried she was going to chop a finger off. 

“Oh…” 

She hadn’t been at work for three weeks now, she didn’t feel safe there. The big brand pharmacy job was getting to her, and she hated that place more and more as the Covid-19 outbreak surged along. My parents were very cautious when the pandemic started, so when my mom was told she was an essential worker and had no forms of safety provided to her, she took a leave of absence. Now that that time had run out, she was using up her vacation time. I could tell she was frustrated because she didn’t want to go back, but at the same time she couldn’t stay cooped up forever. 

I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to upset her.

“Hopefully it will be better by then. The numbers are starting to go down kinda.” But they weren’t. She just nodded, gave a forced half-smile, and put the flowers in the vase.