“You’re overthinking it.”
Or, “You’re stressed.”
Or, “Drink some water.”
Sometimes all three.
And Freya, who never missed a chance to place herself at the center of any situation she did not belong in, told me with a completely straight face that young women these days had no stamina. She said it while lowering herself dramatically into a dining chair after carrying a bag of dinner rolls from her car to the kitchen, as if she were some weathered farm wife in an old movie and not a retired cafeteria supervisor who considered Costco a full-contact sport.
But that Saturday, I was trying.
I was carrying a platter of smoked brisket—the expensive kind from that barbecue place on Madison Avenue that charges you like they cured it in holy oil—across the driveway toward the backyard gate. The concrete was hot under my sandals. Music was playing from the patio speakers. Somebody’s kid was yelling near the hydrangeas. Leo was at the grill with a spatula in one hand and a beer in the other, laughing too loudly at something one of his coworkers had said. Freya was near the picnic table adjusting balloons for the third time because apparently the helium was not honoring the emotional architecture of her event.
I remember thinking, as I crossed the driveway, that my legs felt strange. Not weak exactly. Distant. Like the signals between my brain and the rest of me were being sent through fog.
Then they quit.
No stumble. No warning. No dramatic moment where I might have caught myself if I had been paying better attention. My legs simply stopped obeying. One second I was upright with warm brisket grease soaking through the paper lining of the platter, and the next I was falling. The platter hit first. Then my knees. Then my face. The sound of ceramic cracking against concrete rang out so sharply that for a second it seemed louder than the music.
