Working adults.
I looked down at my hands.
They were old hands, yes. Veined and spotted, with knuckles that had widened from arthritis and decades of scrubbing, planting, sewing, cooking, folding, carrying, mending, and holding. They were not pretty hands. They had not been pretty since I was twenty-nine and sold my wedding ring to buy the water pump for the farm.
But they were working hands.
They had always been working hands.
“I see,” I said.
Carlos sighed, the way he always did when he thought I was making something emotional.
“Mom, don’t take it personally. It’s just logistics.”
Just logistics.
That was what children called it when they stopped seeing the person beneath the service.
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