Tradition

It's New Year's Day and I feel swollen with sorrow, the way a corpse swells in water.  I can almost see the liquid seeping from my shoes when I walk, hear the squish, squish sound of my feet moving across the kitchen floor.

I'm making a good luck meal, although it's much too late for luck to save us.  It would take a miracle, really, and we've had so many of them, already—like when they found your cancer in time, or when I totaled the car but wasn't hurt at all, not even a bruise. 

Still, tradition is a powerful incentive.  Collard greens and black-eyed peas, smoked pork chops and cornbread are what we always have for dinner on New Year's Day. 

"How much longer?" you ask from the living room, the football game almost over.

"Thirty minutes or so," I tell you, which is a lie.  I started cooking later than usual, and it will probably be more than an hour before it's ready.

I use my mother's recipe for cornbread because I have no recipes of my own, unless it's the one called, “Disaster.”  We  should never have gotten married, but you know that.  We have nothing in common other than the grim determination not to fail at anything. 

Besides, who knows anymore, what is mine and what is yours?

So we just go on, year after year—two people who keep bobbing up to the dinner table, then floating away as if we never swallowed a bite.