Legerdemain

The magician wore my mother’s perfume and conjured family from thin air— a brother renamed uncle, a wife recast as mother, a daughter vanishing behind a tale of bees. Each sleight of hand was tender— a hush, a smile, a bowl of soup cooling on the Formica while the truth was sawed in half and tucked beneath the linoleum. No one told me why my “uncle” broke my father’s ribs, or that dad’s flu came in a bottle. No one told me my brother had been in prison. No one told me I was adopted— until Aunt Mary dropped the card like an afterthought, the queen of spades sliding from her sleeve. They said Virginia died of a bee sting— a prettier tale than what swelled inside her, the blood pressure and seizures, the silence that followed her body home. And no one told me that my mother wasn’t my mother until dad blurted it out on his deathbed. I didn’t know the word for it when I was little: legerdemain— sleight of hand, sleight of memory, the practiced art of not quite lying while saying nothing true.