My mom and I have a secret language. She shared it with me when I was at the exact age when secrets are still fun, and nobody asks you behind the jungle gym to tell them.
We were grocery shopping. She would pick up something, hand it to me, and I would pile it neatly behind me. Suddenly, she stopped the cart in the middle of the produce department. She leaned over the grocery cart where I sat, her purse strap slipping off her shoulder, peered behind her shoulders to make sure nobody saw, and reached out for my small hand before she whispered:
“When I squeeze your hand twice, tight, it means I love you. It’s our secret.”
My eyes widened amazed that she had entrusted me with such an honor, a code between me and her.
Hand squeezes on the first day of kindergarten after she slung my name tag around my neck and shuffled me onto the school bus. Hand squeezes before I would dance at competitions and hand squeezes at the doctor’s office before a shot.
Then I grew older and turned into a young woman with a silly laugh like hers and a knack for making up little songs like her. And I fell in love with a boy, fast. I fell in love with the way I could leave him little notes in his backpack, or how he would sharpen his face when he had an idea. I fell in love with the way he always changed the words to songs and danced down the hallways of my apartment building. I fell in love with the Bialetti espressos, the homemade pies, and the late-night Brown Line rides watching the skyline change from the back train car.
And one night we sat in the back of a cab and I looked ahead to make sure the driver wasn’t listening, and then I reached out for his hand and held it in mine and whispered:
“When I squeeze your hand twice, tight, it means I love you. It’s our secret.”
I shared our secret, Mom. He squeezed my hand under the table the first time he met you and dad. He would squeeze my hand every night before I fell asleep. I shared with him the secret that you had entrusted me with when I was 3 years old, sitting in a grocery cart eating animal crackers out of a little red box. But the first time you saw him squeeze my hand twice was the last time he would say goodbye to me with one.
The next time someone squeezed my hand, it was you.
It was you who sat at the edge of my bed late one night, you who reached down to wipe tears off my face before they could fall and make the pillow sticky. You held my hand and squeezed twice, tight, and then one extra time, tighter.
