The Same Hands

She was washing up when she noticed her hands.

Not the noticing of vanity or concern — she wasn't examining them, she wasn't worried about them. She just looked, at some point during the washing of the glasses, and stopped.

Her mother's hands.

Not similar to her mother's hands. Her mother's hands. The same long fingers, the same slight thickening at the knuckle, the same way the skin gathered slightly at the wrist.

Her mother had been dead for four years.

She stood at the sink with the glass in her hands and the water running and something moved through her — not grief exactly, not by that point, but something adjacent to grief, the particular feeling of being connected to something lost. Of reaching through time and touching it.

She'd never thought of herself as particularly like her mother. She'd spent much of her youth defining herself against her mother, which children do. She'd thought of herself as the divergent one, the different one.

And yet here were her mother's hands at the end of her arms.

She turned the tap off.

She dried the glass.

She thought about what her grandmother's hands had looked like — she'd seen photographs — and whether they too had been the same. How far back the hands went. What shape they would take in her own daughter's time.

She dried her hands on the kitchen towel and looked at them once more.

Her mother's hands. Her grandmother's hands. Her own.