Two days before my mother’s operation, I left the office early and bought a bunch of chrysanthemums. I chose yellow chrysanthemums because I remembered my mother saying that yellow brought good health. As I walked through the park to the house I had grown up in, I held the flowers up to the sun. I closed my eyes and tried to see the lump in my mother’s breast turn to butter, become liquid and trickle away. The lump remained solid, hard as a lump of glass. I held the flowers against my chest until I reached the house. 

My mother, Krysia, was in the kitchen chopping carrots and watching television. She smiled when she saw the yellow chrysanthemums. I got her favourite vase and began to arrange the flowers. My mother put down the chopping knife and said she wanted to clear out some of the stuff she had collected over the years. She wanted to start with the suitcases on top of the wardrobe and she needed me to get them down. I nodded and pushed the vase into the centre of the table. Just then the game show Wheel of Fortune came on the television. Krysia settled into her seat and asked me to make some tea. I filled the kettle, got the teapot ready and as I stood by the stove waiting for the water to boil, I touched the small mole on the tip of my nose. I had always thought of the mole as a smaller version of the beauty spot on my mother’s right cheek. My father had once stroked the tip of my nose and said the mole showed I belonged to my mother’s side of the family: ‘During the voyage to Australia, while you were still inside your mother’s belly, there was a storm just before the ship reached Fremantle. The ship heaved from side to side and that was when the mole slipped from your cheek to the end of your nose.’