Excerpt from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She holds me, her hands on my haunches, pushing them one way and then the other. "Like this, like this, sway your body, move, child. Don't be so stiff. Move around." My elegant, beautiful mother. I can read the messages in the arch of her supple, fluid body: "How is this my child? So different from me, so stiff and so serious?" I can't tell her that I am not serious. That it is only this unexpected closeness to her that is making me awkward and gawky. In the garden with Samson, in the kitchen with Sita, I can dance mad baila like an undulating dervish. I can lose myself and be just a whirl of motion. I can be silly and unfettered and ridiculous. But here with her, I am tongue-tied and thick-footed.

Her hands push me away. Quick footsteps. The bedroom door slams, reverberating through the house. My father looks up from his papers and says, "Your mother is delicate. We need to treat her carefully. You understand this, don't you? The need for care."

Of course I do. She is my mother. I know better than anyone that she must be handled with diligence, like all things precious and dangerous.

* * *

Sometimes on the weekends when I wander down to the kitchen, she is already there. She says, "We don't need Sita today. I sent her to the market. I'll make you breakfast myself." I sit at the table and watch. She talks fast, her housecoat wrapped over her nightdress, her hair pulled into a gushing ponytail on the very top of her head, cascading down in an inky waterfall to her elbows. She says, "I'll make pancakes. The way you like. Thin. Crispy like an appa." Her fingers crack eggs on the rim of the bowl, slide them in with one quick motion. "Just the way you like."

I watch this mother, the one that appears sometimes. She is demonstrative, coming over to hug me, so I open my nostrils wide to inhale her scent—like nothing else, the smell of this woman. She pushes a bowl at me. "Here, you whip the eggs." She heats oil, tilts the pan to coat it. Pours the batter onto the hot oil and swirls it so that the thinnest of crepes emerge. She flips these onto a plate, sprinkles sugar granules on the hot surface, squeezes a lemon over it, rolls up the little package, and passes the plate to me. I love the sweetness and the bite of the lemon, the hot delicious crepe. She watches me with hungry eyes. She never eats while I do. Watching me is enough for her, she says.

* * *

This too happens. I'm playing outside her locked door, waiting and wishing for her. I'm being careful, but somehow the big doll slips from my fingers, falls banging on the wooden floors. Her bedroom door whacks open and she comes for me. The clutch of her fingers around my upper arm is like a tourniquet. Her face close to mine, she hisses, "I told you to be quiet. I need to rest. I need to sleep. Migraine is splitting my head apart. You need to be silent. Do. You. Understand." Important information is being transmitted. Yes, I understand. I must not make noise. I must be quiet; I must let her rest. By the age of seven I have learned the lesson of silence perfectly.

* * *

In every house on this island, in a frame as extravagant or as meager as the family's fortunes can afford, is the talisman of the wedding portrait. Without this photograph the house cannot stand.

The wedding photograph of my parents is in a heavy gold frame poised in the center of the living room wall. It shows my mother enwrapped in a Kandyan osari, her eyes huge, the gleam of lipstick on those virgin lips. Her neck is weighed down by the seven concentric gold necklaces that go from encircling her throat to dangling at her waist. Her hair is bisected by a ruler-straight part, on one side of it an ornament in the shape of a dazzling sunburst and on the other a curved crescent moon.

Excerpted from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera. Copyright © 2016 by Nayomi Munaweera. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.