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I’d never be able to thank my mom enough for what she’d done for me back then. She’d been a great mom when she herself had been dealing with my father’s passing. Mom put her arm around me. “I just made the call, and I wouldn’t even have known there was a problem at all if not for that boy.” She brought me close. “The one who stayed with you that night at the party?”
The party…
That was the night everything had changed, and my mom had recognized I had an issue. I’d been so good at hiding how bad things had gotten. I’d gotten drunk and high right under her nose by going to random parties behind her back.
I had hit my all-time low at a party. I’d gotten wasted and passed out with a cocktail of drugs in my system. I probably would have died on that floor if someone hadn’t found me.
Mom rubbed my shoulder. “Thank God he called me that night. That boy?” she stated, sighing. I guess the guy who’d found me had scanned my phone’s contacts and called her.
Not that I’d remember.
I’d been so far gone that night, and Mom never did get the guy’s name. I remember asking around after I was sober enough to, but no one had been able to tell me anything about him. He’d apparently just been a good Samaritan and helped a girl he didn’t know.
“Oh, would you look at this,” Mom said, noticing something in a box. She had to let go of me to get it, and once she did, I smiled at what she had. She faced me. “I haven’t seen this in years.”
I hadn’t either. Dad had given it to me.
Mom was smiling too by the time she handed the gift to me. It was an old phone case and seeing it was like something out of a dream. I’d worn the hell out of the thing, and it’d been on a couple of phones before it had made it into the box. It was a pink glitter case, a birthday present.
“Your dad gave that to you, right?” Mom asked, and I nodded. My dad had given me a lot of things before he’d passed. He had like any dad would have, and his absence made letting go of anything he gave me hard. Even an old, broken phone case.
The case was broken, an accident, and I turned the case around to study it. It had a crack right down the center, but that wasn’t what I looked at when I shifted the case around.
What the…
I stopped, everything stopped when I noticed the design on the back. It’d been a design I’d seen a million times, but it’d been years.
“Honey…”
Mom watched me as I left her and began rooting around for the letter I’d been reading. I’d just been reading it. I’d just been looking at it, but I couldn’t find it.
Where is it? Where is it?
“Honey, is everything okay?” Mom asked, suddenly beside me, and I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure everything was okay until I found that letter.
I spotted it with my mom by my side. With all the rushing around, the letter had slipped beneath a box, and right away, I unfolded it.
I studied the paper, my gaze zeroing in on something in the corner.
No way.
The resemblance was uncanny. The flower at the bottom of the letter and the one on the back of the phone case were duplicates.
Identical.
My back touched the wall, trying to find a flaw, something to distinguish the flower on Wolf’s letter from the one on the case. I loved the one on the case. So much so that it’d been the inspiration for my tattoos. The watercolor flowers had been a tribute to my dad and even the artist hadn’t come close to the design on the case. It hadn’t been their fault as I’d had them sketch something from my memories. I hadn’t seen the case in years, and all I’d had was the memory of it.
I touched my mouth, the case a literal duplicate of the flower in the corner of the letter. Wolf had this same flower as a tattoo on his hip, which was why I’d assumed he’d put it on the letter. The flower represented him.
I didn’t know what I was looking at here. In fact, I was so confused, and my mom squeezed my shoulders. From some far-off place, I heard myself tell her I was fine, and the phone case slid from my fingers easily when she took it from me.
“It’s a shame what happened to this,” she said, and I assumed she meant the crack on the back. Her thumb went down it, the crack right in the center of the flower. She frowned. “I know how much this meant to you.”
It did mean a lot to me. Everything my dad had given me did.
I couldn’t answer her, too busy looking at the flower on the case and then the letter in my hand. I had no words.
Mom’s head tilted. “I remember he felt so bad about that,” she said, giving the case back to me. “That boy who sat with you that night at the party. He felt so bad. He said it broke before he called me.”
