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Chapter TenGianaIt was the hand.
That hand.
That one I remembered well.
All too fucking well.
It was a hand I had described in acute, painful detail to a female police officer while my legs were spread in stirrups.
I was one week shy of my sixteenth birthday. My mother and I had been spending time after school planning on a way to make it a big, happy affair. On a tiny, sad budget.
That was what I always remembered from childhood. My mother constantly trying to find ways to cut corners, to make a dollar stretch as far as possible. It didn't matter how rough a year we had, she always had found ways to make Christmas and Easter and birthdays something special. Maybe I'd never gotten name brands or expensive electronics like some of the kids I went to school with, but I had beautiful memories of brightly-colored packages on Christmas morning, of simple park birthdays full of amazing baked goods and close friends.
We'd never had much by way of family. My mother had grown up in foster care and had never found her forever family. Until she met my dad. She always said that, if nothing else, she would forever be thankful for me, and for the parents she gained through marriage, and for the grandparents as well.
Unfortunately, my great-grandparents passed before I was old enough to remember them, and my grandparents only made it to my early teens.
So all she had left to feel thankful for was me. And she showed it. I don't know if I knew anyone else who had as close a relationship with their mother as I did. She was who I confided in when I had a crush, who I cried to when said crush rejected me, who I went to for fashion advice, who I went to movies with.
She was my best friend in the entire world. And I was hers.
As a kid, I never stopped to wonder why she clung so tightly to me, why she would often come in my room to watch shows, and "just so happen" to fall asleep in my bed with me instead of going back to her own.
I don't ever remember hearing my parents arguing, but as an adult, I knew they must have, knew that the bitterness between them didn't just happen overnight, that there were many cross words that must have created it slowly over time.
And the older I got, the more I could see how much she had protected me from him. Not because he abused me, not because he was ever outwardly cruel to me, but because his cold indifference would have been just as hard to come to grips with as a small child.
He never wanted to be a father, and he didn't feel the need to act differently.
So my mom worked hard to be both parents for me, even while I shared the walls with my father as well.
He was never around, anyway.
So we clung to each other.
And we had decided on flower cupcakes for the party, had picked out her sweet, light pink sundress that I had always admired as my outfit, had sat and written out invitations in my mother's beautiful, flowing penmanship, had even found the perfect park with an actual koi pond and a pergola so we wouldn't melt in the heat.
It was all set up.
We had been working on little specifics. Like the music to load onto my iPod, if four pizzas would be enough, if we should paint our nails red or yellow—or a combination of the two—if I should wear my hair up or down.
We never would hammer out those details.
We never would have that party.
I would turn sixteen.
But by then, my mom wasn't around anymore.
It was a normal night.
My mother and I had stood brushing shoulders in our tiny kitchen, chopping up vegetables for a stir-fry, deciding on peanut sauce since my father wouldn't be home. He hated all things peanut butter. My mother and I binged Reeses when there was enough leeway in the budget for us to buy a big bag and do so.
We had eaten dinner in front of the TV in the living room, watching Gilmore Girls reruns for the thousandth time, having always connected to the mother/daughter dynamic, loving the small-town vibe even though we both agreed we were city women through-and-through.
Then, my mother got one of her migraines, having to take one of the pills that made her sleepy and loopy, so she went off to her room to rest in the dark, and I did the dishes and went to my room to listen to some music, still trying to perfect that playlist of mine.
I fell asleep on a mixed CD a friend had given me.
I woke up to it still playing on a loop.
But I wasn't alone like I had been when I fell asleep.
