I could hear my mother in the living room, voice stretched thin and wobbly, talking too loudly to the man with the pickup.
She used her sweet voice when other people were around, the one she’d used to read us bedtime stories before she started falling asleep with her face pressed to the radiator.
When it was just us, the voice changed. Darker, like she was talking through a mouthful of broken teeth.
I stood to go to my room and change out of my clothes. Lillian barely looked up when I left.
Before going into my room, I peeked inside Mom’s room.
Mom sat hunched in her chair, knees drawn to her chest, a cigarette dangling from her lips.
The man beside her was my least favorite, Glenn, who always wore sweatpants and once tried to show me a magic trick with a quarter and made it reappear from behind his zipper.
I avoided looking at him directly, like he was a solar eclipse.
Mom’s chin jerked up when I passed, and her eyes were like two little lakes with a film of algae, cloudy and mean.
“Where’s your sister?” she asked, even though Lillian’s cough echoed from the kitchen.
If you told her, she’d say she already knew; if you didn’t, she’d say you were being snotty.
“She’s eating,” I said. My voice was too small, so I tried again, louder. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Glenn snorted. “She’s a piglet, that one.”
Mom blew smoke at the ceiling and stared at it like maybe she could will herself up through the drywall and into the sky. “You got homework?” she asked.
I nodded, but she didn’t ask to see it or care if I did it. She flicked ash into a blue plastic cup.
I stood there a minute, waiting for something else, but the room had already forgotten me.
In my own room, the wallpaper peeled down in curling strips. I had a poster of the solar system above my bed, planets spinning out on invisible lines, everything brightly colored and far away.
My old stuffed animal, Rabbit, sat in the corner, nose chewed off and one ear hanging by threads. I squeezed him to my chest and lay down on the scratchy comforter.
I could hear the dull hum of voices through the thin wall, Glenn’s laugh like a car horn, my mother’s words trailing out in long, wet sounds.
I traced the bandaid on my knee until the skin beneath burned, then peeled it off slowly, watching the scab start over.Some part of me wanted to keep the ache alive, as if a small pain could distract from the big ones.
There was no homework in my backpack, not really, just a math worksheet with ghosts smudged in the margins, a note from the teacher that said “see me” circled twice, and a permission slip I’d already forged.
I set it all aside. The room was so quiet, I could hear the tick of Mom’s cigarette ash falling into the cup on the other side of the wall.
I remembered how it used to be, back when Dad was still here, and Mom would catch me playing with Lillian’s makeup or drawing with her eyeliner on the bathroom walls.
She’d scold us, then laugh and wipe my cheeks with a warm washcloth, humming old Fleetwood Mac songs while she did it.
Sometimes she made pancakes for dinner, said it was a “special girls’ night,” and let us eat them with our hands, tearing off soft, eggy pieces and drowning them in fake maple syrup.
I wasn’t supposed to remember the part where she burned the first batch and threw the pan so hard it left a triangle-shaped dent in the floor.
It was easier to remember the good parts, so I did.
After Dad left, everything tilted.
At first, Mom tried to keep up. She bought us matching sweatshirts in bright, candy colors and walked us to school holding both our hands, tight like she was afraid we’d float away.
She promised she’d get a better job, that everything would get back to normal.
