She sighs like I’m the problem here, like I’m the inconvenience. “Rent’s overdue. Again.”
“Again?” I take a step farther into the room. “I’ve given you money every month. You told me you paid the rent.”
She zips the bag with an air of finality. “Well, clearly I didn’t.”
I stare at her, waiting for the punchline. For the part where she admits this is a mistake. That there’s more time. There’s always supposed to be more time.
“How long?” I ask.
She avoids my eyes. That tells me everything.
“How long have you known?” I press.
“There were a few notices.”
“A few?” My voice cracks despite my effort to keep it steady. “You hid them from me?”
She finally looks at me, irritation flashing across her face. “I didn’t hide them. I just didn’t see the point in worrying you.”
A laugh slips out of me, sharp and ugly. “By letting us get evicted?”
She grabs the duffel and moves past me toward the door. “I’m going to stay with Matheo.”
I scoff under my breath. “The same guy who beats the shit out of you at the slightest provocation?”
She flinches visibly and stops walking but doesn’t look at me. “He says he loves me.”
I almost laugh at that, except there’s nothing funny about the situation. “He’s an abusive drug dealer, Mom.”
“Well, I’m moving in with him,” she says and continues toward the door.
“So, what about me?” I ask in a small voice, even though I really just want to scream.
She pauses, one hand on the strap. Turns just enough to glance back at me. “You’re an adult now, Millie. You’ll figure it out.”
The words hit me square in the chest. Like a bullet.
“Figure it out,” I murmur with a humorless laugh.
Really? Isn’t that what I’ve always done?
I’ve been on my own for as long as I remember.
I make my own lunches, do my own laundry, learn which moods meant I should stay quiet and which meant I should stay gone. My mother was never cruel. Just absent. Like I was something she forgot she’d set down until it was inconvenient.
My dad left long ago, before I was old enough to remember him. She never talks about him, and I stopped asking years ago. There’s no one else. No grandparents. No aunts. No safety net I don’t make myself.
School wasn’t much better. Kids notice things…how your clothes don’t fit right, how your mom shows up late, too loud and smelling wrong. I learned early it was easier to be invisible. To keep my head down. To expect nothing.
After graduation, nothing really changed. I sell jewelry at craft fairs and parks, stringing beads and wire into things people say are pretty. I have a few regulars. A small online following. I make some money but not nearly enough. I’ve had a few jobs, but they didn’t last. Somehow, my mom always finds a way to ruin them. That’s why the backpack is still on my shoulder now. Why it always is. Everything I care about fits inside it because experience has taught me anything left behind won’t be there when I come back.
I’d endure all of it because…well, she’s my mother. The only family I have. But it’s just now dawning on me that I am alone in that fantasy. She really doesn’t give a damn about me.
“W-what if I don’t figure it out?”
I see a brief flash of emotion in her pale brown eyes—ones that used to be vibrant. She used to be beautiful…at some point in my memory. But now, she’s just a strung-out middle-aged woman with thinning hair and sagging skin.
“Goodbye, Millie.”
