AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She died when you were young?”
My fingers loosen on the steering wheel. “I was thirteen…how’d you know?”
“It’s my job. You can usually tell. You have that air about you.”
“Oh.”
“How’d she die?”
“Cancer,” I say, and this isn’t exactly a lie either. My mother did have something eating at her. Something she was powerless to stop from growing. The first time she attempted to end things, I was five. I walked home from kindergarten to find her bleeding out on the bathroom floor.
She was sorry, she said days later when I visited her in the hospital. We didn’t have family, and I assume as usual, my father was nowhere to be found. Thankfully, one of her housekeeping clients was kind enough to take me in.
Ann clears her throat. “Was it quick at least?”
“Not really.”
At first, or rather that first time, it wasn’t so bad. I got to sleep in her client’s daughter’s room while she was away at horse camp. Her bed wasn’t a pallet on the floor like mine. She had a pink, frilly comforter and books. So many books. I could have any of them I wanted, her father said. They were relics, he told me. Classics, but also, his daughter only cared about boys.
“I’m sorry, Sadie,” Ann says. “That must have been hard.”
The second time was hard. I didn’t get to go to the nice people’s house. By then my mother had burned that bridge too. Nothing lasts forever, she’d said, when the woman got wise and fired her, and the books stopped coming. That time, I was eleven, and she hadn’t slit her wrists. I was grateful that at least there wasn’t the blood or the sight of her open flesh. That time, she sat in the garage with the car running. Only she ran out of gas before it killed her.
“It could have been worse,” I say, glancing over at Ann. “She was brave. She died peacefully.”
My mother was still sitting in the car by the time I’d trekked all the way home from school in the rain. She said she hadn’t had enough gas to pick me up but we both knew it was a lie. She’d been weeping for days. She loved him, she swore. He discarded her. He used her, just like the rest of them. He’d never intended to leave his wife. I’d heard it all before. And so on it went.
“No, Sadie,” Ann says taking my hand. “It was you who was brave.”
I don’t pull away, because her hand is soft and warm and she has a point.
For a while after the garage incident, I skipped school to go to work with my mother. In truth, I wanted to keep an eye on her in case she tried anything again. But there was the other issue as well. She was too sad to clean, and we desperately needed the money, so I did it for her. Thankfully, this only lasted a few weeks.
By then, she had a new client, and she was in love again.
The upswing lasted until I was thirteen.
That time, the car didn’t run out of gas. It kept running, and it was still running when I arrived home.
Ann squeezes my hand. “So your father raised you then?”
“Something like that,” I say, and she smiles. Me too, because she leaves it at that, which is better than having to tell the truth. I went straight into foster care. Four months and one black eye later, I disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SADIE
Ann asks about my parents. But she forgets to ask about the most significant relationship of my life, which would make a lot more sense. If she is looking for insight as to who I am, she should have started there.
It wasn’t long after the fight over my weight gain that Ethan started disappearing into the night too. Work was chaotic and stressful, he said. He began coming home later and later. There were major projects, he was climbing the ladder, and it was never quite the right time to slow down.
On weekends he started going to meet-ups with other people he said were interested in bettering themselves. He started mentoring youth through a program at work. He said it made him feel alive. He said he felt young again. Once or twice, he invited me to tag along. By that point, I had become just bitter enough not to take him up on the offer.
Instead, I busied myself by watching the neighbors. I guessed at their problems—at how many of them were just as unhappy and bored as I was. Sometimes I guessed right.
I told my husband about the woman next door that flew into rages and hit her husband. I told him that the family down the street was hiding something. Something big. I learned who was having financial problems and who was relying on substances other than food, trashy TV, and voyeurism to get them through the day. I made it a point to share these things with Ethan just so he could see I wasn’t really that bad.
Sure, we weren’t as happy as we
