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Good, I remember thinking. Dad won’t have to look too far to find us when he comes for me.
Momma still won’t call him, even though it’s been over a month since that rainy day he drove away.
I hear her crying sometimes, late at night when I’m s’pposed to be sleeping. One time, I crept down the hallway and peeked into the kitchen to find her sitting at the table with a bunch of open mail. She was on the phone, fingers rubbing the curly-cue cord between her fingers.
“That asshole. That fucking asshole,” she was saying.
Bad words. Grown up words.
With one eye poking out from behind the wall, I watched the way her back rose and fell as she broke into sobs.
She was nodding and nodding, and eventually there was a sniffle, and a long sigh. To whoever she was speaking to on the phone, she said, “Yeah, I know. Nothing I can do about it now. I think it’ll be good for both of us. I’m just surprised they left it for me. You know I never wanted to leave Shiloh…but my parents… Yeah, I know. God, how could I’ve been so stupid for so lon?—”
Her voice had cut out, like maybe whoever she was talking to cut her off.
She laughed, and it was a wet, sad, crackled thing. “Thanks, Linda. I’m sorry I didn’t— I know, I know, but I should’ve—” She sighed again. “Thank you.”
And I remember thinking how young she sounded in that moment. Like she wasn’t just my Momma anymore, but someone who needed takin’ care of. Just like Dad said.
It made me forget how mad I was.
“Are you gonna die?” I’d asked her later, after she caught me sneaking back into bed.
She didn’t yell at me for eavesdroppin’. She just tugged on my hand with her much bigger one, and had me sit next to her on top of my rumpled Avengers sheets, holding my hand in both of hers in her lap.
Shaking her head, she said, “What? No. Why would you think that?”
“Dad…he said you couldn’t survive without him.”
Her eyes got big and round at that, and she was shaking her head. “No, kid, no. We’re gonna be just fine without him. Both of us. I promise you.”
The next day she told me we were moving.
Now, Momma’s pulling our car down a long gravel driveway toward a big white house with green shutters and weeds growing all around it. It’s finally stopped raining.
Our new house is so much bigger than our house in New York. And there are no wheels or cinder blocks. No blue tarp covering the corner of the roof where the rain would come in through the kitchen sometimes.
Behind it, over the trees, I can make out the tall, concrete train bridge we’d passed under earlier. Fog hovers around it, slipping through the arches like smoke.
Momma told me it was famous—the biggest of its kind in the world.
I told her it looked haunted, and she laughed, a twinkling, magical thing, sounding lighter than I'd ever heard her.
It made her look real pretty, prettier than she ever looked.
I was bummed Dad was missing it.
That’s when I remembered—again—that I was still mad at her.
“He’s not coming back, Mason!” Momma finally snaps.
“He is too!” I scream back, my voice bouncing off the empty walls and corners of my bedroom.
“He’s not,” she says slowly, eyes pinched at the corners.
“You lie! You lie, you lie?—”
She wraps her arms around me, shushing me.
