Then she sits down across from me as one adult might sit down across from another, her legs crossed, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. “So, Miss Murphy,” she says, “what would you like to know about your mother?”
I know I can’t ask her the first questions that jump to the tip of my tongue: Where is she? Why did she leave me behind? Does she still love me?
Instead, I ask, “How do you know my ma?”
Miss Joe lets out a laugh I’m not expecting, one so loud that it makes me jump in my seat. For a second, I think she’s laughing at me, but then I realize that she’s laughing because she can’t contain the joy that spreads through her. Watching that joy is like watching a piece of paper catch fire. It’s like she might as well be sitting with my mother again, and they’re laughing together over a joke, the funniest thing either of them had heard all year, though I get the feeling they heard something that funny every single day. Miss Joe stares at the ceiling brightly, filled to the brim with memories. “We were the closest friends. Miss Doreen Hendricks, yes, and me, Miss Loretta Joseph. We would pretend we were twins, even though we looked nothing alike, and we had our own secret language that no one was allowed to know but us, and we read books together, side by side, and as we read, we would decide that we were Janie and Pheoby, Anne and Diana, Elizabeth and Charlotte. I always let her be the star, while I was the star’s best friend.”
I don’t know any of these people, but Miss Joe seems not to notice, because she keeps talking.
“You couldn’t find one of us without the other. We even said we would marry each other,” she says. “This house you sit in now was my mother’s house at the time, and we decided that your mother would come here to live with me once we were finished with school. Then your mother met your father, and time got in between us, and we were not as close as friends as we once were, though we would still speak on the phone on each other’s birthdays and on Christmas each year—for hours and hours, and it’d be like not a day had passed.”
I have a surge of anger toward my dad. I bite my lip to keep my anger to myself, but I don’t have to say anything—Miss Joe seems to see what I’m feeling. “No, this wasn’t your father’s fault,” she says. “You’ll see. Sometimes, friendships don’t last, and it’s not anyone’s fault in particular. That’s just the way it is.”
Miss Joe holds her hands together. “I know that you would like to see your mother again, Miss Murphy,” Miss Joe says, “and I know that it must be difficult to be without her—but I also know that she wouldn’t have left without a reason.”
I want to ask Miss Joe what reason my mother could possibly have—and ask how Miss Joe could possibly know—but instead, I frown at the dirty plate sitting in my lap, my head bowed, saying nothing at all. The most burning question I have is why Miss Joe would want to tell me something like that.
“I’m worried about you,” she says, “and I want you to learn how to keep on going without her. Every little girl needs her mother, but sometimes that is how life is—life can’t afford us everything that we want or need, so while you might not have a mother, you have a father who loves you very much, and a home and food and clothes and—” She stops herself, and she’s leaning in while she’s looking at me, with an expression on her face that suggests she needs nothing more than for me to understand. “Miss Murphy, you need to learn to live without her. Do you think you can do that?”
I tell her yes—of course I tell her yes, because I’m not an idiot. My dad must’ve spoken to Miss Joe, and together, they decided to sit me down—lie to me, get me to stop asking questions. Maybe my dad even figured out what I’ve been doing, that I’ve been planning on taking his boat, and they want me to give up on looking for my mother. There’s just no way that’s going to happen, because even if my dad and Miss Joe are fine with letting go of people they love, I’m not. And I never will be.
Miss Joe keeps talking to me, but my side of the conversation has long since been over, and I suppose she realizes this on her own, because it’s not very much time after she takes me back to waterfront in her red pickup truck with the stack of books she’s given me, and hands me ten US dollars to get back on the ferry and arrive home, where my father sits in the living room, waiting for me.
I know that I will somehow have to find my mother on my own. I can’t ask anything else about her. I have to pretend that I’m moving on and learning to live without her, because if I don’t, I know exactly what will happen: My father will be ready to lie, ready to beat back my questions. He won’t have his guard down ever again. I decide then that I will never mention my mother to him—but all the while I’ll continue my search in secret, and when the moment is right, I’ll yank the truth right out of him.
In the morning, after he’s gone to work but before I’ve gone to school, I open his yellowing and splintering bedroom door. There’s nothing at all special about the door itself, except that it has been the same door to
