When I got home, my mother was in the living room. Watching TV. Blaring the volume, as always.
When she saw me, she hit the mute button. The silence felt stunning.
“Where have you been?” she asked. Her voice was loud and hard. As it usually was, but even more so.
“I just had dinner with a friend.”
She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
My gut instinct was to run. Trot up to my room and leave her behind. I didn’t. I sat on the couch with her. She was clearly taken aback.
“I just wanted to tell you something,” I said. And paused. My voice was soft, and I watched her face change as a result of it. Become even less comfortable. My mother liked the familiar. Conflict was familiar. This moment was not. “I wanted to tell you . . . thank you. For being a better mother than some. Making sure I had a roof over my head all those years.”
“And now,” she said.
“Yes. And now.”
She continued to study my face for clues. Clues to what, I had no idea.
“You’ve been drinking,” she said.
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was a bitter sort of laughter. I couldn’t believe communication with her was so impossible. Even when I was sincere, and really trying.
“I have not been drinking.”
“Let me smell your breath.”
I leaned over and breathed into her face. She sniffed audibly.
“You’re on drugs,” she said.
I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. It was all so absurd.
“How can you even say that?” I asked. “Are things really so horrible between us that you can’t believe I would say thank you for putting a roof over my head?”
“Well, you never did before. And you’re laughing like a fool when nothing is funny. What’s so darned funny? Nothing that I can see.”
“Us,” I said.
We sat in silence for a moment.
Then I went upstairs, checked in on my sleeping baby, and put myself to bed.
While I was waiting for sleep, I tried not to imagine how it would feel to sleep in a crate with openings between the slats. In a bad neighborhood. In the dark and cold. Alone. At age sixteen.
Chapter Sixteen
Molly: Different Kind of Home
It was a day or two later, and I was just minding my own business, going out in the morning looking for stuff to recycle. The sun wasn’t really on me yet, because it was early, and it was cold, and I didn’t have anything like a jacket.
I was thinking I’d have to take money out of Bodhi’s wallet and buy something when we got into the really deep, cold part of winter. Better LA than Utah, but it was still cold enough that you needed some kind of jacket.
For the first block everything was okay, but then I noticed how a car was following me.
I turned a corner, kind of fast, and did a quick look over my shoulder. I sort of looked and tried to pretend I wasn’t looking at the same time. Then I looked where I was going again, but I heard the car turn the corner behind me, so I walked faster. And while I did that, I was sort of reacting to what I’d seen in my brain, almost like I looked so fast that I didn’t really see what I saw until a second later.
It was a real nice car, as in a luxury car like rich people have, but it had the craziest paint job I’d ever seen. This midnight-blue base, but then half the hood was yellow. And not an exact half, either. Not with a ruler right down the middle. I mean like somebody was spraying yellow paint over the hood of this really nice car and then just changed their mind for some reason.
Right around the time I was thinking that made the person following me some kind of insane freak, I heard somebody call my name. I jumped a mile.
“Molly!”
It was a lady’s voice, so just for a second I didn’t run.
I stopped and turned around, and it was that Brooke lady, the one whose baby I found. I couldn’t believe she was driving that crazy car. The last time I’d seen her, when she took me out and bought me turkey and mashed potatoes and pie, she’d been driving a different car. The other one was old and not a luxury car and not what a rich person would drive at all, but at least it had a normal paint job.
She had her window down, so I walked right up to her driver’s side door, which meant I had to walk out into the street, but there was nobody coming because there was nobody else out at that hour.
The whole driver’s side of the car was yellow, and a nice, neat yellow, too, like a real paint job. Like if you only saw the car from where I was standing you’d almost think it was a perfectly normal bright-yellow car. If you didn’t look at the hood. And if there even is such a thing.
“Did you talk to my social worker?” I asked her right off the bat, before she even had time to say anything, because if she hadn’t done that one simple little thing for me then I didn’t want to hear whatever she’d come to say.
“Yes.”
“Is it good news? Will I like it?”
“No.”
I turned and walked away again. Up onto the sidewalk and back to my normal route past all the trash bins that might’ve had bottles or cans. I didn’t know why she came and I didn’t really want to hear why, because I was mad.
I could hear her driving along behind me.
“Molly!” she called again.
And this time, because now both her windows were down, I heard the baby girl in the back seat, and she was calling my name, too. It was a little bit quiet, but I could hear her saying “Molly, Molly, Molly,” and it melted all my mad away. I could just feel it turn
