“But you have to drive in the morning. And besides, you came all the way out here just to see if my mom would take me back and that’s more than anybody has tried to do for me for a really long time.”
Also because I wanted to be really helpful and agreeable, and good to have around, so she’d want to keep me and help me even more, but I didn’t say that. I also didn’t say the last reason—or at least the last reason I knew about—which was that now I actually knew her well enough and liked her well enough that I cared about how she felt.
“I shouldn’t put it on you,” she said. “But I’m going to take you up on it. Because I really need the help tonight.”
“I know you do,” I said.
And then, after that, other than the stuff she had to say to the motel desk clerk, we didn’t talk for a really long time.
She took an extra-long shower, which I can relate to. I didn’t take one that night, because I didn’t want her to have to look after the baby, but I know how good that can feel.
When she came out, in pajamas, and with a hotel towel wrapped around her wet hair, Etta and I were out on the little balcony playing with her toys.
Etta was a little amped up from sleeping all day, so she was running around in sort of a squished circle in that little space. There was a railing and all, though, so it was safe enough. I had almost everything Brooke had brought for her to wear on her at once. Two pairs of leggings, one on top of the other, and a shirt with a sweater and her jacket, because it gets cold at night in the desert. Then I had a blanket from one of the two beds wrapped around her shoulders, but when she started running it flapped out like a cape, which made her look like some kind of tiny superhero.
Brooke came to the sliding glass door and looked out at us, and she had this look on her face like we were the cutest things she’d ever seen in her life. But then, after I got all happy about that for a minute, I decided she was only thinking that about her daughter.
She slid the door open.
“What are you doing out there?” she asked me.
“So you can sleep,” I said. “She’s not in much of a mood to be quiet.”
She got this really nice look on her face, like she was touched by what I said, and Etta stopped running for, like, a split second, and Brooke came out and kissed her on the top of her hair. And then, before she went back inside, she took my head in both her hands and kissed me on the top of my hair, too. Like we were both her daughters.
Then she went back inside.
I watched through the glass while she got ready for bed, and I could still feel where her hands had been on my head and where her lips kissed me. I started thinking what it would be like if Brooke were my mother instead. I’d have another, even littler, sister to look after, and I wouldn’t have to be homeless, and if I came out to her, which I already had, she would just say she couldn’t care less. So long as I was happy she wouldn’t care how I was happy.
But then I made myself stop thinking about it, because those kinds of ideas can set you up for a long fall. You have to be careful what you want and how much you want it, because I knew there were people who usually got what they wanted, and I didn’t seem to be one of them.
So then it was the next morning and we were driving, and we hadn’t said much over breakfast, and we still weren’t saying much. We were going to get home that day, whatever a home was in my case, and she knew it and I knew it, and I didn’t know what that meant for me. I think she didn’t either, and I think maybe that’s what was making it so quiet in that car.
Even Etta was quiet, and I knew she was awake so far.
I’d been looking out the window for a long time, even though there wasn’t much out there—just flat California desert and clouds that looked kind of puffy and nice.
Then I looked over at Brooke and she was crying.
There wasn’t any sound to it—she wasn’t sobbing or anything. It was just these quiet tears running down her face and dripping off her chin. I could see where they’d been landing on her shirt, leaving all these little dark spots.
“What?” I said. “What happened?”
For a long time she didn’t say anything at all, like she wasn’t even home in there, like she hadn’t even heard me, and that scared me a little.
Then she opened her mouth, and still nothing.
And then after a while of that she said, “I’m so sorry, Molly.”
“About what?”
“I didn’t believe you. I thought you did something terrible that made your mother decide to throw you out of the house.”
“I know you did,” I said.
If it had been any earlier I would’ve been mad when I said it, because I already knew she believed that, and as long as I’d known it I’d always minded it a lot. But now she was crying about it, so once you’ve made a mistake like that you really can’t do much better than to be sorry about it.
“I needed to,” she said. “I needed to believe that it could only happen if you’d done something truly horrible. Violence against a family member or something unacceptable like that. Why did I do that, though? Why did I need to make it your fault?”
“Because then it could never happen to you,” I said.
I’m not stupid. I’m
