She would probably have made her way back to that terrible crate in that terrible neighborhood by now. I could go find her there. Hopefully. But then what? Where would I take her? If I took her to a motel, I would be spending the tiny bit of money I had to find a new place for Etta and me.
Oh, who was I kidding? I had no money to find a new place for Etta and me. But I was going to move all the same. I had really meant it when I said I wanted nothing more to do with my mother.
I had a lot of figuring to do.
When I got to the crate, I could tell someone was inside. I walked over and knocked, strangely confident that we would work this out in no time at all. At least the short-range parts of it.
We could all go to a motel for a couple of nights. She could watch the baby while I found a job. I would just tell her that my mother’s actions had nothing to do with Molly’s welcome with me. In my life.
An old man stuck his head out of the crate. It startled me a few steps backward. He had a long, wispy gray beard, like the old men in fairy tales, and a brown sweater with holes.
“Yes?” he asked. A bit grandly, as though he were answering an actual door. At an actual house.
“Where’s Molly?”
“No idea,” he said. He voice was cigarette-rough and raspy. “Nobody I know has seen her for days.”
“She didn’t come by here this morning?”
“Well, you woke me out of a sound sleep, so it’s hard to say.”
I rummaged around in my purse and found a pen. I had no real paper to write on, but I had a car insurance bill in there, so I used the envelope. I would have to mail it in using a plain envelope.
I wrote down my first name and phone number.
“When she comes back here, will you please call me?”
I held out the paper to him. He only stared at it. As though it were something alien in his life.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Let me just get out my iPhone 6.” His tone of voice rang with sarcasm.
Of course I did not mention that the world had moved quite a way on in iPhone models. That would have been needlessly cruel.
I dug up some change from the bottom of my purse. I had no idea what a pay phone would charge to make a call from the south side to West LA. So I gave him all the quarters I could find. About four dollars’ worth.
“Thank you,” he said.
He took the money. But I had to wave the phone number under his nose to get him to take that, too.
“If she comes back here, do you even give her this spot back?”
Not that I wanted her to keep needing it. I just couldn’t help wondering.
“Finders keepers,” he said.
Then he pulled his head back in and closed the end of the crate.
I walked back to my car, wondering.
Wondering how long it would take him to spend those quarters on food. Or cigarettes, or liquor. If he would bother to find a way to call without the benefit of those quarters if he saw her.
If he would ever see her.
Wondering how long it would take me to find Molly if she had to go to some undetermined new place to squat. If she could be anywhere in the city.
If it was even possible to find her if she could be anywhere.
Wondering if I would ever see Molly again. And, if not, if I would ever forgive myself for the careless way in which I had lost her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Molly: Stupid
It was about two weeks later when I went to see Bodhi—two weeks after Brooke’s mother kicked me out.
When the guard led Bodhi into the visiting room, I swear I didn’t recognize him. He looked like he’d gained about forty pounds, and almost all of it in his cheeks. The cheeks on his face, I mean.
I tried to think how long it had been since he got put in here, but I could only remember that it was the same night as I found Etta. But I had no idea how long ago that had been, and I couldn’t wrap my brain around figuring it out, either. One part of my brain said maybe only a little handful of weeks but it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like something that happened years ago, like maybe in another lifetime or something.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make, even though I’m doing a terrible job at it, is that I thought he couldn’t possibly have been in jail long enough to gain so much weight, but there it was right in front of my eyes. I wondered if they had him on some kind of medication that made him blow up with water weight or if he was going through some other unexpected jail thing like that.
The fact that he wasn’t thin as a whip made him seem less Bodhi-like to me, like something so basic had changed that I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Because never eating and constantly moving had been so much the heart of his Bodhi-ness, and I couldn’t quite figure out who I had standing in front of me without that clue. It was like a guiding star, like the North Star that the sailors used to use to guide their ships, but after it suddenly winked out and stopped shining.
I guess jail changes a person, but that’s only me guessing, because jail was the one terrible thing I’d managed to avoid so far.
Believe it or not, all this was going
