Chapter 4
Behind me, I could still hear the party going uninterrupted, like the ground hadn’t just shifted under all of us.
There was a diner three blocks away, a little place called Marlene’s with a chrome counter and a bell on the door.
Dany cheered up on the walk, swinging our joined hands. Inside, a waitress with kind eyes and a name tag that said MARLENE took one look at my boy and treated him like he was the most important customer she’d ever had.
She brought him his own basket of fries, and when he’d nearly finished, she came back and set down a second basket without being asked.
“These are all yours, too, sweetheart,” she said. “Refills are on me.”
Dany grinned up at her like the sun had come out.
He got more warmth from a stranger in an apron in ten minutes than he’d gotten from his own blood in five years.
I sat across from him and watched him be a happy kid. I felt something loosen in my shoulders that I hadn’t known was clenched.
Then my phone buzzed on the sticky diner table.
A missed call.
My mother.
May you like
By the time we got home and I’d given Dany a bath and put him to bed, my mother had called eleven times. I sat in the dark of my bedroom and listened to the voicemails pile up.
You could hear the whole story of who my mother is just in the order of them.
