For Our 10th Anniversary, My Husband Gave Me a Green Dress and My Sister a Baby novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Box

Nate drove me to Kenmore with one hand on the wheel and the other wrapped around mine.

He parked at the curb behind a news van and cut the engine.

"I'll be right here."

"You don't have to wait."

"I'm not going anywhere, Lena."

I kissed him once, quickly, and walked up the path with my bag.

The front door was unlocked.

My mother sat at the kitchen table in her cardigan. Across from her sat Dolores in the green wool coat, her lipstick fresh and her purse on her knee.

Between them stood a plain shoebox.

Neither woman looked at me.

"Good morning, sweetheart," Dolores said. "Sit. This concerns you."

"It doesn't," my mother said.

"It does now."

I stayed standing.

"What's in the box?"

Dolores lifted the lid with two fingers.

Inside were envelopes.

Dozens of them, cream-colored and bundled with rubber bands by year. Each one bore a single line of handwriting I had known my whole life.

My mother's.

D. Marr.

Dolores lifted one out and fanned it open. Cash, in neat twenties.

"Every first of the month," she said. "For twenty years. Your mother leaves it under my doormat in Lackawanna."

My stomach turned.

"Mom?"

Joan didn't answer.

"She paid my rent when Shelby was six," Dolores said. "Her school fees. A dentist, once, when I couldn't afford one. And she never signed her name or said a word, and I never once got to hate her to her face."

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