The Girl They Forgot to Love novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Gray Honda

I crossed the lot with the phone still at my ear.

My mother ended the call before I reached her.

We stopped an arm's length apart under the nail salon's buzzing sign.

She was smaller than I had pictured. Her hair had gone gray at the temples, and she wore a man's canvas jacket.

"You're so tall," she said, and then looked ashamed of it.

"I'm five six."

"You were this big." She held her hand at her hip. "You were wearing a yellow hat."

I had the shoebox under my arm. I didn't say anything.

"Can I sit in your car?" she asked. "The heater in mine died in November."

I let her into the Civic. We sat with the duffel bag between us in the back seat and the dashboard glowing.

She looked at the shoebox on my knees.

"Is that it?" she said. "The hat?"

I opened the lid. The yellow rubber had cracked along the brim.

She touched it with one finger and shut her eyes.

"I bought that the week before I left," she said. "It was sixty cents at a church sale. You wouldn't take it off, not even in the bath."

"I wore it every day until I was seven."

"I know. Your father mailed me one photo of it, once. I thought I'd die of it."

I asked what I'd been afraid to ask for twenty years.

"Why did you leave?"

She didn't look away, and I will give her that.

"I wasn't well after you were born," she said. "I stopped sleeping. I cried at the stove. Your father took me to a hospital his friends ran, and I stayed five weeks.

"When I came out, there were lawyers in the house. I signed what they put in front of me, because he said it was only until I was steady."

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