One Kiss for My Last Month novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Fifth of October

The library stacks smelled like dust and old glue.

Mom walked me three rows back, past Biography and Travel, and stopped where the shelves made a narrow corner.

From there, we could see nothing of the reading room but a strip of green carpet.

She knelt on the floor and gripped both my arms.

"Maddy. Tell me you remember."

"Remember what?"

"A gym floor," Mom said. "Field Day. You were in the three-legged race, and you fell, and your lips went blue, and the nurse didn't know what to do."

My mouth opened.

No sound came out.

"The ambulance came at two thirty," she said, and her voice shook. "I was on a bus with a cleaning bucket. They called me at the cleaning job. You were already in surgery."

"Mom."

"I wore a gray cardigan to the hospital. I was still holding the bucket."

I could not feel my hands.

"You remember it," I whispered.

"I remember all of it." Tears ran down her face and she did not wipe them. "I woke up on the third of September, in my own bed, thirty-five years old. I remembered dying in a hospital bed when you were twenty-four."

"I remember that too."

"I know. You were there."

We stared at each other in the dusty light.

"I saw you at the hearing," she said. "I asked myself what in the world I should do, and then the judge called your name, and you looked at me."

"I looked at you."

"You had your grown-up face on. The one from the end." She laughed, wetly. "I'd have known it anywhere. That's when I knew you remembered too."

"Why didn't you say?"

"Because of what you said to me."

I knew exactly what she meant.

I had been twenty-two, in a cold kitchen, with a stack of unpaid bills between us.

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