“Listen to me very carefully,” she says through gritted teeth. “I am your mother. Do you know what that means? It means your life is mine. I gave it to you. And I am the only thing keeping you alive. Keeping you safe. So thank me for that.”
She’s handing me a way out of our fight, and every other time I have taken it. Every other time I’ve given ground, tried to rebuild a peace between us because it was worth it. Because she was all I had. But I don’t think that’s true anymore.
“What about everything after?” I say. “Huh? You gave me my life, but there’s more to being a mother than that.”
She shakes her head. “Stop it.”
I can’t. Not now, not when I’m finally saying everything that’s been beating in me like blood. “Don’t you know? The shit you do touches me, Mom. It fucking hurts.”
“You think it doesn’t hurt me?” Her eyes are overbright, her hands trembling as she pushes her hair out of her face. “What about that? What about me, Margot?”
As if we haven’t been answering that question my whole life. And that’s all it takes. That’s the whole of my decision, in one heartbeat. Mom, with me in front of her, with me in pain and alone, and she asks, “What about me?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my job to know,” I say. Maybe it should be harder to talk to her like this. But it feels like relief, drifting and cool. “Honestly, Mom, I don’t care.”
I expect some sort of reaction. Some sort of pain, or even my relief mirrored in her. But she only laughs. That same dismissive look on her face as at the end of every fight. I don’t understand how she can swing back and forth so fast, how things can stop mattering to her from one second to the next. “I told you, Margot,” she says. “I’m not doing this. It’s my goddamn lunch break and I’m just not doing this.” She nods to the phone booth, to the Bible and the photograph. “Sell that back to Frank. It’s not worth whatever you paid for it. And we’ll talk about where you got the money later.”
She doesn’t understand what’s just happened. I have to tell myself that as she steps away from me, as she gets into our station wagon and pulls away from the curb. She doesn’t understand that this, this conversation, this rejection—that’s what I needed. I’m ready to leave her.
Even if she did get it, I’m not sure she’d ask me to stay.
I spend the afternoon in Redman’s, don’t go back to the apartment until dark. She’s already asleep when I get there. Doesn’t wake as I sneak into the bedroom to get the rest of my money from under the mattress. Doesn’t wake as I pace through the night in the living room, waiting for dawn.
Nobody but you and me. She doesn’t think that’ll ever change. I didn’t used to either.
When the sun breaks the sky, I know it’s time. I leave three twenties stuck between the pages of the Bible and hide it in one of the cupboards above the stove, the photograph and the rest of the cash safe in my pocket. She’ll find it if she needs it. I can do that, at least.
Outside, the air is just touched with chill. I take my hair down from my braid, let it hang around my shoulders. No phone and no ID, but ahead there’s the lure of the streetlights along the highway. There’s the rush of a passing car, and east or west, wherever it is, that’s where I’m going. Phalene.
five
morning finds me in the back of some guy’s pickup. He passed me on the sidewalk outside the Safeway in Calhoun, and if he’d looked at my bare legs for a half second longer I wouldn’t be here. As it is, he told me I could ride in the cab or climb into the truck bed. I picked the bed.
Johnny—that’s what he said his name is—didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I told him I was looking for Phalene, but he typed it into his phone and said sure, he could drop me in the town center. It startled me, how close it looked on the map. Barely three hours away on the back roads. I expected it to be over in the east, near Omaha, or even out of state, but instead it’s practically next door by Nebraska standards. As if Mom ran as far as she could, and it turned out to be not very far at all.
It’s taken us longer than it should, though. Johnny insisted on a too-long nap at a rest stop just before Crawford, and I spent the whole thing ready to bolt if another truck pulled into the lot. But we’re close now. And here I am, sky fresh and wide overhead as I sink farther into the pile of burlap and tarps and hold tight to a bungee cord Johnny’s got hooked to the side.
Just get to Phalene. Just find Gram. She’ll take care of the rest.
This far northwest, Nebraska’s not as patched-up with farmland. The ground we crossed on the drive seemed layered with long grasses and low, broken hills. Here, it’s starting to level out. Now and then I can spot a house dropped into the middle of nothing a mile or two back from the highway.
Lives going on like nothing happened. I wonder what Mom’s doing at home. Whether she’s noticed that I’m gone. Whether she’s already on her way after me.
I grip the bungee cord so tightly that it cuts into my palm. That’s not happening. Mom’s probably as happy to have lost me as I am to have left. She doesn’t matter anymore. I left her behind. I picked something else.
Gram, and maybe more. Maybe a grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins. The kind of family you see in pictures. As long as Phalene’s still on the horizon, I can wonder, and I can hope.
If I’m remembering the map right, we’re coming in from the east, through what should be fields thick with green. But they’re stripped bare, flattened, with barely the slightest hint of any furrows for planting. Someone used to farm here a long time ago, but there’s nothing more to get out of this land. It’s dead.
The town starts all at once, sprouts from the black earth on either side of what passes for a highway. It’s only been one lane in either direction since Calhoun, but now the pavement starts to fracture and gape, and houses press in, their shapes familiar, like they were all built from the same plans. I let them glaze past me. None of these is Fairhaven, the house I saw in the photograph. This might be Phalene, but it’s not Nielsen land.
After a few blocks the houses drop away and the town opens onto a square. That’s where Johnny leaves me, on the sidewalk in front of a laundromat, his truck’s exhaust sticking to the back of my throat as he disappears.
Late morning. Barely anyone around, and it’s quiet, the air stale as I squint through the sun to get a look at the town. There, laid out like a handkerchief in the center: a park, lush and well kept, with a circle of brick in the middle, where two spigots are spraying out a high arch of water, rainbows ricocheting onto bronze statues of children playing.