The woman at my door asked for help as if 10 silent years could be explained away later. She had left me in a wheelchair with our two daughters to chase a better life. I agreed to help, then reached for a battered storybook. Katherine recognized the cover. She had no idea what waited in its margins.
Katherine looked older than the woman who had abandoned us.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Katherine looked older.
Not the faded gray coat or the split leather along one boot. Not the hair she had once kept perfectly highlighted, now tied back with an ordinary black band.
Her face looked tired in places where expensive makeup used to hide.
Amelia stood inside the open doorway, one hand still on the knob.
She was ten and had Katherine’s eyes.
Her face looked tired.
Katherine noticed that too.
“Hello,” she said.
Amelia looked at me over her shoulder.
Greta came down the hallway more slowly. At 13, she remembered nothing clearly about her mother, but she had studied every photograph I kept.
She remembered nothing clearly about her mother.
She stopped beside her sister and folded her arms.
Katherine tried to smile.
Neither girl returned it.
I rolled closer to the door.
“What do you need?”
The question made Katherine glance down at my wheelchair.
“What do you need?”
Ten years earlier, she had looked at it as though it were the lock on a prison cell.
Now she could barely meet my eyes.
“My new husband left,” she said. “There were loans in my name. Credit cards. Business debts I didn’t know about.”
A car passed behind her, throwing pale light across the porch.
“My new husband left.”
“I lost the house last month, Aiden.”
She rubbed her palms together against the cold.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Greta shifted beside me.
Katherine looked toward the girls, but not long enough to learn anything from their faces.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“I only need enough to get back on my feet,” she continued. “A few months’ rent. Food. Maybe help with a deposit.”
She spoke like someone reading from a list she had practiced in the car.
I thought about the night she left.
Greta had been three.
Amelia was six months old and had a fever.
“I only need enough to get back on my feet.”
***
I had been home from rehabilitation for eleven days, still learning how to transfer from the bed to the chair without falling.
Our living room was full of therapy bands, pill bottles, unopened bills, and toys I could not reach from the floor.
Katherine had placed Amelia in my arms.
Then she picked up a suitcase.
Katherine had placed Amelia in my arms.
“I didn’t sign up to be your nurse,” she said.
Greta stood near the couch holding a plastic horse by one leg.
Katherine looked at both children.
“I’m not throwing my life away for the three of you. I’ll find someone who can give me the life I deserve.”
The front door closed before Amelia finished coughing.
“I didn’t sign up to be your nurse.”
For months afterward, Greta asked when Mommy was coming home.
I always answered the same way.
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
