I went. I made it okay. I was eight, and I made it okay, and I'd been making it okay every day since.
"—and I just don't know, Lyddie, I just don't know what to do anymore, he wasn't always like this, you remember—"
"I know, Mama."
"—before the mine closed he was different, your daddy was a good man—"
"I know."
"But enough about me," Sandra said, and the guilt-pivot was so familiar I could have mouthed the words along with her. "How are you, baby? Are you eating?"
"I'm fine, Mama. Yeah, I'm eating." The sandwich sat on the table in front of me, two bites missing, the bread already going stale at the edges.
"You work too hard. You've always worked too hard. You get that from me, you know."
"Probably," I said and she laughed a small, wet laugh, and then she was back to Phil, back to the lamp, back to the question of whether she should say something to him when he sobered up or let it go the way she always let it go.
"Maybe just give it a day," I said. "Let things settle."
The clock on the staff room wall ticked past one-thirty. My fifteen minutes were gone. Technically, the fifteen minutes I shouldn't have lost were gone too.
"I gotta get back, Mama."
"Oh—oh, of course, honey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to keep you—"
"You didn't. Call me tonight if you need to. Love you."
"Love you too, baby. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."
She would not be fine. She would go back to the house on Clover Fork with its sagging porch and its orange tap water and its cabinet full of Jim Beam bottles she pretended not to see, and tomorrow or the next day Phil would be sorry and gentle and almost the man she kept insisting he used to be, and the cycle would begin again. I knew this the way I knew my own pulse—constant, predictable, inescapable.
I wrapped the sandwich back up, tucked it into the fridge where someone else would eat it by five o'clock, and stood. The headache had spread. It was a band across my forehead, a slow tightening, like someone was cinching a belt around my skull one notch at a time. I dug the Tylenol bottle out of my scrubs pocket and dry-swallowed two tablets, grimacing at the bitter chemical taste that coated my tongue.
I pushed through the staff room door and put on the face. The one I could do in my sleep, the one that saidI'm here, I'm capable, I'm fine.
I was fine.
Thehardwarestorebeneathmy apartment had been closed for two years, but it still smelled like it was open. Sawdust and metal and the memory of paint. I climbed the stairs on the outside of the building—wooden, slightly rotten atthe third step, a problem I'd mentioned to my landlord in March along with the hot water heater and received the same response for both, which was nothing—and let myself in.
Four hundred and seventy-five dollars a month. Almost reasonable until you did the math on what almost reasonable actually cost: the drafts that turned my heating bill into a second rent from November through March, the hot water that had been lukewarm since spring and would probably stay lukewarm until I either fixed it myself or moved, the window in the bedroom that didn't close all the way and let in the sound of the creek and the cold and occasionally a moth. I'd stuffed a towel in the gap. The towel helped with the cold. The moths didn't care.
I lived alone. Not because I liked it, but because living alone meant silence. Real silence. The kind where no one needed anything from me when I walked through the door. No roommate's bad day to absorb. No partner's mood to read and manage and accommodate. Just me and the four walls and the quiet that wasn't peace exactly but was the closest thing to peace I could afford.
The apartment was clean. I'd cleaned it Sunday, my one day off, and by cleaned I meant scrubbed with the thorough, methodical intensity of someone who couldn't control much but could control this. The kitchen counter was bare. The bathroom was spotless. The floor was swept. Everything was in its place because I had put it there and because keeping things in their places was the one form of order available to me.
The rest of it—the furniture, the objects, the accumulation of things that was supposed to indicate a life being lived—told a different story. A secondhand couch from Facebook Marketplace, grey, $40, with a stain on the left cushion that I'd covered with a throw blanket from the Dollar General. A lamp from Walmart, $12.99, the cheapest one without a wobbly base. A shelf of library books—not my books, the library's books,borrowed and due back in two weeks—arranged by size because it looked neater.
There was nothing in this apartment that was mine. Nothing chosen because I loved it. No art on the walls, no colour I'd picked for its own sake, no object sitting on a shelf because it made me happy to look at it. Twenty-two years old. A woman with a favourite colour, presumably. A woman who presumably had preferences and desires and opinions about what made a space feel like home.
If she did, she'd never let them in the door.
I reheated leftover mac and cheese in the microwave and ate standing at the kitchen counter, scrolling through my phone with my free hand. A nurse's habit, you ate where you could, when you could, as fast as you could, and you didn't sit down because sitting down meant you'd have to stand up again.
My mother's text glowed on the screen:
dont worry about me baby ill be fine??
The heart emoji was new. Mama had discovered emojis last year and deployed them with the chaotic enthusiasm of someone who believed a string of tiny pictures could do the emotional work that words couldn't. The heart was supposed to reassure me. It did not reassure me. It sat on my screen like a tiny red lie, cheerful and hollow.
