Wolf sucked in a breath, looking up from the journal at his mother in the hospital bed. She’d slept through his entire evening visit this time, but now he had questions.
“Ma,” he said, leaning over the bed so his dark hair fell forward and touched her face. “I need you to wake up. Visiting hours are almost over.”
He’d been shocked to his bones—realizing that he’d never even known his mother’s real name.
Nor, apparently, his own.
“What the hell, Ma? What thehell?”
There came three gentle taps on the door. That was Kate, one of his mom’s nurses. She didn’t even bother sticking her head in anymore, just tapped three times to tell him time was up.
He closed his mother’s diary, straightened, and turned around to pick up his backpack from the reclining chair Nurse Mindy had brought in for him. He’d come to believe over the past seventeen days that nurses were the best human beings on the planet. He didn’t even mind that they made him leavewhen visiting hours ended every night. He was pretty sure they enforced the rules more for his sake than theirs.
He glanced at the clock on the wall, a round black one with a white face. 8:57. His mother, or rather her diary, had just dropped the bombshell of a lifetime on him, and now there was a forced intermission before he could learn anything else—if there was even anything else in the diary to learn.
He leaned down to kiss her cheek, as he did every night.
His mom was pale. She’d always been pale, but now she was white and her face was thin and drawn. She was only forty-four, fourteen years older than he was. The cancer had aged her so much you’d never know.
He’d put a recent photo of her on the bulletin board—skin like Irish cream, freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, orange-red curls framing her face.
Even her hair was losing its color. She was fading before his eyes like a watercolor in the rain.
And he’d never even known her real name. He knew the rest—that she’d been a runaway teen when he was born, that she’d raised him with help from Grandma Sage. It had been just the three of them for as long as he could remember, until Grandma had died in her sleep without warning or fuss twelve years ago, and just the two of them ever since.
“Priscilla Maria Bishop,” he whispered. And he covered her papery, frail hand with his brown one. “I love you, Ma.”
She didn’t respond. She’d been sleeping all afternoon. The nurses had warned him she’d start sleeping more, waking less, until eventually she wouldn’t wake at all.
Straightening, he slid the strap of his canvas bag up over his shoulder, tucked the diary inside, rubbed the small of his back with his free hand, and walked quietly out of the room. He waved to Mindy and Kate at the nurses’ desk, and they returned sad smiles that tried to convey comfort.
And then he headed out to his 1977 Ford truck. The front was still the original light blue, but it had faded to powder-with-rust. He turned the key to crank her up. She coughed a few times, but she started, and he patted the dash and said, “’Atta girl.”
Snowflakes filled his headlight beams all the way back to their simple house in Hobbsville, about fifteen miles north of Borger, Texas, almost to the Oklahoma panhandle. They got a few inches every winter, but it always came as a surprise all the same. It was only November.
His head was full of questions. If his mother’s name wasn’t Travail, then neither was his. Was he a Bishop, then?
What about her piece-of-shit stepfather? Was he still around?
He stepped through the front door and looked around the house they’d shared for more than a decade. They’d moved around constantly when he was growing up, and he’d changed schools at least once a year. But once he’d landed a job on a union construction crew, they’d been able to buy a place of their own, a fixer-upper.
His truck was a fixer-upper too.
Hell, so was hislife.
He wanted answers. And pouring through his mother’s journals didn’t seem likely to give those answers fast enough. So he went to her bedroom.
When he opened the door, he realized he hadn’t been in there since the night he’d taken her to the ER. She hadn’t told him she was terminal. That job had fallen to a stranger, a doctor who knew more about his mother than he did.
It turned out keeping secrets had been a way of life for her, hadn’t it?
Her bed was unmade, just the way it had been when he’d scooped her out of it, taking the blanket with them, wrapping her up along the way to the truck. He looked around, wonderingwhere her secrets might be hidden—besides the diaries, which would take days to read.
Not many options for hiding places in the bedroom. It had been a den, but when she got too weak for the stairs, they’d made it her bedroom. Then later, they’d added the hospital bed, and later the commode and the IV pole. The whole time he’d been expecting her to recover, and wondering why it was taking so long.
He searched under the bed, inside the drawers of her dresser, the nightstand, and the closet. He checked the insides and bottoms of drawers and under the mattress. He felt for loose floorboards and false doors in the walls. He was wondering whether to slice open the mattress when someone knocked at his front door.
The intrusion startled him. When someone came around unexpectedly, it made him nervous. He’d never thought too much about that, but now that he was questioning everything about himself, he realized he’d been raised to be suspicious of strangers by a woman who had something to hide.
