know what to do. Her emotions were big and loud and subject to change without notice. Mine were quiet and simmering and stewed until they boiled over. I didn’t know how to deal with her big loudness any better than she seemed to know how to deal with me. She wanted to talk. I wanted to listen. And in that, I figured we’d do well enough. So long as she didn’t expect me to talk back.
That pain I’d carried around since Frank died was deep and dull and constant. It was a feeling I knew well, one that I’d had since I was sixteen and motherless, trucking across the country, working odd jobs on farms. I kept quiet and kept my head down. Used my size and strength to keep a roof over my head and my belly full. And when I’d knocked on the old farmhouse door, I’d found a home when I thought I’d never know family again.
Homeless and alone at sixteen, that summer marked the beginning of a new life. Frank brought me into the family in ways I’d never expected or imagined. All I’d wanted was maybe a cot in the barn and a few weeks’ work, but he gave me a home. He gave me hope when I’d convinced myself no such thing existed.
So I did whatever he’d asked, without question. I kept my head down, as I was like to do. But I watched Olivia. We’d both lost our families, both been saved by Frank. Given a home, shown kindness and love. And I spent so long marveling at her unsinkable optimism when there wasn’t an ounce of optimism in me. There was rarely a moment when she wasn’t smiling, never a time when she didn’t find joy where I could find none.
When she found me up in the hayloft that night long ago, staring out the open gable window at the moon, we talked about the losses we shared. Well, she talked. I listened, my heart aching with understanding I couldn’t find the words to express. She’d been younger than I was when my mother died, but when she spoke of her parents’ death, I found myself jealous that she hadn’t seen them go—she was at school when the accident happened, their coffins closed. For years, she said, she expected them to just walk in the door, told herself they were just away and would be back at any time.
And I told her how I’d held my mother’s hand and watched her take her last breath, leaving me alone in the world.
Maybe it was the recognition on her face. Maybe it was the honesty of the tears in her eyes. Maybe I’d never met anyone who understood me until her.
But I kissed her. And that kiss made me wish I’d kissed her the second I met her instead of the night before she left.
She’d never truly returned. And her loss was felt by Frank every single day.
It was me who had found him the day he passed. I heard the crash and rumble as he fell, taking a shelf down with him. A moment was all it took. One flicker and thump of his heart, and the man I’d known faded away in my arms well before the ambulance arrived. But I pumped his chest all the same with Kit at my side, praying to a God I didn’t believe in to save him.
It wasn’t the first time He’d let me down. Watching my mother wither away, neglected in a county hospital bed, I’d prayed. I bargained and begged. But in the end, she was taken from me too. There was no insurance for an immigrant, even if she’d come here seeking refuge from war. There was no compensation for my father dying in a valley in Croatia, and there was no place for me anywhere. There was no quarter for any of us.
So when Mama held my hand with tears in her sunken eyes and begged me to survive, I promised her I would. But it wouldn’t be in the foster system. I didn’t even know what would happen to me if I let them take me, but the fear of deportation to a country I’d never known was enough to set me out on my own. I was young and strong and knew there had to be work for me, if I looked for it.
So I headed west, certain there was a place at the end of the road where I’d