I would understand if right now, she just wanted to go to bed. Her socks had gotten wet. She needed to borrow some dry ones before she went back down to the van to get the rest of her things and Bowzer.
She didn’t ask if she could bring Bowzer up to my room. The dorm had a strict rule against any kind of pet visitation, but I made no effort to stop her. I couldn’t think or worry about anything besides how very wrong the situation seemed. Why did she suddenly have so little money that she couldn’t even go to a motel? Some secret addiction? I couldn’t imagine it. Gambling? She’d never seemed interested. I wondered how long she’d been out of her apartment and where, up till now, she’d been sleeping. In the van? I could not bring myself to ask her.
I didn’t really have the chance. As soon as she put on my socks, she left to go get Bowzer. She was worried about him, even with his blankets, being down in the van for so long. “I’ll be right back,” she told me, pulling on her hat. Her cream scarf had gotten stained with something, maybe ketchup, since I’d last seen her. “I’ll have him with me, so don’t lock your door.” She stepped into the hallway and glanced back and forth before peeking back at me. “I’ll come up the back stairway. No one will see him. Don’t worry. And he’s all peed and pooped out for the night. I’m sure of it.”
I stood still after she left, staring at my closed door and listening to the vibrating pipes above. I blinked. I shook my head. I tried to come up with a sensible course of action—I would only have a few minutes before she returned. I could call Elise. But there was nothing she could do in San Diego, not tonight, not right now. I could call my father and insist that he help her. I could remind him that though they were no longer married, I was still his daughter, and she was still my mother, and that if he cared for me at all, he must still care for her a little. But that would be a long, loud conversation. My father could, and no doubt would, counter that the divorce—which she had caused—had put a financial strain on him as well, and that he was not responsible for her poor decision-making or whatever it was that had sucked up all her money. He was living simply, he would say. He hadn’t gotten himself into a jam. Any concern for me would be overwhelmed by his refusal to be concerned for her.
And anyway, she would see my calling him as a betrayal. “He wants to see me poor,” she had sniffed to me once, early on. “He wants to punish me. He wants to see me without anything at all.”
I looked at my watch. She’d already been gone two minutes. I searched my room for anything I might not want her to see, as if I were fourteen again, locking my diary out of fear that her obsessive curiosity might get the best of her while she was putting my laundry away. I considered that her priorities were different now, and that she might be just a little too preoccupied with her own troubles to worry about my every thought or decision. Still, I picked up the note Tim had left for me, folded it carefully, and tucked it inside my desk drawer.
When I heard the door to the stairway open, I hurried across the room and peeked out into the hallway. She was jogging toward me, her boots heavy on the carpet, her gait awkward. She had both straps of a duffel bag looped around her neck, and her hands cradled her belly. It was Bowzer, of course, hidden inside her buttoned-up coat; but as she panted toward me, she just looked pregnant. A girl stepped out of her room with a dried green face mask, headed toward the bathroom; she passed my mother with nothing more than a friendly hello.
Once we were in my room again, the door shut safely behind us, she eased Bowzer out from under her coat and set him gently on the spare bed. “There you go,” she whispered. He looked like a little black and gray lamb; his legs were so thin compared to his body. He whimpered, watching her take off her coat. She