She didn’t even turn on the light, though it was raining out, and only the faint gray of an overcast sunrise glowed around the window shade.
When she noticed me watching her, she put her hand to her throat, startled. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t want him to have to wait.”
“Why are you whispering?”
She was already buttoning Bowzer under her coat. He gave me one last confused look before his eyes and snout disappeared.
“Because you were sleeping.” She was still whispering. “What time is your first class?”
“Nine,” I said, lying. I only had a conference with my English professor at eleven, nothing before that. I rubbed my eyes and squinted at her, trying to think what other people would think when they saw her in the hallway, or down in the lobby. She didn’t look pregnant now. She looked like she was hiding something lumpy.
“You’ve got to be careful, Mom. You can’t just take him out on the front lawn. Seriously. I could lose my job.”
“I know.” She patted the pockets of her coat. “I’ll take him back down the stairs to the van, and then drive to a park or something.” She blew me a kiss. “And I’ll make my bed when I come back. I’ll make yours, too, okay?”
“It’s raining,” I said.
“I know.”
When she turned to go, she walked into my metal trash can, knocking it on its side. She put her hands to ears, wincing.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Without waiting for my response, she stepped out into the hallway, shutting the door behind her so softly I worried she hadn’t closed it at all.
When I got back from the shower, there was a message on my phone from Tim. He got home okay, he said, and he wanted me to think about where I wanted to go for dinner, because anything was good with him; he just wanted to see me. His voice was always scratchy in the morning, deep and warm. “Love you,” he said, before he hung up. There was a pause before he said it, not a hesitation, but more of a deliberate wait, as if he knew very well what he wanted to say, but just wanted to think about it first.
I sat on my bed, my hair dripping wet, my phone tucked under my chin. I didn’t want to do anything. I might have sat there for a very long time if I hadn’t been worried about my mother coming back. She’d been out with Bowzer for almost half an hour.
I texted him. “In hurry. 72 night is good. CU then.”
I stared at the message before I sent it, making sure it was what I wanted. It was good: I wasn’t lying, but he wouldn’t spend the day worried. There was no need for a buildup. I would just tell him. And then I would lose my best friend and the only part of my life that, in the last year, had felt consistent and certain. I would feel better, maybe, after it was over, after it was all settled and done.
I was just putting on my coat to leave when she burst back into the room, the hood of her coat dripping wet and pulled up over her hair. The ketchup stain was front and center on the knot of her cream-colored scarf. She was pink in the face and breathing hard—worn out, I suppose, from climbing seven flights of stairs with a medium-sized dog under her coat. She also had a white paper bag, rolled over at the top, tucked under one of her arms. When she set Bowzer down, the bag fell on the floor. She looked at it and laughed in a way that seemed unhappy.
“Breakfast,” she said finally, leaning against the wall. “Bagels. I was going to get coffee, but I didn’t see how I would get it up here. Sorry. And you like strawberry jelly, right? On top of the cream cheese? I had them do it like that. They thought it was weird. But they did it.”
“Oh,” I said. Bowzer started sniffing around the bag, and I bent over to pick it up. “Thanks. But you know, I can pick up a bagel whenever I want at the dining hall, and it’s right on my way to class. You should save your money.”
She was still out of breath, not saying anything, but I could tell, just from her face, that I had said the wrong thing. My cell phone rang. I took it out of my bag and