he heard he could get work up here, but the job didn’t pan out, and so he was homeless.” There was a long pause during which Winnie thought he was done discussing the topic, but then he propped his birdlike elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hand. “Did he have a mental illness?”
“That’s none of your business,” Winnie said firmly. She could tell that switching to the mom role had cost her Samuel, because he looked away. She felt immediate regret. Should she have told him that Adam was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that on his twenty-sixth birthday he’d gone missing? The police hadn’t bothered to look for a homeless man, though they’d written up the report for Winnie and then told her to have a nice day.
“They have a very hard time, Samuel,” she offered gently. “Discussing their medical history is highly inappropriate.” But he was giving her that look that made her feel stupid.
“That was like fifteen years ago,” he said. “But it’s fine.”
“Thirteen,” Winnie corrected with a frown. “Don’t age me.” Samuel glanced up to check her face and seemed to relax at the joke. Winnie was sweating beneath her shirt. She hadn’t realized how hard this would be—parenting. People, for some reason, chose only to highlight the good parts: the cute chubby cheeks and cute little socks—not the temper tantrums and lollipop bribery it took to get them in the socks. Winnie tried to relax, softening her voice. “And you’re right. Adam was mentally ill. He also had PTSD from an incident in prison—” Winnie didn’t tell Samuel how violent the incident had actually been “—and he had a personality disorder and a bunch of other stuff.”
“Why did you stop working there?”
“I had you, silly. I wanted to be a mom.”
“Why couldn’t you have done both?” He almost sounded accusatory. She tried to bat the feeling away. She was projecting her own feelings onto her son.
“I...well...I didn’t want to. You remember that Bible story about Hannah you learned in religious studies a few years ago?”
“Yeah, the one where she begs God for a baby because she’s barren and his other wife is having all the kids.”
Barren, Winnie thought. What a word. “Yeah, that one. I felt like Hannah, I guess. I’d been waiting for a baby for so long, praying for one, and then I got you.” Her own simplistic answer irritated her, like things were ever that easy; but Samuel seemed to accept it.
“You could go back,” he said.
Winnie managed a thin smile. She hated talking about Illuminations. She had no feelings of nostalgia when it came to her former workplace. It had been full on relief when she left, and not just because of what had gone down. Counselors at mental health facilities were overworked and underpaid. The thought of taking Samuel’s suggestion made her want to throw up. She remembered running into one of the other case workers, Dan Repper, shortly after she quit. She’d been browsing the stands at the farmers’ market when she’d seen him approach her out the corner of her eye. Winnie had immediately tried to extract herself from the berry-buying, shoving a twenty into the seller’s hand just as Dan’s nasal voice called out to her.
They started speaking just as Winnie propped the crate of blueberries on her hip, and she felt like she moved it from right hip to left at least a dozen times before the conversation was over. Dan told her he’d taken over half of her caseload when she left, split it with Dee since Illuminations was short on counselors. He’d sounded accusatory so Winnie had apologized immediately; she would have sung the apology if it meant getting out of there. But Dan had more to say.
“There’s a woman coming around the office asking for you. She says you were her counselor but won’t give us her name.”
“What does she want?” Winnie tried to keep her voice neutral, smiling at a golden retriever as it paused to sniff the crate she was balancing.
“Your home address.” Dan’s words sank into her brain with cold teeth. Winnie was so shaken she felt like she was shivering in the mid-August heat, and he was going to notice.
“Anyway, Beula at the desk—you remember Beula?” He didn’t wait for her to reply. “She told her that under no circumstances could we give out counselors’ home addresses. The woman said she’d find you herself and walked out.”
Now, Winnie mentally shook herself before answering Samuel’s question. “I