and she moves the most important ones last: her Glock 19, its holster, and a box of rounds.
By the time the sun sets Mona is richer than she’s been in years. Not only does she have over a thousand dollars, she now owns a flashy car, a box of her mother’s papers and photos, and a goddamn house in New Mexico.
She sits in the driver’s seat and does some thinking.
Eleven days left. Maybe fewer. She’ll have to seriously book it.
That night at the motel she orders takeout from a barbecue joint and sits on the bed eating and reading her mother’s things. Lots of them—most of them—she doesn’t understand. They look like data reports from some old computer system—the kind, she imagines, whose screen is rendered in black with dark green letters. There are reams and reams and reams of data, and sometimes there are words but she doesn’t understand a damn lick of it—“cosmic bruising” gets tossed around a lot, as well as “aphasic,” and there’s a lot of talk about “binary states,” which Mona doesn’t get. There are also some other papers, interoffice memos, all of which originate from the same laboratory: CNLO, Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory, whose name is always paired with the same corporate logo, an atomic model of an element (hydrogen, Mona guesses) encased in a drop of water, or possibly a ray of light.
And it appears her mother was once employed there, probably as some sort of engineer. She sees “Alvarez” on several of the memos, even “Dr. Alvarez.” Mona’s been getting surprised all day, but this surprises her most of all: she cannot imagine her mother having a PhD in anything, especially advanced stuff like this.
She looks at a few old family photos from her father’s belongings. The one she lingers on the most was taken in front of their old cinder-block house. The house is as small and white and drab as she remembers, drenched in sun and dust. Mona, Earl, and her mother stand before the front door, smiling a little, a snapshot taken on the way to church. Mona cannot imagine who took the picture—maybe a neighbor?—but even in this moment, early in their family’s history, Mona thinks she can detect some brittleness in her mother’s eyes, something ready to break.
Mona can still remember the last time she saw her mother. Alive, that is. It took place right there, on that step in the photo. She remembers the hot, red day when her mother ventured out onto that front step—her first time outside in months—and called to Mona, playing in the yard, hardly seven years old. Her mother was wearing a teal bathrobe and her hair was wet, and Mona remembers how embarrassed she was when the wind rose and the bottom of her mother’s bathrobe lifted up and Mona saw coarse pubic hair and realized her mother was nude under that robe, just naked as a jaybird. Her mother called to her to come, and when Mona obeyed her mother knelt and whispered into Mona’s ear that she loved her, she loved her more than anything, but she couldn’t stay here, and she was so sorry. She couldn’t stay because she was not from here, not really, she was from somewhere else, and she had to go back now. Mona, terrified, asked where it was, and was it close and could she visit, and her mother whispered that no, no, it was far, far away, but she said not to worry, everything would be fine; one day she would come and get her little girl and everything would be fine. Then her mother said to stay in the yard, to just stay there until the ambulance came and took care of everything, and with one last profession of love she kissed Mona and walked back inside.
Mona’s last memory of her mother is of her walking down the long, dark hallway, teetering uneasily on pale, skinny legs, her hands mindlessly probing her ears. After that, though Mona was not there to see it (having minded her mother), Laura Bright wrapped her head in two towels, climbed into the bathtub, shut the curtain, put her husband’s shotgun to her chin, and painted the aquamarine tiles of the shower with the wet, simple matter that composed her mind and soul.
Judging from her mother’s preparations, she had evidently tried to make a clean job of it, but the grout kept a pink stain that never went away, no matter how her father