Gwen scanned the stack of papers. Gwen Melissa Frame. "This should be--"
The woman tipped her head to read the name, double checked the driver’s license. "Nope. Got it. Sheila’s done two wrong this week, swapped the first and middle names like she got the job being related to somebody." The woman smirked. "Uncle’s the controller." She tilted her head to look past Gwen. "Next!"
A fuzzy-haired young man stood at Gwen’s shoulder. She could feel him moving her aside as he fished his driver’s license out. She backed up a step to give him room and looked up and down the long hallway at the scarred linoleum and the cork boards already partially covered with announcements. Her hand convulsed once around the papers, ruffling the edges. Somehow, twenty years after she’d left, she’d gone back to U.
Chapter Two
Artificial ingredients should be tossed.
She’d taped the parking permit in the back window of the car even though the whole thing was ridiculous, and she obviously wouldn’t be staying. It was a good thing she’d packed the office supply kit for Missy. Tape was always handy, and if Missy changed her mind and showed up in the morning, Gwen had the tools she needed to white-out her own name and swap the registration back from Gwen Melissa to Melissa Gwen.
At the dorm entrance she took a deep breath, relieved it hadn’t been the same dorm she’d lived in at eighteen. That would have been weird. Thank god what she was doing wasn’t weird at all. She walked towards the front desk and decided that a wreck, the kind her life currently was, required a kind of triage. There were things she wasn’t going to worry about during the emergency she was experiencing.
She wasn’t going to worry about being nearly forty. She wasn’t going to worry about the next day’s orientation or the dorm mixer she could see the perky signs for across the lobby. She wasn’t even going to worry about the poor girl who would soon discover her roommate was old enough to be her mother. The roommate issue fell under the age thing, and she wasn’t going to worry about that. Her focus as she approached the guy behind the desk, who still struggled with acne and rightly so since he was a teenager, would be to worry about being nuts.
"Mother, I’m home." Gwen stood in the middle of the dorm room, holding her phone and studying the right half, already moved into by a girl who’d fled to a sorority party. The other side remained empty because she obviously wouldn’t be unpacking the car with all of Missy’s things in it. Why would she?
"Oh, good. I’m just going to pop on over. After I had my nails done, I picked up that chicken pizza you love."
"The thing is, Mom…" If she couldn’t say the words to her own mother, she definitely couldn’t stay the night. She glanced around the room. Even half empty it felt less lonely than her house. "I’m kind of in a dorm room. At the U."
"I knew Missy would change her mind. Thank God! I kept picturing the kind of waitress get-up a bar, for heaven’s sake, would put those girls in. She’s too young for that business."
Gwen rubbed her finger and thumb along the bridge of her nose, hoping the tension there wouldn’t flare into a headache and that someday her mother would remember her own past with some accuracy. "You worked in a bar for years, mother."
"Oh, just after my divorce."
"Divorces… es." Gwen gave up trying to rub her headache away. "Missy’s not here, Mom. I am. I’m…" She sat down on the bare mattress. "Here."
"Did you find another table, dear?"
"Kind of." She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry or just fall asleep on the second-hand bed like a lucky homeless person. "I found myself enrolled."
"Hmmm."
"Mom?" Gwen waited, but there was no response, no explanation of what her mother was thinking. "What kind of hmm was that?"
Ellen sighed and it sounded worried but warm. "Do you remember when Steve left?"
Did she remember when her husband left? How did anyone forget that? If there was a way to blank it out, she’d have done it. "Of course."
"Gwennie, the day he came for the rest of his clothes, when it was clear that he was really going, you walked into the kitchen and started making that rib roast you know I love. Remember?"