Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,75

my hands. I thought of ripping the letter up.

My mother was gone.

I did not want to lose my father.

I did not want to believe her.

I wanted to find Kel Keller and tell him—Dad, Mom is dead. To say those words. Dad. Is what I always called him in my mind. He was Daddy to me when I was small. I remember it. I know I do.

I’ll find him and ask him, I thought.

I had never met Arthur Opp and all I could think of was that I didn’t want to. Arthur Opp to me was a secret that my mother and I had between us, a joke nearly, something we shared happily whenever a letter from him came. Her secret admirer. He was magical. He existed in my mind like Santa Claus. He was not supposed to be real and he certainly was not supposed to be my father.

I felt a slowing down of my body and a coldening of my veins. I read the letter again and tried to think of everything I ever knew about Kel Keller, my mother’s ex-husband, and tried to see in my mind’s eye the pictures that I saw of him growing up. I couldn’t imagine him as anyone but my father.

The worst part was having to tell Officer Connor what had happened, when he came back into the room.

My mother died, I said to him, and it was puzzling to me to say those words aloud.

Just . . . now? asked Officer Connor.

I nodded, and then I put my head down on the table so he could not see, but he came around the table and put one hand on my shoulder and I wanted for him to leave it there forever, to feel the protection of his hand on my shoulder for the rest of my life.

They brought in a man to set bail and then took me outside. They drove me to three ATMs and I had just enough. But there’s nothing left for me now, barely anything at all.

There are decisions I have to make, said the hospital. What to do with her body.

Her body. Her body.

When I left it was early evening and I had nowhere to go. They let me out on my own because I’m eighteen. They had towed my car to the station’s parking lot and I owed them money for that and it would all be on some big huge bill that they’d hit me with later.

Where are you gonna go, baby? asked the woman at the desk when they signed me out. She was nice and older.

Home, I said, but the word sounded wrong.

I stood out on the front steps of the police station. It was cold but the rain had stopped. On the street, expensive cars went by slowly, and their drivers stared.

I pull up outside my mother’s house. I think of her on the steps outside, as she was on good days. Once she pulled me in between her knees and sat me down and leaned her elbows on my shoulders. This was when I was small enough not to protest.

You’re getting so grown-up, said my mother. I was maybe ten.

No I’m not, I said, because I did not want to be. I always had a feeling that things would start to go wrong when I got older.

There was a drink she used to make: lemonade and iced tea mixed together. I have heard this called an Arnold Palmer, but she always called it iced lemon.

She put rum in it when I was older but when I was younger she drank it plain, we both did, and we sometimes sat out on the steps, and in these moments I felt happy.

At the top of the steps I put my key in the lock and turn it.

Inside it is freezing and strange. The sun has set. I flip the switch to my left and nothing happens. The electricity has probably been shut off. This happened whenever she forgot to pay the bill while I was growing up. Until finally I took responsibility for it when I was older. But the first time it happened, when I was little, we made a game of it, my mother and I: we put a blanket on the floor and used two little flashlights to light our way. The only kind of candles she had were birthday candles, the little ones, so she stuck plenty of these into a pot full of dirt that used to be