her eyebrows to ask if she was okay. Her mother tilted her head to the left. That meant don’t worry. But there was thoughtful concern on her face. Maybe Miguel had done or said something.
“Let me get you a glass of water.” Deziree looked around. “Let me get you all a glass of water.”
They ate more, put on a movie. Deziree excused herself, saying she had to work at the church early tomorrow.
“We’ll keep it down.”
Lena woke up halfway through the movie. Went to her room to get blankets, pillows. Her bag was on the floor, the contents spilled. Someone had gone through it, looking for something.
“I’m being paranoid,” she whispered. No one here would go through her bag. The house was too small and loud for someone to have broken in without them hearing. Lena shook her head. Took all the bedding out to her friends. Covered Tanya’s feet where she slept on the couch, gave Stacy a pillow, paused by Kelly. Looked at him in the white light from the television, his face gentle with sleep. Kelly’s eyelashes were long, his lips looked—were—soft. She put a blanket on him. He took her hand, laced his fingers between hers. Lena exhaled. She relaxed, tried to focus only on his warm hand, how much bigger it was.
On the edge of everything was the terror Lena felt when she fell. She remembered the sounds her mouth made, the way her body refused to do anything she said. The girl walking into the bedroom, the way it still hurt to breathe because her body was bruised from the fall. The three seconds, bullet out of gun, bullet into mother, the spray, the sound of pens on paper. Wasn’t it ridiculous, she felt, how something that had only started in May was crumbling and rearranging so much of who she was, how she was. How could almost three months be so big in proportion to 21 years? Kelly’s breath became slower. Lena let go of his hand, went to her room to sleep.
Her friends left early the next morning. Alone in the house, Lena went back to her grandmother’s shoeboxes. She found a photo, yellowed and square, of her grandmother as a teenager. Miss Toni was holding a book in one hand, a small handful of wildflowers in the other. Long grass obscured her knees. A tree in the background looked familiar. Her grandmother was smiling big enough that you could see the gap between her front teeth. She rarely did that. Lena’s eyes kept cutting to the tree, the grass, the wildflowers. It was a guess, but Lena was almost certain her grandmother was in the meadow near Long Lake.
It wasn’t impossible. Her grandmother had grown up only 30 miles away. It was probably nothing. A trip to the country to see a lake, a meadow crowned in purple clovers and the August wildflowers worth having a picnic in. Maybe she had known—or maybe they were distantly related to—someone in the area. And it was probably nothing: Lakewood was probably just a small mid-Michigan town then. A lot of churches, a lot of donuts, bad winters. Lena’s hands shook as she set the photograph down.
Part 2
22
Dear Tanya,
Yesterday morning, my mom told me to quit my job. She said stay here, we can figure it out, we have savings now. Deziree showed me some research she had done about negotiating medical debt. There was still time, she said, for me to register for classes. We have a cushion. She didn’t know how much we really have. I had only put four thousand dollars in her bank account, and I have a new, separate account that she couldn’t see or access. My mom said she could try to find something real. I take calls and do appointments now in the main office. I have a system that keeps me and everyone else organized. Deziree was talking to me like I was my grandma, like I needed to be convinced. I drank some coffee, ate some fruit, found it in me to say that I liked working at Great Lakes Shipping Company, I liked living in Lakewood. My voice, bordering on content. I don’t want to do it forever, but it’s a good life change. And we’ll be in incredible shape if I can do this for a year.
Your job pays a lot of money, my mother said. I waited for her to continue. I felt suddenly that she knew what I was doing in