The cardboard beneath my back had grown soft from three months of body heat and the occasional leak from the Honda Civic’s sunroof. I pressed my palm against the car window, watching the condensation from my breath fog the glass in small, perfect circles. Outside, the streetlight cast long shadows across the empty parking lot behind the defunct grocery store where I’d been sleeping since October.
My daughter Jane’s voice still echoed in my head from our last phone call. “Just sleep in your car a little longer, Mom. I’m busy with the baby coming and all.
You understand, right?”
I understood more than she knew. The flood had taken everything. My little house on Maple Street, my photographs, my mother’s china, forty years of carefully collected memories.
Insurance covered the structure, but not the life inside it. At 62, I found myself with nothing but a twelve-year-old Honda Civic and the clothes I’d managed to salvage from the muddy wreckage. Jane had seemed sympathetic at first.
“Of course, you can stay with us temporarily, Mom. Just until you get back on your feet.”
But temporary had stretched into uncomfortable, and uncomfortable had become impossible when her husband Frank started leaving passive-aggressive notes about utility bills and grocery costs taped to the refrigerator. The morning I’d finally packed my few belongings back into the Honda, Jane had been feeding 18-month-old Emma breakfast.
She’d barely looked up from the high chair as I explained I’d be staying elsewhere for a while. “That’s probably for the best,” she’d said, wiping mashed banana from Emma’s chin. “Frank’s been stressed about the promotion at work, and you know how he gets when he’s stressed.”
I knew exactly how Frank got when he was stressed.
He got mean. He got entitled. He got comfortable treating me like an unwelcome guest in what had been my temporary home.
Now, lying in the backseat of my car with a winter coat serving as my blanket, I wondered if this was what my mother had felt like in her final years— invisible, inconvenient, easily discarded when love became too much work. My phone buzzed against my chest. A text from Jane.
Hope you’re doing okay. Frank got the promotion. We’re looking at bigger houses now.
Baby number two is due in spring. I stared at the message until the screen went dark, then set the phone aside without responding. She hoped I was doing okay.
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