Abby
“Now, who is this you’re talking about?” Darlene asks. Her eyelids flutter open and then close again.
“My mother,” I say. “But what did you mean about what happened on this ship a few months ago?”
She completely ignores my question, but maybe she’s hard of hearing. Or maybe she’s like my Grammy was before she passed, and her memory has given out. “It didn’t sound like your mother…”
“She wasn’t like most mothers,” I say. “At night, she didn’t read me fables or fairy tales. She read me travel brochures.”
“How strange,” Darlene remarks. But it wasn’t strange. The diner where she worked kept them in one of those file stands at the entrance. I used to help put them back in place whenever I had to tag along with Mom to work, which was a lot.
“In my day, a woman’s place was in the home
