Page 213 of ClickBack

Rae looks at me as if I have said something in another language.

“At the store?”

“I had the opening shift.”

“You were sixteen.”

“There was a baby coming. I knew what the hours paid. I knew how to open the store.”

“Mama.”

“I didn’t know how to go to his funeral.”

I have said the practical part so often that it usually stops there. This time I let myself remember the rest.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of walking your grandmother past those people. Some of them knew about me. I imagined them looking at her and deciding what she had done wrong to raise me. She offered to go, and I decided I knew better than she did what it would cost her.”

Rae looks down at the picture in her lap.

“So she stayed home?”

“She put the dress away and went to work, too.”

I opened the store. While they buried Gavin, I counted the drawer twice. The total came out right both times. I remember wishing someone would buy something so I’d have a reason to count it again.

“You never got to be sad?” Rae asks.

“I was sad.”

“Where?”

The question breaks something I was still trying to hold together. I press my hand over my mouth.

Rae puts the photograph on top of the box. She comes toward me, then stops, angry enough to hesitate and loving me enough to hate the hesitation. I hold out my hand. She takes it.

“You were a child,” she says.

I nod.

“You were.”

“I was.”

She sits beside me while I cry. I want to tell her I’m sorry for that, too, for making her comfort me in the middle of something I did to her. Instead I get myself a tissue from my bag and give her room to move when she needs it.

After a while, she returns to the box.

“Did his family know about me?”

“His aunt knew I was pregnant. We used to meet at her house. She knew how young I was.”

“Did she say anything to him?”

“Not that I ever heard.”

I remember her coming into the store that fall. A small purchase. A paper bag. Her eyes moving over me before she said she was sorry for my situation.

“After he died, she told me his mother had been through enough. She said the kindest thing I could do was carry on like none of it happened.”