There are three things Susanne Bradshaw knows for sure: 1) Her mother is dead. 2) She has no living relatives. 3) Her last summer before freshman year of college will be spent alone.
But with her mother's death, Susanne learns her family's deepest...
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I parked the Ford Taurus in the empty parking lot of Lone Pine High School, the place where I spent the last four years dodging boys and dreaming of what would come after graduation. It had only been two and a half weeks since I walked across the temporary stage built on the bottle-green, plastic field of the football stadium.
By the time I graduated, what was left of my mother was a sick woman I only recognized because I spent my entire life loving her. The nurses at Yarborough played her a live broadcast of my ceremony, but when I arrived later that night in my long black robe and cap, her dark brown eyes turned shiny from shame.
"Couldn't even see my girl walk," she whispered hoarsely. For a long time, her words sounded cracked, like they were dumped into a blender and melded together by sharp, twirling blades.
I shut off my car engine and threw the keys across the dashboard. In the middle console, a glass pipe, a Bic lighter, and a gram of marijuana were buried beneath car insurance papers, miscellaneous mail and overdue bills. My mom and I liked to pretend neither one of us had the habit of getting high. She hid her stash in her car, and on hot summer days like this, the earthy scent rose up from beneath the hard plastic and blue seat fabric.
I tapped out the black ash into a half-empty Styrofoam cup and pressed the tiny, grinded herb into the bowl. This is, admittedly, not how I imagined my senior summer to begin—still clothed in the stiff, black dress my mother bought me three years ago for a school dance. Back then, I thought it made me edgy to have a dark cloud perpetually floating over my head. Now, I wanted nothing more than to strip off my dress and light it on fire.
My lips wrapped around the rim of the pipe and I fixed the lighter's flame over the green bowl. I was just a handful of inhales away from pushing down my climbing anxiety when a sharp ring echoed through the cab.
I froze, lungs half full of smoke.
Ring, ring, ring.
With each second, the volume climbed higher, forcing me into motion. My hands flew to my back pocket, to my smartphone. A blank screen stared back at me.
Ring, ring, ring.
"Where the hell—" My frustration manifested itself in my words until my searching fingers found the surface of my mother's cardboard box—her things from her hospital. Her cellphone.
I didn't bother to look at the caller I.D., I just slid my thumb over the screen and breathlessly said, "Hello?"
"Susanne!" My mother's sweet, city-fast voice rushed out.
My heart stopped. "M-Momma?" I could barely wrap my lips around the name.
"No, no I'm sorry, fuck," my mother said. "It's Leonora. I apologize, I forget—we sound identical over the phone."
"Oh," I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. "Sorry. That was... stupid of me." She's dead, idiot. "What—what do you want?"
"I want to have a conversation with my niece," she said. I moved my thumb to end the call. "I can only do that if you don't hang up the phone."
