Mom sat.
People were still shopping around us. Carts rattled past. Registers beeped.
The manager quietly offered us his office.
Mom shook her head.
“No. Please. I need to hear this now.”
But register six had become its own little world.
Mom stared at the photograph.
“When I got pregnant with you, it was difficult,” she told me.
“I was sick all the time. Your father was working two jobs. We were behind on everything.”
She looked at Helen.
“Anna’s father, Robert, offered to take her for the summer. I said no.”
Then her face crumpled.
“Until one night.”
She had been exhausted.
Anna needed new shoes. The refrigerator had stopped working. Mom had spent the afternoon being sick.
After Anna went to bed, Mom cried in the kitchen.
“I told your father I was scared I couldn’t manage everything once the baby came.”
She looked at me.
“Then I said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to manage both of them.'”
Helen inhaled sharply.
“Mom heard you.”
Margaret looked at her.
“What?”
“She told me that.”
Mom went still.
Helen sat beside her. “She thought you meant her and the baby.”
Mom covered her mouth.
The next morning, 12-year-old Anna announced that she wanted to live with her father.
Mom argued.
Anna insisted.
“I thought she wanted him,” Mom whispered. “I thought maybe she’d reached the age where an aunt wasn’t enough anymore.”
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