“But where is he?” Rebecca pressed. “Does he know about me?”
A pause. The needle went in and out of the fabric. “He knew,” Victoria said very quietly. “He chose not to stay.”
Rebecca had not fully understood it then. She was 6. But she had understood the feeling. The way her mother’s shoulders dropped slightly when she said those words. The way she set the dress down for a moment and pressed her lips together before picking it up again.
She understood it better as she got older.
And when she was 16, her mother became sick.
It came quickly. That was the thing about it. One week Victoria had a cough. The next week she was tired in a way sleep did not fix. By the third week, she could not get out of bed.
A neighbor took them to the hospital, and the doctor spoke in a low voice that Rebecca was not supposed to hear, but did. She sat outside the ward on a hard plastic chair and stared at the floor and felt the world rearranging itself around her into a shape she did not want.
Her mother died on a quiet Tuesday morning.