I pressed call.
The phone rang and rang and rang. Eight rings before she picked up.
Evelyn.
My mother’s voice was thick with sleep and something else. Annoyance.
Do you know what time it is?
Mom. My voice cracked. There was a fire. My apartment. Mom, I lost everything. I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t
Oh.
A pause. Long empty.
That’s unfortunate.
Unfortunate. Like I’d spilled coffee on my shirt.
I heard rustling, then my stepfather Richard’s voice in the background. Patricia handed him the phone.
Evelyn, what’s going on?
I told him again. The fire, the smoke. Standing on the sidewalk with nothing but my phone and the clothes on my back. I was crying now, I realized. Couldn’t stop.
His response came flat. Final.
This isn’t our problem, Evelyn. You should have been more careful. You’re an adult now.
The line went dead.
I sat there for a long time. Phones still pressed to my ear, listening to silence. The firefighters kept working. Neighbors drifted back inside. The sun started to rise, painting the smoke a sickly orange.
My parents hadn’t asked if I was hurt, hadn’t offered to come, hadn’t said they loved me.
Not our problem.
As the shock slowly hardened into something else, a memory surfaced. My mother standing in my apartment 5 days ago, her first visit in 2 years. She’d shown up unannounced, said she missed me. Walked through every room touching things, asking questions. At the time, I’d been happy, grateful even.
Now, sitting on that curb wrapped in a stranger’s blanket, I wondered,
“Why had she really come?”
I pushed the thought away. It was crazy, paranoid, but the question wouldn’t leave me alone.
Jason Park saved me that first week. My coworker had a spare room and a kind heart. He didn’t ask questions when I showed up at his door at 6:00 a.m. with ash in my hair and nothing but my phone. Just handed me a cup of coffee and said,
“Stay as long as you need.”
3 days later, I finally felt human enough to deal with the insurance. I called my renters’s insurance company, expecting the usual bureaucracy, claim forms, waiting periods. But the customer service rep, Greg, according to his flat Midwestern voice, asked a question that made me pause.
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