Chapter 1: The Bus Station
I dropped my suitcase and knelt beside him.
“Sweetheart, it’s Mom.”
Felix looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. For a moment he didn’t seem to recognize the woman kneeling in front of him. Then his small arms wrapped around my neck and he began to cry the way he had when he was three and had fallen off his tricycle.
“Mommy… you came back.”
My mother, Judith, reached out a trembling hand and touched my face as if checking I was real. My father, Raymond, stared at me with the exhausted relief of a man who had been carrying too much for too long.
I pulled all three of them into my arms right there on the bench, ignoring the stares from people waiting for buses. The plastic bags at their feet held everything they owned. A half-eaten loaf of bread. A few pieces of clothing. My father’s old jacket that I had bought him five years earlier.
I could barely speak.
“What happened?”
My mother’s voice was hoarse.
“Russell said the house was his now. He changed the locks. He said we were no longer welcome. We’ve been here for three days.”
Three days.
My son and my elderly parents had been sleeping at a bus station for three days while I sent money every month for a house I thought was ours.
I held Felix tighter and looked at my father.
“Where is Russell?”
My father shook his head.
“He lives in the house with another woman. A younger one. He told us the money you sent was never for us. It was for him.”
The world narrowed to the sound of buses idling and my son’s quiet crying against my shoulder.
Five years.
Five years of sleeping in a small room beside the laundry, working six days a week, missing every birthday and school play, believing I was building a future for my family.
I kissed the top of Felix’s head and stood up.
“We’re going home,” I said. “All of us.”
My mother’s eyes filled with tears.
“We don’t have a home anymore, Maren.”
May you like
I picked up my suitcase with one hand and my son with the other.
“Yes, we do,” I said. “And I’m going to show Russell exactly who paid for it.”
