“What happened?” she asked.
“Owen left something at school,” I said. “His teacher found it. She said it has my name on it.”
My mother’s expression shifted into something I can only describe as a mother’s understanding — that particular look of someone who has sat with enough grief to know when a moment is different from other moments, and who doesn’t look away from it.
She didn’t ask any more questions. She handed me my keys.
At the first red light on the way to the school, I looked at the small wooden bird hanging from my rearview mirror. Owen had made it in shop class for Mother’s Day the previous spring, about four months before everything fell apart. The wings were slightly uneven. The beak curved in the wrong direction. It was, objectively, a lopsided little bird.
I had told him it was beautiful.
He had rolled his eyes with the theatrical exhaustion of a thirteen-year-old who has been caught being touched by something. “Mom,” he said, “you are legally required to say that.”
I started crying at the red light. Not quietly — the kind of crying that takes over your whole body for thirty seconds and then releases you, wrung out and a little cleaner.
By the time I pulled into the school parking lot, I had wiped my face and steadied myself.
The building looked exactly the same as it always had. That was somehow the hardest part — the way the world continued to look like itself.
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