Free Return to Me by Justina Chen

my arms, both of us surrounded by a wall of boxes filled with her hopes for our new life here.

Chapter Nine
    T his is what a girl does in crisis. When her world is shattering. When she is cut off from her friends back home because she doesn’t have a landline phone or an Internet connection (her dad didn’t think to add these functions before they moved). And the thick, stone walls block cell phone reception as effectively as they do her mother’s sobs.
    This is what a girl does.
    She goes outside to call the Bookster moms and leaves messages with each one. And because she is afraid to leave her mother alone for too long, she texts her own friends. Then, her boyfriend.
    She ignores the barricade of boxes in the living room that need to be put away.
    She listens to the eerie silence after her mom stops crying. The silence is worse than the crying.
    She falls apart on her own.
    Half an hour later, her mom’s friends haven’t called back. Or her own.
    So she calls her grandfather, the one her father has ironically called unreliable. She leaves a garbled message. The words are unclear, but the intent is not:
SOS. Your daughter needs you.
    Because he does not answer, she rings her grandmother, the one she hasn’t seen in two years, maybe three. She doesn’t leave a message, because what words can bridge the gap of silence between them?
    And then, because she has no one else to call, she phones a neighbor.
    A neighbor her mom bribed at Starbucks to be her friend. A neighbor she’s met three times.
    A neighbor whose last name she’s forgotten or perhaps has yet to learn.
    The neighbor flies into her house a mere five minutes later.
    The neighbor takes one look at her and says,
Lie down, honey. I’ll take care of this
.
    The neighbor sprints upstairs to her mom’s bedroom. And opens the door. And says, “Oh, Elizabeth.”
    Elizabeth? Since when had her mom started going by her full name?
    The girl asks herself what else about her parents doesn’t she know?
    But then the neighbor tells her mom that Thom is a jerk. That all men lose their brains in their forties.
    The neighbor says go meet him. Figure out what’s really happening.
    The neighbor picks the place to meet—a private bar in a hotel not far from here.
    The neighbor says,
You won’t know anyone there.
    The neighbor says,
I’ll drive you and wait in the parking lot. However long it takes.
    The neighbor says,
Pull yourself together. You are strong. You must be strong for your kids.
    The neighbor leads her mom downstairs and puts her cell phone in her hand. The neighbor says,
Call him.
The neighbor opens the front door.
    The neighbor says,
Fight.

Chapter Ten
    A round six, in lieu of dinner, Mom filled her white ceramic cup with water and placed it in the microwave. Watching the carousel spin, I had a sudden image of Reid, me, and Mom, our threesome whirling aimlessly while we waited for Dad to return home to us. I tiptoed to her, though I don’t know why. She always knew when I was near.
    “Mom, what did Dad say?” I asked gingerly.
    “Do you want some tea?” she asked, as if we were in the middle of an entirely different, entirely meaningless conversation. I trembled despite wearing a thick fleece jacket. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how much of my shivering was due to my being sick or my being in shock.
    “Not really,” I said.
    “Okay, that’s good, actually. I don’t even know where Thom is.”
    “What?”
    “Tea. I don’t know where your favorite tea is.”
    We both heard the inadvertent slip of Mom’s tongue. Worse, we both knew exactly where Dad was: precisely where he had been these last few months when he was living “on his own” in Manhattan. Disheartened, I sat down at the kitchen table, where I found Mom’s ubiquitous list on her clipboard:
Call Schwab and Wells Fargo, contact divorce lawyer…
    Divorce lawyer?
    My nausea now had nothing to do with the flu. Honestly, what kind of ice-pick woman discovers her husband has been