Free The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel by Manuel Gonzales Page B

around looking for Sarah’s mother. She gave Sarah a bath and gave her a T-shirt to wear as pajamas, too big and wonderfully soft and thin, and then she read to Sarah from
A Wrinkle in Time
—“One of my favorites when I was a girl”—and then she tucked Sarah into her big, fluffy bed and told her, “In the morning, guess what? You’ll wake up in your own bed!” And as she fell asleep, Sarah thought to herself that she wouldn’t be upset if she didn’t wake up in her own bed, that it would be just fine, thank you very much, to wake up in her aunt’s bed, which felt clean and lovely, but then she woke up and it was the morning and she was still at her aunt’s, and she was surprised by how much this upset her.
    Her aunt took a day off work and took Sarah to school and picked her up again in the afternoon, and the rest of the afternoon and that night, her aunt told Sarah things like, “She’s probably just with some friends in the city and lost track of everything,” and, “You know how your mother can be sometimes, like she’s on a different planet,” which was true, or had been true when her mother had been a younger woman. As a girl and into her teens, Sarah’s mother had the habit of disappearing from the house for a day or two, crashing on the couches of friends in the city or in Brooklyn, or not sleeping at all, sitting in diners or cafés with friends or people she had just met, and then coming home to any number of punishments, which didn’t bother her at all because she hadn’t been a rebellious girl, just forgetful and thoughtless. When she had become pregnant with Sarah—she hadn’t the slightest idea who the father was, or else convincingly pretended she hadn’t—she’d changed, or if nothing else, she hadstopped leaving the house and forgetting to come back, at least until now.
    Another night passed, and then it was Saturday and there was no school, and her aunt said, “Hey, do you want to go to Coney Island today?” and Sarah said, “Sure,” even though what she really wanted was to go home and for her mother to come back. But she didn’t want to upset her aunt, who seemed more than upset enough, and she didn’t want to say what was on her own mind, either, as she would only upset herself by saying out loud the thing she wanted to do but couldn’t do. And so, fine, she would go to Coney Island with her aunt, except her aunt stayed home and Sarah went with a friend of her aunt’s who also had kids, three of them, the oldest four years younger than Sarah, and for most of the day, Sarah watched her aunt’s friend yell at her kids or caught her aunt’s friend staring at her with a strange, sad, pitying look in her eye.
    On Sunday, her aunt bought cookies and pizzas and cake and popcorn and closed the blinds and turned her apartment as dark as she could and ran movie after movie after movie, Sarah’s favorites, which weren’t many and which were mostly her favorites because they were the ones she had at home—
Labyrinth
and
Top Gun
and
Time Bandits
. When they ran out of movies, Sarah’s aunt kept the apartment dark and the popcorn popped and they sat and watched whatever was on TV, and then, on Monday, the police came over. After that, a man and a woman from CPS came to her aunt’s house, and after that, Sarah’s aunt took her back to her mom’s apartment, where they packed her clothes and her toys up, and Sarah asked her aunt if they couldn’t just stay there.Sarah’s aunt told her, “Maybe, maybe we will, maybe we’ll come back here and stay until your mother comes back,” but they never did. One day while she was at school, her aunt moved what she could from Sarah’s old apartment and sold the rest and what she didn’t sell was left on the curb. And then time passed and Sarah changed and while she didn’t know it, her mother changed, too, which was why when Sarah was older and she saw her mother week after week, year after year, she never once knew they’d been