Free The Forever Bridge by T. Greenwood

house. And so she pedals away from Izzy’s house, past Marcy’s house, and heads over to the library. But it’s Sunday. Closed.
    Outside she sits on the steps, dials the number for the phone company, and waits for almost fifteen minutes before somebody finally helps her. While she waits, she looks across the street. All of the shops are closed except for the salon and the drugstore. Suddenly, the door next to the salon swings open and a pregnant lady with long blond dreadlocks and a big backpack barrels out. Her face is red; it looks like she’s been crying. She looks lost. She looks up and down the street before ducking down the alley between the used bookstore and the artist gallery. Ruby stands up, thinks about following her, but then a voice comes on the other line.
    “Fairpoint, how can I help you?”
    Ruby gives them her mom’s address and tells them the phone’s out. They say they’ll send somebody tomorrow. They give her a confirmation number she writes in pen on her hand. She calls her dad then and tells him everything’s taken care of. What she wants to tell him is to come home. That her mom is sad, that Izzy’s being mean, and that she just wants him to come back. But instead she just says, “Where are you now?”
    “Just crossed the border into Massachusetts. Listen, I’ll call the house tomorrow. You said they’re coming to fix the phone tomorrow morning, right?”
    “Yeah. Tomorrow.”
    “How’s your mom?” her dad asks then, and Ruby can picture his face. The way he draws a breath in whenever he talks about her. The way his eyebrows lower and his nostrils flare.
    “She made Mickey Mouse pancakes,” Ruby says.

A s Nessa stumbles back down the stairs and outside, she feels sick. Dizzy.
    Her mother is gone. And beyond the confirmation of this, the finality of this, there is the undeniable and inescapable fact that she is still hungry. Starving. Hunger doesn’t care that her mother is gone. Baby animals in the wild, abandoned by their mother, still need food. Nourishment. Infants without their mothers’ milk must find other ways to survive.
    The last thing she ate was a bruised apple an old woman on the bus had offered her from her bag. It was mealy and sweet, but it had taken the edge off at least. Though now the edge has returned, dull and serrated.
    In Portland, she had been able to scavenge. Foraging in Dumpsters and trash bins usually yielded enough to survive on. And even when it didn’t, while it had pained her to do so, she’d also been able to count on the kindness (or pity) of strangers. She had only to sit on the sidewalk with her hand outstretched for a moment before someone would drop a dollar in her palm.
    But here, the streets are not littered with the detritus of urban life. The sidewalk is clear of both trash and people. Leaving her mother’s apartment building, she feels like a castaway, surfacing on a deserted island. Her mother is gone. But that does not change the simple truth: she needs food and she needs a place to sleep.
    She has ten dollars in her pocket. It is the last of the money she stole from Mica. She had vowed to herself that she would not touch it. That it was her emergency fund. Though she wasn’t sure how ten dollars might be able to save her in an emergency.
    And so now, her stomach angry with hunger, the baby demanding, demanding, she ducks into a diner and takes a seat in a back booth.
    Her heart stutters when she realizes that the waitress is a girl she remembers from high school, though she was older than Nessa, a couple of years ahead of her at school. Nessa always thought she had a friendly face: plump and inviting. Heart stammering, Nessa waits for recognition, for the waitress, Marla, to remember her. But soon it is clear that she has no recollection of Nessa, or, perhaps, it’s that Nessa is simply unrecognizable.
    “Good morning,” Marla chirps and hands her a menu.
    Nessa wonders if she had stayed in Quimby if this would be her life now: a