Free Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia Page A

itinerary for the next few days on the road.
    “Thanks for the ride,” Emmy said to them, and then to me, “Let’s hit it,” and she moved away from the car and lingered in the parking lot.
    Simon gave me a hug, leaned in close, and told me, “I’ll take care of Stella, you take care of you,” and I realized I would miss all the late-night television and the quiet energy he gave our house when he was there. I hugged him again, and then he stood by Emmy to give me some space, so I could say good-bye to my mother.
    “Lemon,” she said, “I just . . .” But she stumbled on her words.
    I half listened to her stammer as I glanced over her shoulder at my friend and the long Greyhound bus in the background that would move me away from everything familiar.
    “Thanks again for the phone,” I said. “And thanks for the painting.”
    Besides the cyber-blue cell, Stella also had given me a small four-by-six-inch painting of an ocean-colored house. There was a fence in front, a blue tree in the yard, and four sky-colored shutters lined up above the front door. It looked like a nice home outside of all that blueness, but I couldn’t place it and wasn’t sure if it was a painting of a place we had lived before or of a place she hoped we might live eventually. Either way, I liked it best out of all the other paintings I’d seen of hers and planned to use it as my bookmark on the road.
    “I brought it with me,” I told her, and she nodded.
    I said something about being excited to see her artwork when I got back, since Simon had paid the tuition for Stella to take a painting class at the university as his Christmas gift to her. And I said something about being sure to call as soon as we got to California.
    I did not say “Thank you for letting me go,” and I did not say “I’ll miss you.”
    My mother was never good at saying good-bye either, so she hugged me quickly, awkwardly, and then whispered that she left me something tucked into the pregnancy book I had packed in my purse. I hoped that it was money.
    “Be good, and don’t do anything stupid. Take care of each other,” she said.
    I smiled widely so that later, when I didn’t come back, she’d think of me as being beautiful and brave. As someone she wished had stayed.
    I guess I should’ve realized she must’ve felt that not only was she losing me, she was losing the baby as well, the long months that remained of watching its development through the series of ultrasounds, of witnessing the growth of a child from a tiny sack of cells. But all my life, all around me, people had been leaving, moving, and trading spaces: strangers at rest stops when we were on the road; families at the Amtrak station when we headed down the coast; men and women at hotels checking in and out of rooms with paper-thin walls, with stained carpet and X-rated television channels. It’s startling how frequently people shifted in and out of view, the addition and removal into and out of one another’s lives. I’d witnessed it for as long as I could remember, had watched Stella nonchalantly pack our lives into boxes more times than I could count, and at the age of seventeen I discovered I was an excellent mimic.
    The bus driver came out of the station and started calling for the passengers, so I told Stella I should get going.
    “Don’t forget where you came from, Lemon,” she said in a way that made me wonder if she already knew I’d bought aone-way ticket. “Take all of that in,” she said, nodding toward all the things that lay beyond my view, “but don’t forget where you came from.”
    And then it was over and she was back in the car running her fingers through her hair when Simon leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. As the car began to move away, they became silhouettes, mere lines of shadows shaping out the frame of strangers, two people I may or may not have known. And they were out of the parking lot before I had the chance to tell Stella the reason I was going