Two Moms
My teacher, Mrs. Halvorsen, kept the drawing I made during free time that week — two women standing next to a house, one of them with a big yellow X scribbled hard enough to tear the paper.
"Who are the two moms, Lucy?" she asked gently, crouching by my desk.
"That one's real," I said, pointing to the one without the X. "That one wants to be, but she's not."
Mrs. Halvorsen didn't say anything else about it that day, but I noticed she started watching me a little differently at lunch, the way you watch something you're worried might break.
My aunt Dana, my mom's sister, came for dinner that Friday, and Bianca was pleasant to her in the specific, careful way people are pleasant to someone they don't quite trust. I watched Dana watch Bianca back, and I understood, the way kids understand things adults think they're hiding, that Dana didn't trust her either.
After dinner, while Bianca was upstairs, Dana helped me carry the trash out to the cans by the garage. That's when she found it, half-buried under coffee grounds and a broken eggshell: the torn corner of the photograph, curled and stained but still recognizably my mother's smiling face against the sand.
Dana went very still, holding it up to the porch light.
"Lucy," she said carefully. "Where did this come from?"