“Brandon, honey, you told me we were coming somewhere I could relax for a little while, just a few weeks…”
“Mom, please don’t start. They’ll feed you here, and there’s a television. What more could you possibly need?”
She reached toward his sleeve, hoping to stop him. As her coat opened, I noticed the brooch attached to her blouse: a silver dragonfly decorated with a green stone, its left wing broken.
The pen fell from my hand.
I recognized that dragonfly immediately. Thirty years earlier, I’d stared at it for almost an hour while riding a bus on my mother’s lap. I was six, and I’d asked whether a dragonfly could still fly if one of its wings was damaged. My mother had quickly moved my hand away.
“Keep your hands off it. You’ll end up breaking it completely.”
It was February 1996. My father had walked out on us, and the factory employing my mother had failed to pay its workers for several months. Brandon, who was four years older than I was, sat in a car with someone our family knew. I could still picture him eating a popsicle while my mother guided me toward a building with a large gray gate.
I believed we were going to visit somebody.
Inside an office, a woman asked my mother whether any relatives might be willing to help. Without even glancing in my direction, she replied:
“Taking care of my son is already enough. My daughter is nothing but a burden. Let this place deal with her.”
She pressed a tamarind candy into my palm and walked away. I tried to chase after her, but a caregiver caught me before I reached the door. I screamed “Mommy!” until my throat was so sore that I couldn’t make another sound. My mother never looked back.
Three decades later, that very same woman stood inside the nursing home my husband and I had worked so hard to establish. She had no idea who I was. In her mind, I was still the little girl who had vanished from her life thirty years ago.
“Are you running this place?” she demanded with an air of superiority. “I expect a private room. My son is a successful businessman. Money isn’t an issue for him.”
