Chapter 29: An Impasse

When I was about ten, I walked home the same way every day. My mom had taught me exactly how to walk and where to go. She told me the short cuts. She told me what to do if someone tried to grab me, and as always, she promised me that when I turned the corner onto our block, she would be either standing out there waiting outside the apartment building or sitting on the bench in the courtyard.

On one fall day, I was rushing home from school. I couldn’t wait to throw down my books and lay in my bed and wait to see what scents would float to me from the kitchen. That day I ran up the subway steps and rounded the corner onto my block. As I got down to the building for the first time, I felt dread pooling in my belly. My mother was not sitting on the bench smiling at me, she wasn’t coming down the stairs to tell me she had just been running late or had been lying down. She wasn’t coming at all.