Chicago, IL. January 1992.
When Jenny Adler shows up to her first day at a new job, she hopes it can be as simple as it is on paper - a few short months of doing paperwork and answering phone calls before she moves on to the next thing. It was never...
MOM CAME HOME FROM WORK UNUSUALLY LATE that night. It wasn't completely unheard of—occasionally, if she was scheduled for weird hours and was off selling products in some town an hour or more away from Woods Crossing, she wouldn't get back until well past dinner time. But tonight, the clock read 11:01 by the time the door finally creaked open.
Jen and her father had stayed awake, anxiously waiting for her in the living room. He kept standing up from his chair and nervously hovering near the phone; she was curled up under a blanket with a mug of tea in her hands, her eyelids drooping with fatigue. Dad let out a sigh of relief when his wife, who looked surprised to see that they were still up, came through the door.
"We were worried about you," he told her in a concerned, yet also slightly annoyed voice. "Was traffic bad tonight?"
Jen saw her mother's lips quivering slightly, but why that was, she didn't know. It wasn't like the two of them weren't used to Dad being condescending.
"Yes," she said quickly. "There was construction. I'm sorry I worried you two."
She leaned in to placate him with a brisk kiss, but Jen's eyes were narrowed at them. Something was off; she just couldn't quite put a finger on it...
She sat up straighter, setting her mug down on the coffee table with a small thunk. "Is that a new jacket?"
That was what was weird—the fur coat (faux, Jen assumed – it wasn't like they could ever afford real fur) was much too nice for her to be wearing on the job.
She thought her mom's smile looked a little tight, but her tired brain must have been imagining things. She was just getting too drowsy to think straight, that was all.
"Yes," Mom answered. "I had it in my car and it got colder than I expected tonight, so I put it on after my shift."
Jen nodded and wrapped her hands back around the mug of tea, willing her weary limbs to pull her up off of the sofa so she could go crawl into the arms of sleep.
She didn't think about that night again for a long time. After all, she had no reason to suspect that her own mother would ever lie to her.
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Mom was waiting for Jen by the front entrance to the Orchard Park Mall. And Jen was late. After asking Robert to stay with her longer than either of them should have been awake last night, she'd accidentally slept through her alarm.
From a distance, Margaret Adler looked small and delicate. Her hair was floating in the breeze as if she were underwater, like a doll plunged into a child's bath and then neglected. Seeing her up close did little to dispel the appearance of fragility, and whenever Jen thought too hard about how lively and vibrant she used to look in comparison to now, it felt like someone had tied a weight to her heart. But at her core, under all those layers that had been cracked and glued back together, she was still Mom.
