She wore a brand new sundress that day. As always, we met on her mom’s front porch; she chain-smoked while the feral cats roped around our feet. I can still see her leaning against the house, turning her head to blow the smoke away from my face. It was late May and the creek was already dry. She talked incessantly about nothing at all as I tried to prepare her for what would happen while I was gone. I still don’t know if she noticed that I could hardly stand up but that was the one thing she didn’t say a word about.
That day she showed me her new dentures and teased that she had finally grown an ass. She was a year clean and convinced she was getting her kids back. I was pretty sure she was, too. The judge presiding over her child welfare case had uncharacteristically wagged his finger at the mismanagement of it all. Everything pointed to reunification. I would be gone for her next court date but fully expected to return to good news.
There was no way to know the judge would have a near fatal heart attack the week before her court date. The new judge ruled in favor of Child Welfare. They ended her services and by the time I came back from surgery in mid-July, her phone had been shut off. When we knocked on her mom’s front door we were told she no longer lived there. I looked for her behind Safeway, where she had been living before she got clean. For more than a year, I was always waiting to see her.
Last August, I finally did. The sky was white with heat, cloudless. My coworker E and I had the AC cranked as we pulled into the Walmart parking lot. I hadn’t fully exited the van when I saw her making a beeline for me. She was wiry and tan, her skin leathered from living outside again. Her teeth were gone. She hugged me almost violently, as I tried to say hi. But we were skipping the pleasantries and she was sobbing in my arms instead. Because everything she once feared had come to pass. And the only thing to do was sit in the rubble with her.
“They really fucked her,” E said, as we drove the bypass back to the office. I nodded. The smell of her cigarettes and sweat still lingered on me. I waited for the familiar cascade of emotion to pull me under, drag me somewhere dark. But it never came.
I see her sometimes in the lines for free showers on Washington Street. E says it’s like a carwash for human bodies. I think of the words my therapist says that always make me laugh, and shift me forward: This is the gig. She means it in the Buddhist way. The gig: our soul’s assignment. This is the shit we signed up for. We agreed to crash into each other, and hold on for dear life. To try to tend each other’s wounds, but always risk inflicting even more pain. I don’t believe in endings, anymore. It’s all just another drop in the wet, inky middle. All of this.