Amanda

Kayla Boaz ’19, Contributor

I walked into that little yellow house with the siding on all sides and something felt wrong. It clearly was a home, embroidered quilts and doilies on every wooden table. There were no dishes in the sink and the trash cans were all empty. Every blanket was folded neatly on the backs on the floral pattern chairs.

I had never actually been to Ada before. I guess my mother spent her whole life here, but I never knew it. She inherited this house, just like me. There wasn’t much to do here, so there weren’t a lot of ways to get into trouble. But she found the one way you could in a small town. She had me. But she isn’t here now. There aren’t many places she could be, either the movie theater or the church down the street. I sat on the hard sofa and waited for a while. She would be 50 or 60 something by now. Isn’t that the prime age for trashy gossip magazines? I looked for an old newspaper or pictures to look at, but there weren’t any.

An hour passed and she still didn’t show up. I didn’t have her phone number, or I would have called her. She didn’t know that I was visiting. I bet she would be surprised to walk into her house and see me sitting there. She probably never thought she would see me again. I never thought I would meet her at all.

I walked next door to a red brick ranch and knocked on the door. A woman about my age answered the door. I’d guess she was a house wife and maybe a mother, as made apparent by her Saucony gym shoes and loose-fitting target yoga pants. She had a kind face. I wondered if my mother had one of those too. I asked her where I could find Brooklyn Reed and her small-town smile instantly melted away.

“She’s gone. I’m so—”

“What do you mean she’s gone? Where did she go?”

“She died sweetheart. It was an overdose.”

She kept talking and asked me how I knew her, but I couldn’t hear her over the buzzing in my head. After finally working up the nerve to meet her, after spending my entire life without her, it was too late. She was gone.

I walked back into the yellow house and sat at the kitchen table. She lived here. She was real. She has a life, I would just never be a part of it. Would I have yelled at her and told her all the things she missed out on? Or would I have simply told her who I was and embraced her. I wont ever know. So, I picked up the homemade orange potholder from the oven handle and drove away. I could have never lived in a town that small anyway.