Two weeks in, doing his laundry out of habit more than anything — folding shirts for a boy who wasn’t there to wear them — I found a folded note in the pocket of an old jacket. A girl’s handwriting.
Meet me after my shift. — J
Just that. No last name.
I asked Robert if he knew anything about a girl.
“No idea,” he said, not looking up from his newspaper.
I believed him. Why wouldn’t I?
A month after Malik left, I noticed our joint savings account was ten thousand dollars lighter.
“Business expenses,” Robert said, when I asked. “New inventory line for spring. I should’ve told you, I know.”
I let it go. We’d been married twenty-two years. You learn to trust the shorthand.
Winter came and went. Then spring. Malik’s birthday passed — his twentieth — and I baked a cake anyway and put it in the freezer, because some part of me refused to believe he wouldn’t come back to eat it.
In May, I got a postcard. No return address, postmarked from a town called Caldwell Springs, forty minutes east. Just Malik’s handwriting: I’m okay, Mama. Don’t look for me. I need to figure some things out. I love you.
I cried for two days over that postcard. I also kept it in my Bible, right at the book of Psalms, and read it more times than I could count.
Robert never asked to see it.
“He’s alive,” Robert said, when I told him. “That’s all we needed to know.”
“That’s not all I need to know, Robert.”
“Chasing him won’t bring him home faster. Let him come around on his own time.”
I wanted to believe that was wisdom. Looking back, it was something else wearing wisdom’s clothes.
In July, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize.
“Is this Malik’s mother?”
The voice belonged to a young woman named Renata — Jasmine’s cousin, she said. Jasmine. The J from the note.
“Malik’s been staying with my cousin in Caldwell Springs,” Renata told me. “I thought you should know. They’re… they’re expecting a baby, ma’am. Jasmine’s about five months along.”
I sat down right there on the kitchen floor.
“Is he alright? Is he safe?”
