My Daughter Carried Yellow Flowers Through A Door Of Our Own

I signed the divorce papers the next morning.

There was no crowd. Mira gave me time to read each page, and I used it.

When I reached the last line, my pen left a small blue dot beside my name.

I looked at it, then kept writing.

The refunds cleared the following week. The fund received all $18,600. My $6,800 went from Mira's trust account into a new account in my name.

I paid for Ada's hearing aids before I bought anything else.

At the fitting, she chose purple cases again.

"I still like purple," she told the woman helping us.

I liked that she could keep something simple.

Outside, she stopped beside the parking lot fence.

"That bird sounds bossy," she said.

I laughed for the first time in days.

The clothing order arrived three weeks after the meeting. Inez invited Ada to help put the right size cards on the packages.

"Can Mom come too?" Ada asked.

"I hope she will."

I came for an hour. Nobody asked me to stand at a microphone. We folded shirts and matched socks. That helped more than another speech would have.

At work, Ruth pinned the board's letter beside the staff schedule with my permission.

"People saw you walk in here worried," she said. "They can see how it ended."

The caller who had warned her about me never called back.

I kept my job. I kept the yellow receipt book too, though I moved it out of my everyday bag.

For a while, I had carried it everywhere, as if someone might ask me to prove myself in the grocery line.

One evening, Tess saw me check the bag before we left for milk.

"You can leave it here," she said.

That time, I did.

Six weeks after the breakfast, Ada and I moved into a small apartment in Sparks. The rent was $1,050. My sewing machine went beside the kitchen window, where the light was good.

We had collected our clothes and Ada's books from the old house while Nolan was at work.

Ada put her yellow cup on the lowest shelf.

"Now I don't have to ask you to reach it."

There was only one bedroom. I slept on a folding bed in the living room until I could buy a better one. After supper, we folded it up and had room to dance badly.

Our family case took months. Nolan and I reached an agreement through our lawyers, and the court approved it.

Ada lived with me. Nolan had set visiting times and paid $520 a month in support. He took a warehouse job and began making the payments.

He also had to cover my $1,800 legal bill. When that payment arrived, Mira returned the $600 Tess had paid at the start.

I handed my sister the check over a bowl of soup.

"I said it was a loan," she told me.

"I listened."

She tucked it into her purse, then washed the bowls while I dried.

The criminal case took longer than the divorce. Nolan and Briar eventually pleaded guilty to taking the fund's money. The court placed them on probation and ordered community service. The returned money was recorded in the case.

They had no role in the clothing fund again.

The lease had been canceled before possession. There was no event business left for me to owe money to, and no loan in my name. I kept the signed refund agreement with the final court papers.

Nolan asked once whether we might try again.

We were standing outside Ada's school after a meeting about her classroom needs.

"I know what I threw away," he said.

"Then take care of the time you still have with her."

He nodded. I could not make his next choice for him.

I stopped asking Ada to report on their visits. I asked whether she had eaten and whether she had enjoyed herself. When she wanted to tell me more, I listened.

She knew her father and I lived apart. She knew I had not taken the fund's money. She did not need the full weight of every paper in my drawer.

By spring, I could hear his car leave after a visit without going to the window.

On the first warm afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table mending Ada's school cardigan. The window was open. Somewhere downstairs, someone was watering plants.

Tess had taken Ada to choose flowers for our sill.

I heard their steps before the knock.

Ada came through our door carrying a pot of yellow flowers in a brown paper sleeve. She set it beside my sewing, and I moved the cardigan so every bloom could sit in the sun.