“You’ve been wanting your own life.”
“I’ve been saving for school.”
I had been accepted into a certification program for property assessment and construction management.
Classes started in three months.
I had $1,870 saved.
It felt like a fortune to me then.
I needed three more months.
That was all.
“I can leave when classes start,” I said. “Just give me until then.”
Mom shook her head.
“Derek needs to settle in before the baby comes.”
I looked at Lauren.
“Are you okay with this?”
She didn’t answer immediately.
Then she shrugged.
“You always said you hated living here.”
“I said I hated having no privacy.”
“Same thing.”
“No, Lauren. It really isn’t.”
Mom stepped between us.
“Enough. I am not letting you turn her pregnancy into a competition.”
That sentence told me everything.
Even my homelessness was somehow going to become an attack on Lauren.
I stared at my mother.
“Are you telling me to leave?”
Her face tightened.
“I’m saying it’s time for you to start your adult life.”
“When?”
She looked away.
“By the weekend.”
It was Tuesday.
Four days.
I had four days to build an adult life.
On Saturday morning, everything I owned fit into two duffel bags, one cardboard box, and the trunk of a twelve-year-old Honda Accord.
Mom handed me seventy dollars.
Lauren was in the kitchen eating toast.
Derek was watching television.
Nobody helped carry my things.
At the front door, Mom hugged me.
I remember standing there completely stiff while she whispered:
“You’re going to be fine. You always figure things out.”
That was the last thing she said before I walked outside.
For the next six weeks, I figured things out.
I slept on a coworker’s couch.
Then a friend’s floor.
Then inside my car behind a supermarket.
Sometimes I bought a cheap shower membership at a gym.
Sometimes dinner was crackers and peanut butter because I needed gas money more than food.
Mom knew.
She called twice.
Both times, she asked whether I had found an apartment yet.
Neither time did she offer to let me come home.
Once, while I was sleeping in my car near that twenty-four-hour gym, I woke up and saw headlights slowing beside me.
It was Mom’s sedan.
I recognized the dent in the rear bumper.
She stopped at the traffic light.
For one second, I thought she had seen me.
Then the light changed.
She drove away.
She never mentioned it.
Neither did I.
That night something inside me became very clear.
Nobody was coming back for me.
So I stopped waiting.
