Ms. Watters came up beside Lexi, opening an umbrella. The rain made a thumping sound on the stretched nylon.
One by one, the other passengers disembarked from the bus and disappeared.
Lexi looked at the empty parking lot and wanted to cry. How many times had she been in exactly this position? Every time Momma dried out, she came back for her daughter. Give me another chance, baby girl. Tell the nice judge here you love me. I’ll be better this time … I won’t forget about you no more. And every time, Lexi waited. “She probably changed her mind.”
“That won’t happen, Lexi.”
“It could.”
“You have family, Lexi,” Ms. Watters repeated the terrifying words and Lexi slipped; hope tiptoed in.
“Family.” She dared to test out the unfamiliar word. It melted on her tongue like candy, leaving sweetness behind.
A banged-up blue Ford Fairlane pulled up in front of them and parked. The car was dented along the fender and underlined in rust. Duct tape crisscrossed a cracked window.
The driver’s door opened slowly and a woman emerged. She was short and gray-haired, with watery brown eyes and the kind of diamond-patterned skin that came with heavy smoking. Amazingly, she looked familiar—like an older, wrinkled version of Momma. At that, the impossible word came back to Lexi, swollen now with meaning. Family.
“Alexa?” the woman said in a scratchy voice.
Lexi couldn’t make herself answer. She wanted this woman to smile, or maybe even hug her, but Eva Lange just stood there, her dried-apple face turned into a deep frown.
“I’m your great-aunt. Your grandmother’s sister.”
“I never knew my grandmother,” was all Lexi could think of to say.
“All this time, I thought you were living with your daddy’s people.”
“I don’t have a dad. I mean, I don’t know who he is. Momma didn’t know.”
Aunt Eva sighed. “I know that now, thanks to Ms. Watters here. Is that all your stuff?”
Lexi felt a wave of shame. “Yeah.”
Ms. Watters gently took the suitcase from Lexi and put it in the backseat. “Go on, Lexi. Get in the car. Your aunt wants you to live with her.”
Yeah, for now.
Ms. Watters pulled Lexi into a fierce hug, whispering, “Don’t be afraid.”
Lexi almost hung on too long. At the last second, before it turned embarrassing, she let go and stumbled free. She went to the battered car and wrenched the door open. It rattled and pinged and swung wide.
Inside, the car had two brown vinyl bench seats, with cracked seams that burped up a gray padding. It smelled like a mixture of mint and smoke, as if a million menthol cigarettes had been smoked within.
Lexi sat as close to the door as possible. Through the cracked window, she waved at Ms. Watters, watching her caseworker disappear into the gray haze as they drove away. She let her fingertips graze the cold glass, as if a little touch like that could connect her with a woman she could no longer see.
“I was sorry to hear about your momma passing,” Aunt Eva said after a long and uncomfortable silence. “She’s in a better place now. That must be a comfort to you.”
Lexi had never known what to say to that. It was a sentiment she’d heard from every stranger who’d ever taken her in. Poor Lexi, with her dead, drug-addict mother. But no one really knew what Momma’s life had been like—the men, the heroin, the vomiting, the pain. Or how terrible the end had been. Only Lexi knew all of that.