Nobody Was Present

For twelve days.

Twelve days of a woman working on her own daughter in a house with nobody else in it, with a deadline on a card, and the deadline was the sixteenth, and the reason the deadline was the sixteenth is that I was due back from Albuquerque on the twentieth.

And on the twelfth of September, four days out, with the appointment made and the form in a folder and the money already spent on the service fee, she stopped her in the entry hall and asked her for the last time.

Nobody pushed anybody over a car.