I watched from the window. I told myself she’d be back before dark.

She wasn’t back before dark. She stayed with Deja’s family for a while. I know that now. At the time I didn’t call.

I was waiting for her to call first, which is one of the more embarrassing things I have to admit in all of this. I was the adult and I was waiting for the teenager I had just put out of the house to be the one to apologize. For a tattoo. I have turned that over in my head so many times that I’ve basically worn a groove in my brain about it, and I still can’t fully explain it except to say that I was the kind of stubborn that gets worse when it knows it’s wrong.

Months went by. Then a year. Deja’s mother called me once and I let it go to voicemail. I listened to the message and then I deleted it. I’m not going to dress that up into something more complicated than it was. I was ashamed and I turned the shame into anger and I aimed it at everyone around the situation instead of at myself. That is the honest version.

I moved twice after that. New job, different town. I stopped talking about Janelle to people because the questions were too hard to answer without the story sounding like what it was. I told a woman at my church that my daughter and I were estranged and she squeezed my hand and said she was praying for us, and I said thank you, and I believed her. That was about six years in. After a while it becomes less of an open wound and more of a low-level thing you just carry.

You stop waiting for the phone to ring. I had stopped waiting.

Then last April I was at Dollar General picking up dish soap and the cashier, a woman named Brenda, I know her a little from coming in regularly, she looked at me and said, “You’re Janelle’s mom, aren’t you. From the picture.” I said I didn’t know what she meant. Brenda said, “Your daughter Janelle. She feeds half the kids on Fulton Street out of her apartment. She’s got a picture of you two on the wall.”

I stood there at that register for probably ten seconds without saying anything. I don’t know what my face did. Brenda was still smiling because she thought this was good news, and she wasn’t wrong exactly, but I wasn’t ready for it. I asked her what she meant by feeds kids and she explained that Janelle had lived on Fulton for a few years, that she ran some kind of informal after-school thing out of her place, that neighborhood kids came and ate and she helped them with reading. Brenda said it like it was common knowledge. Like everybody already knew except me.