The last time I went in was three years ago. The nurses said she was having a clear day and had been asking for me, so I walked down that hall with my heart going a mile a minute, so happy I could’ve cried.

She looked up. And whatever was on her face, it wasn’t my mama looking at her boy. She grabbed the nurse’s arm and pointed right at me. “Get him out.” Then quieter, shaking. “He looks just like the man who hurt me.” They had to sedate her. I drove seven hours home and didn’t tell my sisters why I left so fast.

So now I just come and I sit. Room 114, second floor, I can see her window from right here in the lot. My sisters go in and hold her hand and she smiles at them because they wear her face and I wear his. I’m not brave enough to put her through that again. That’s the honest truth of it. The son who never visits is really just a coward who loves her too much to make her scream.

I got out of the car today. Don’t ask me why. Walked up close enough that I could see her in the chair by the window, looking down at the parking lot. At my car. And I watched her turn and say something to the nurse standing beside her. I found out later what it was, because that same nurse came down to bring me a cup of fresh coffee, bless her heart, and she told me. Mom had pointed down at my car and said, “That poor man’s been sitting out there so long.” Then she said, “I hope his mother knows where he got to.”

She was worried about my mother. Fifty feet away, worried sick that some lonely fella’s mama didn’t know where her boy had run off to.

I drove home. I haven’t told Carol or Patty any of this. I’ll do the same drive next month, same cold coffee, same forty minutes in that lot. And I’ll sit there being the strange man she frets over, the one whose mother she hopes is still out there somewhere wondering where he went.

She is. She’s right upstairs. And she has no idea it’s me.