The plastic handle of the grocery cart felt cold and slick under my palms. I was just there for eggs and a loaf of sourdough, the kind that costs a dollar more than it should, but I like the crust. I remember looking at the total on the register. It said twelve dollars and forty-two cents. That number felt heavier than it should have.

I looked up at the girl bagging my items. She looked young, maybe seventeen or eighteen. She had thick, dark hair pulled back in a messy knot, and there was a slight gap between her front teeth that hit me like a physical blow to the chest. It was the same gap Dana had. I felt my lungs catch, a sharp, ragged sound that nobody else in the store seemed to notice.

Then I saw the name tag. It had the last name of the boy Dana had run off with back in the summer of 2009. I felt a weird buzzing in my ears, like a swarm of cicadas had moved into my head. I didn’t mean to, but I pushed the cart forward, and it slammed right into the rack of magazines at the end of the belt with a loud, metallic clatter. The girl looked up, startled, and her eyes locked onto mine. There was no warmth in her look, just a calm, heavy kind of recognition.

“You’re the lady from the photo Mom keeps in her drawer,” she said.

Her voice was flat, not mean, just matter-of-fact. The air in the store suddenly felt thin.

I wanted to turn and run, but my feet felt like they were rooted in the linoleum. I knew I had to say something, but my brain was just spinning.

I raised my daughter to be strong. That is what I told myself for sixteen years. When she told me she was pregnant at sixteen, I didn’t scream. I didn’t throw things. I just sat at the kitchen table and looked at the oilcloth cover with the little yellow sunflowers on it. I told her the truth. I told her that she couldn’t stay under my roof with a baby. I thought I was teaching her that choices carry weight.

“It’s my way or the highway, Dana,” I had said.

She didn’t cry. She just looked at me with those same gap-toothed eyes and nodded. She packed a single blue duffel bag with her clothes and took the forty dollars I had left on the counter. I watched her walk down the gravel driveway. I told the neighbors she had moved in with her aunt up in Springfield. I told myself I was a decent mother. I told myself that tough love was the only kind that worked.