Her fluffy slippers with tiger faces on the toes by the front door. We waited there because it was too painful to be at home and see my mother’s toothbrush by the sink. We waited at my father’s parents’ house, which sat in a hollow just a quarter mile down Shiloh Church Road from the trailer where I had lived my whole life. Then we could bail her out and forgive her and deal with whatever came next. She would grow tired of hiding and turn herself in, or the police would track her down and put her in jail. We assumed her disappearance would last only a few days - weeks, at the most. But my father and I believed the investigator’s story almost instantly because, after we’d gone all night fearing the worst, it gave us hope that she wasn’t dead. And she had raised me to be an honest boy: I’d never stolen so much as a pack of gum from the store or a pencil from a classmate, and I could hardly tell a lie, even a small one. She didn’t drive too fast or drink too much or yell at my father. The theft didn’t seem like something she would do - it seemed, in fact, contrary to everything I knew about her. Now, because of her failure to appear, my mother was suspected of having fled to avoid prosecution. The investigator said that, at about the time she’d left home the day before, she was supposed to be at the Clay County Courthouse for questioning. He thought my mother might have taken it. One of our neighbors, the father of a little girl my mother baby-sat, had reported to the police that he was missing around sixteen hundred in cash. Not long after daylight, the county investigator arrived to explain that my mother was a suspect in a crime. I struggled to repress images of her mangled car, her lifeless body. No one had seen her at the store, or anywhere else. My father and I spent the rest of that night whispering prayers and making phone calls. The day she disappeared, she told my father and me she was going to the Piggly Wiggly in Lineville, about ten miles from our home in Delta, Alabama. My mother became a missing person in the summer of 1994, when I was fourteen.
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