“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Angela asks from the back seat.
“Um…” I gaze into the rearview mirror at the little girl, deciding whether or not to lie to her. Well, lying had gotten me this far. Might as well keep up the charade.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say confidently. The gray Subaru stumbles over a pothole, sending the girl lurching forward in her seat. I release some pressure on the gas petal.
“Well, it sure is taking a long time to get home. Mommy never takes this long to get home.”
“Be patient, Angela. I can only go so fast.”
“You’re already going faster than Mommy does.”
“Well, I’m not your mommy, now am I?” I spit out in my impatience. Angela sinks back in her seat at the tone of my voice and turns her clear eyes to the window. She shivers from the cold air gushing through the vent. Sighing, I turn up the heat.
“I’m sorry, Angela. I didn’t mean to be rude.” I turn the car onto a side street, hoping she doesn’t notice our change of direction.
She has red hair, just like mine, but hers falls in scraggly curls and mine in sheets. Her freckles are clustered in an almost solid mass on her nose, just like David’s. How I’ve missed her.
“Excuse me,” she says carefully. A wave of guilt crashes over me as I realize that she’s trying to keep from angering me. I soften my expression as I glance into rearview mirror.
“Yes, Honey?”
“I thought you said we were going home. You did, didn’t you?”
“We are going home, Honey.” Technically, this isn’t a lie.
“But this isn’t my home.”
We have pulled up to a withered wooden house, windblown and faded but still cozy. My house. The grass is freshly mowed for the occasion, the rotten apples from my tree swept away, the flowers watered. In the house there is a fresh vase of pink freesias that I nervously fixed this morning.
Angela leans her cheek against the frayed back seat and frowns at the scene before her. I wind my finger around my necklace chain in silence. I get out of the car, open her door, and help her onto the cracked pavement. She’s so clumsy, so sweet.
“Excuse me,” she says again.
“Yes, Honey?”
“When can we go home?”
“We are home, Angela.”
“Then where is Mommy?”
She looks at me, those blue eyes identical to my own. She is confused, and I, embarrassed, because I brought my little girl home without having the guts to explain anything to her.
“Let’s go inside, Angela, and we can talk.”
“Mommy said that we would just be driving home and that she would see me soon. She said that you would take me home after school. To my home.”
“Your mother trusts me, Angela. It’s okay.” Then again, she doesn’t know that I have only been out of jail for six months. And if I told her the truth, she never would have let me get close to Angela.
We step onto the wooden deck, Angela hesitating, me close to tears. This little girl doesn’t trust me as her caretaker does. I was stupid to think that she ever would. She calls the other woman ‘Mommy’, not even knowing that her true mother is standing right in front of her, mirroring her red hair and blue eyes.

“Angela, don’t be afraid. Come inside.” I find my words to be softer than normal. It’s been years since I’ve needed to reassure anyone. It’s usually me who needs the reassurance.

She keeps her backpack on as she steps through the door. Her knuckles glare white from squeezing the straps of her bag, and ‘oh, God,’ I think with a pang in my chest. Her lower lip is quivering.

My memory floods with the image of David behind of the darkened house. We were so young, so stupid, and so poor that we could hardly afford dinner that night. My head spun from some unknown alcohol we had slipped from the grocery store; David had discovered at the ripe age of eighteen that alcohol melted any of our problems into a manageable blur.

We were about to break the window when his lip began to quiver.

‘I can’t do this,’ he murmured to me. ‘I can’t take precious things away from innocent people to make myself happy.’

‘Stop it,’ I had spat at him. ‘They have everything. They can afford to lose a pair of earrings. They can afford to lose their laptop or their X-box.’

I had leaned up to him until we were nose to freckled nose and kissed his quivering lip. ‘It’ll be okay, Honey,’ I said. ‘We have nothing to lose.’

I have never been more wrong in my life. We had everything to lose.
I was bleeding from broken glass and scooping up jewelry in my arms when the police arrived. David, less bloody but equally distressed, called out for me to run. Officers stormed onto the lawn.

‘Come out with your hands above your head. You’re surrounded.’

‘David?’ I whispered. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Don’t be. I’m here,’ he said

‘David, Honey, help, I’m afraid! They’ll hurt me!’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘I’m scared!’ I wailed into the night, my sense melting away with the booze. ‘Make them go away.’

David had shot the policemen in front of the house that night in response to my drunken request. No one was killed, but David was sentenced to thirty years, and I to ten. I found out a month after the arrest that I was pregnant with a baby girl, an innocent little child who would go immediately into foster care.

I was seventeen at the time.

My little girl stands in the cold foyer, her pale eyes watering, her bottom lip trembling in tribute to her lost father. Little does she know that a room is set up for her down the hall, painted with little flowers and furnished with a white bureau and matching bed. She doesn’t know that I had filled her room with books and clothes, and that I had been putting away every penny I could spare into her college account. She doesn’t know that the pink freesias were picked to welcome her to her new home. All she knows is that I am not her Mommy.

“I… I just need to grab something, Honey. Then I’ll take you home.” I see her lip relax, and two white hands release the straps of her backpack. I run into the little flowered bedroom and scoop the freesias out of their vase, careful not to drip water onto the carpet. I wrap the stems in a paper towel from the kitchen and hand them to my daughter.

“Here you go, Honey. I thought you might like these.”

She dips her speckled nose into the bouquet. “Mmm, yummy. Thank you.” She looks back up. “Can we go home now?” There is a note of earnest in her voice. I hesitate for a moment. If I let her go now, I may never get her back. Then it hits me: I never had her in the first place.

“Can we go?” she repeats.

I breathe in, slowly and deeply. “Yes, Honey. Let’s go.”

As we cross the lawn, Angela takes my hand. “I think these are my favorite type of flowers.”

“Why’s that?”

“They smell so good.”

“They’re my favorite too, Honey.”

“Then why did you give them to me?”

“Because when you care about someone, you learn to sacrifice what you want so that they can be happy.”