Cloud turned back and stared at her, and for a moment, no longer than it took to blink, Tully saw sadness in her mother’s eyes. “You break my heart,” she said quietly.

“You break mine, too.”

Cloud smiled for a second. “I wish . . .”

“What?”

“I could be what you need, but I can’t. You need to let me go.”

“I don’t know how to do that. After everything, you’re still my mother.”

“I was never your mother. We both know that.”

“I’ll always keep coming back,” Tully said, realizing just then that it was true. They might be damaged, she and her mother, but they were connected, too, in a strange and profound way. This dance of theirs, as painful as it had always been, wasn’t quite over. “Someday you’ll be ready for me.”

“How do you keep hold of a dream like that?”

“With both hands.” She would have added, no matter what, but the promise reminded her of Kate and hurt too much to utter aloud.

Her mother sighed and closed her eyes. “Go away.”

Tully stood there a long time, her hands curled around the metal bed rails. She knew her mother was pretending sleep; she also knew when it became real. When intermittent snores filled the silence, she went to the small closet in the room, found a folded-up blanket, and grabbed it. That was when she noticed the small pile of clothes folded neatly in the corner on the closet’s bottom self. Beside it was a brown paper grocery bag, rolled closed at the top.

She covered her mother with the blanket, tucked it up beneath her chin, and returned to the closet.

She wasn’t sure why she went through her mother’s things, what she was looking for. At first, it was the stuff she’d expected: dirty, worn clothes, shoes with holes along the soles, a makeshift toiletry set in a plastic baggie, cigarettes and a lighter.

Then she saw it, coiled neatly at the bottom of the sack—a frayed piece of string, knotted into a circle, with two pieces of dried macaroni and a single blue bead strung on it.

The necklace Tully had made in her Bible study class and given to her mother on that day, so many years ago, when they’d left Gran’s house in the VW bus. Her mother had kept it, all this time.

Tully didn’t touch it. She was afraid somehow that she’d find it existed only in her mind. She turned to her mother, went to the bed. “You kept it,” she said, feeling something brand-new open up inside her. A kind of hope—not the spit-shined little-girl variety, but something tarnished and worn; more reflective of who they were and where they’d been. Still, it was there, under all the rust and discoloration: hope. “You know how to hold on to a dream, too, don’t you, Cloud?”