I don’t realize my face is wet, don’t understand why my heart squeezes painfully until I taste the years we lost in the aroma of buttery pastry drifting from under the foil. With a gentle smile, she takes the plate from my shaking hands and brings it into my apartment, sets it on my desk, pins the card to my bulletin board, stops when something seems to catch her eye.

“What’s this?” She lifts a piece of paper from the wire basket.

I follow, wiping at my face, and shake my head. From the looks of it, it’s a flyer. One I must have made, but the knowledge of why or when is barren land inside my head.

INTERESTED IN BEGINNER GUITAR LESSONS?

CONTACT CLAIRE HINES, APARTMENT 1407

My mother is nodding, her eyes shining. “Oh, Claire. This is a wonderful idea! Do you remember how we learned together?”

Of course I do, but it’s tainted by my confusion and a flaring anger that this woman standing inside my apartment, who looks and sounds like my mother, is not the woman I know. My hands clench and I shift my weight, suddenly uncomfortable. “Leave, please.”

Disappointment flickers in her eyes, but then she nods and hurries to the door, touching my arm when she passes. In the hallway she hesitates, gives me a long look. “I’m different, I promise. And I’m not leaving you ever again.”

When the door clicks behind her, I fall into my desk chair, hands open on my lap. The smell from the plate keeps me focused. I lift an edge of the foil. Bear claws. They are Dad’s favorite; mine too. Warmth spreads through me at the sentiment and the gift. It’s something she was known for before her life imploded, even for a little bit while the seams were coming apart: reaching out to others with her homemade treats, visiting and listening when people needed it. She’d often bring me along on those trips, and I’d sit and listen to the adults talk while she’d scratch my back or run her hand through my hair. I remember one particular winter when much of the town had come down with the flu. It had hit nearly every family, and most of the building was on a self-imposed quarantine. Ruth’s husband had just left her. Gone through the tunnel with a woman from the second floor and never came back. The whole town knew about it. They’d lived in Whittier for only a couple of years, coming, like my own father had, to work in the fishing industry but staying for the impossibly low cost of living.