Page 12 of The Challenge

The pissed-off look on his face made me want to laugh for some reason. I was terrible, still wanting to giggle over his collision with the light fixture.

Evan narrowed his eyes. “I know that look, Chloe. Say what you wanna say…”

“I mean, we all knew you were hard-headed…” I snorted.

Evan rolled his eyes. “You can go now.” He walked past me in a huff.

Chapter 5

CHLOE

The moment I stepped into the facility where my mother now lived, I could smell disinfectant. At least they kept the place clean. But this certainly wasn’t where I’d envisioned her living out her last days.

I made my way down the hallway to her room. When I opened the door, I found Mom staring blankly at the television.

“Hi, Mama.”

She turned to me, her eyes slowly widening. Did she recognize me?

“Hi, Judy,” she said after a moment.

Judy. My heart clenched.

One of the workers walked in shortly thereafter, and I introduced myself before taking a seat in the chair next to my mother’s bed.

“How is she doing?” I asked.

The woman smiled. “I did her hair.”

She’d styled my mother’s graying hair up in a twist. It reminded me of the way she’d worn it on her wedding day to my father. A bittersweet feeling filled my chest. But I forced a smile. “It looks nice.”

“She seems happy today,” the woman added.

“Well, that’s the best I could hope for.” I smiled again sadly.

Actually, that wasn’t the best I could hope for. There was so much more I could hope for. For starters, it would be really great to go back to the time when my mother hadn’t lost her mind, a time when my parents were still together. A time when my sister, Fawn, hadn’t fled town just to get away from the pain of it all, and a time when I didn’t feel like a stranger in my own hometown. A time when I’d had a place to go on Christmas instead of feeling depressed over the holidays. Oh, and a time when I wasn’t accidentally living with a man who’d once rejected me. That would be great, too.

“It’s so good to see you, Mom,” I said, rubbing her hand. My gaze moved over the photos on a shelf nearby. They were mostly of my sister and me. None included my father, per my request. I couldn’t bear the thought of her looking at his photo and perhaps remembering him for a fleeting moment as her loving husband. The truth was anything but that. Maybe it was cruel of me to hide family photos that included him. It was possible they could’ve sparked some good memories, too. But what if she remembered him, got confused, and then somehow realized he’d married someone else? That thought devastated me, and I wasn’t willing to risk it.

Mom suddenly smiled at me, but there was no real acknowledgment or recognition. The fact that she’d called me “Judy” told me everything I needed to know. She had no idea who I was. Tears formed as I joined her in blankly staring at the television. It was the soap opera that used to be her favorite.

“Did she ask for this show specifically?” I asked the attendant.

She shook her head. “I follow this show, so I put it on.”

I nodded in disappointment.

After an hour had passed, I decided to leave. I’d be coming to see Mom frequently while I was in town, so I didn’t need to stay the entire day.

After my visit, I moved on to the other reason I’d come home: my family’s storage unit. When my father had sold our family home, he’d taken the few things that mattered to him—and his family wasn’t included on that list of keepsakes. He and I mostly corresponded over email now. While I’d told him I was coming home soon, I hadn’t given him an exact date. So he likely didn’t know I was here yet.

Dad had left me with the responsibility of sorting all of our family belongings while I was home. He’d provided me with the information needed to access the storage unit and informed me that he’d prefer not to have to keep paying to store everything. Imagine being in a rush to rid yourself of any shred of your family, of the life you had for decades. And how had this become my life? I wanted to resent my sister for leaving me to deal with this all on my own, but I couldn’t blame her for staying away. Maybe she was the smarter of the two of us. Fawn had started a nice little life for herself in New York. She worked as a nanny for a wealthy couple, and the last time we’d talked, she told me she’d just started dating someone.

I pulled up to the storage unit facility, a series of what looked like individual garage bays. It was in the middle of nowhere, set in the midst of a field of unmanicured grass.

After punching in the code that allowed me to unlock and lift the steel door, I sighed, overwhelmed by the massive piles of stuff that represented my entire childhood, all of my memories, and all of the memories my mother had lost. It felt so heavy. It would take months to sort through everything and decide what to do with it. As I surveyed the scene, somewhere in the mounds of stuff, a chair caught my attention. I sat on it as I began reaching for random items in the rubble of my life story.

A box labeled recipe cards that had been passed to my mother from my grandmother.