“Oh, no.”
“She was fine. Cold. Confused. But fine.” Gabby shook her head. “Elmer started locking the office door after that. So nobody gets between him and her when it happens.”
Ezoic
She picked up one of the towels Jean had been folding. She held it in her lap.
“Who’s Marisol?” I asked quietly.
Gabby looked at the towel.
“My mother,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
Behind me, I heard Mark come into the room. He sat down on an overturned mop bucket by the door.
“My mother,” Gabby said again. “And my father was Luis.”
She looked around the little room. At the shelves. At the ghost of blue-flowered wallpaper under the white paint. At the edge of the old pink sink behind the paper towels.
“I was born in this room,” she said.
She told us the whole story.
Sitting on that old mattress in the supply closet that used to be Room 18. At midnight. In the middle of Kansas.
