No help.
No home.
No forwarding address, as it turned out, because they moved to Arizona that spring and never left me a way to reach them.
So by November of 1998, I was a community college student and the mother of two baby girls, Mia and Ava, whom I carried everywhere in a worn gray sling against my chest.
I lived on instant noodles and the night shift at the university library, where the manager let me rock the twins behind the returns desk as long as they didn’t cr*.
Some nights I studied with one eye, a textbook in one hand and a bottle in the other.
I was tired in a way that lived in my bones.
But I was going to make it.
I had decided that much, and I was stubborn like my grandmother.
That night, it was pouring in Seattle, the kind of cold November rain that gets into your shoes and stays there.
