Chapter

“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Teressa asked.

“I wish you guys would believe me,” Dove said. “But no, I guess that wasn’t so bad.”

“Hey, if you call again now, at least they’ll take you seriously. So even if it’s not Peterson, once you call, they will answer and they’ll come get him.”

“If they come in time,” she mumbled.

“They’ll come in time,” Teressa answered.

“They haven’t yet.” Dove couldn’t help but be in a sour mood. She felt Nate’s apology was half-hearted. He had heard a good sermon, and he responded right after. She wasn’t sure that was the same thing as really apologizing. She knew she was withholding forgiveness, but she wasn’t sure how not to. No one was taking her concerns seriously. And she thought she knew why.

Dove went to visit her mom on Sundays. It had been a tradition ever since her mother had been institutionalized. Dove had put her mother in a group home when she herself was twenty and her mother was forty-two. Her father had bailed a while before, when things started going south with her mother’s mental health. Dove had been seven.

Dove found herself doing much of the work around her house and taking care of her mother practically full time. Her mother got a small allowance from the government because of her diagnosis, but disability didn’t provide her with someone to help her live her day-to-day life. That was Dove. She cooked and cleaned and tried to make sure her mother took care of herself. Now that she was institutionalized, some of the work was off of Dove.

Growing up, nothing scared Dove more than the idea of her mother being institutionalized. Despite everything, Dove and her mother had a close relationship. Schizophrenia didn’t stop that. Locking her up somewhere, when they were managing at home, when her mom had good periods where she sang and smiled and never forgot to make dessert. Dove made sure she took her medication and sometimes her good periods lasted quite a while.

But she became more and more to handle. She stopped eating meals, and even Dove couldn’t get her to start again. Dove got a full-time job and wanted to move out, and began to wonder if her mother was even safe on her own, so she institutionalized her.

Her mom was doing better than ever. She was lucid more often. She ate all her meals, and put on twenty pounds. She played the piano again. Dove couldn’t have been happier. She wished she had admitted sooner that she couldn’t do it all on her own.

Still, Dove found herself being cautious around her mom. It felt as if her sanity was tender, like a bruised rib. Maybe if you pushed too hard it would crack. She tried to keep conversations fun and stress free. She played card games while she was there and listened to her mother talk about the various gossip. Those limited interactions seemed all within her mother’s realm of things that could be handled.

Of course, there was one little problem. Her mother could always tell when she was upset. She had tried everything she could think of to make this false, but her mom always caught on. She thought her mom liked that part of being a mother. Giving advice. All in all she was pretty good at it. But Dove didn’t like the stress it must add. That day was no different. She walked into the white, hospital-like building, where the walls were covered with art projects of varying levels. She walked into her mother’s room, filled with little ceramic doves, and smiled at her. She seemed happy; maybe it was a good day. They’d been pretty good lately.

“Hey, Mom,” Dove said, settling into the bone-crushing hug her mom insisted on giving.

“Oh, Dove! What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” her mother parroted back. Sometimes, when there was too much going on in Delores’s mind, she’d get stuck on one word and repeat it over and over. Dove was used to this kind of talking.

“Nothing’s wrong, remember? That’s what I said.”

“I know what you said,” Delores said with a soft tutting noise. “You lied. Lied, lied, lied. Now tell me, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, I just, well—some people aren’t believing me. That’s all. I’m not being taken seriously.”

“Who would ever not take you seriously?”

“Officer O’Bannon,” she muttered.

“Officer? Officer. What would an officer have to do with you? What happened?”

Now Dove was met with a real dilemma. She could tell her the truth of what all was happening, and risk upsetting her, or she could lie and hope for the best. “My bike was stolen,” she said.

“Bike? What do you need a bike for?”

“That’s why it’s not a big deal. It’s just—I thought I saw someone take it, and they won’t believe me when I tell them who it is. Or rather, who it isn’t. They have a suspect, but they won’t listen to me when I tell them he’s not who I saw.”

“Well, don’t let the wrong guy get in trouble,” Delores said. “Wouldn’t want to lock up the wrong person.”

Dove winced at that. She never knew if such phrases meant her mother was unhappy there. Dove thought on good days her mother knew she could be a burden, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it in the group home.

“Have you found a man yet?” her mother asked, quickly changing the subject as she was often did.

“No.”

“You can’t wait forever. I want grandchildren.”

“Listen, Mom. Let’s just focus on Uno, and next Sunday I’ll tell you exactly what happened with the bike and whatever you want to hear about men.”

“That sounds like a great idea, honey,” she said, and they began playing cards.