MOM CAME HOME FROM WORK UNUSUALLY LATE that night. It wasn't completely unheard of—occasionally, if she was scheduled for weird hours and was off selling products in some town an hour or more away from Woods Crossing, she wouldn't get back until well past dinner time. But tonight, the clock read 11:01 by the time the door finally creaked open.

Jen and her father had stayed awake, anxiously waiting for her in the living room. He kept standing up from his chair and nervously hovering near the phone; she was curled up under a blanket with a mug of tea in her hands, her eyelids drooping with fatigue. Dad let out a sigh of relief when his wife, who looked surprised to see that they were still up, came through the door.

"We were worried about you," he told her in a concerned, yet also slightly annoyed voice. "Was traffic bad tonight?"

Jen saw her mother's lips quivering slightly, but why that was, she didn't know. It wasn't like the two of them weren't used to Dad being condescending.

"Yes," she said quickly. "There was construction. I'm sorry I worried you two."

She leaned in to placate him with a brisk kiss, but Jen's eyes were narrowed at them. Something was off; she just couldn't quite put a finger on it...

She sat up straighter, setting her mug down on the coffee table with a small thunk. "Is that a new jacket?"

That was what was weird—the fur coat (faux, Jen assumed – it wasn't like they could ever afford real fur) was much too nice for her to be wearing on the job.

She thought her mom's smile looked a little tight, but her tired brain must have been imagining things. She was just getting too drowsy to think straight, that was all.

"Yes," Mom answered. "I had it in my car and it got colder than I expected tonight, so I put it on after my shift."

Jen nodded and wrapped her hands back around the mug of tea, willing her weary limbs to pull her up off of the sofa so she could go crawl into the arms of sleep.

She didn't think about that night again for a long time. After all, she had no reason to suspect that her own mother would ever lie to her.

Mom was waiting for Jen by the front entrance to the Orchard Park Mall. And Jen was late. After asking Robert to stay with her longer than either of them should have been awake last night, she'd accidentally slept through her alarm.

From a distance, Margaret Adler looked small and delicate. Her hair was floating in the breeze as if she were underwater, like a doll plunged into a child's bath and then neglected. Seeing her up close did little to dispel the appearance of fragility, and whenever Jen thought too hard about how lively and vibrant she used to look in comparison to now, it felt like someone had tied a weight to her heart. But at her core, under all those layers that had been cracked and glued back together, she was still Mom.

And Jen was a walking, talking, apologetic ball of chaos as she fluttered over so fast that she nearly tripped over her own feet. "I'm sorry," she panted, feeling suddenly devoid of oxygen. "I slept in."

Mom just smiled a tender, motherly smile. "That's alright—your father just dropped me off a few minutes ago."

The plan for them to have a girls-only shopping morning had been conceptualized by Jen after Mom happened to mention over the phone that she wanted to buy some more clothes for spring now that the weather was finally mellowing after what felt like an eon of winter. All of their recent family gatherings had felt tarnished by Jen's tension with Dad, sometimes unspoken but always looming overhead like an angel of death, and it was wearing down on her spirit. She'd jumped perhaps a little too eagerly at the window of opportunity to propose an outing for just the two of them.

Stepping into the building felt like stepping back in time. It had been years, maybe even as far back as high school, since Jen had come to the Orchard Park Mall. Located in the nucleus of an idyllic suburb about halfway between Woods Crossing and Chicago, it wasn't somewhere she had reason to visit on any sort of regular basis, but it was the closest mall to the tiny town she used to call home. Back then, she would come here on the weekends when she just needed a chance to escape the suffocating environment, when she needed to go someplace where no one knew her name.

She wondered if Mom ever felt that way, too.

Their first stop – and where they would probably spend most of the morning – was one of Mom's favorite stores, a little boutique near the front end of the mall. As they approached the entrance, they were punched with the strong aroma of intermingling perfumes, a floral scent that Jen would have found to be pleasant in much smaller quantities. As it was, she suspected she might have a headache by the time they moved on to another store.

Her eyes floated around to the various racks of clothes as a Madonna song quietly played through the speakers, and tension threaded itself into the lining of her stomach when they landed on one displaying the same type of fur coats that Victor used to buy for Mom, the ones that she loved to wear when she was out with him.

Jen knew that it had made her so happy to feel pretty. She often considered if it was wrong to resent her for letting a man shower her with gifts that made her feel confident in herself, that gave her a kind of self-assurance that Dad never helped her to build. And it made her wonder if Mom would have been able to back out of the affair even if she wanted to. Victor was a wealthy, powerful man. He knew all the ins and outs of the law, all the loopholes; he practically had it wrapped around his finger. The clothes were Mom's armor, the thing that made her feel powerful, too.

She wished as badly as always that she could just ask about any of this. Now that four years had passed, it would have been easier to have a mature conversation about it – if only Mom remembered. Now, Jen could see a sparkle of curiosity in her eyes as she admired the coats from afar, like her body held its own memories of all it had experienced even if her brain could not reach them.

For some reason, what came out of Jen's mouth while her mother started perusing through a row of dresses was, "How's Dad?"

The small talk had just slipped off her lips, but she regretted it as soon as she said it – wasn't the whole purpose of this outing to keep him firmly out of the equation? Her mother, on the other hand, did not seem fazed.

"He's good," she hummed. "He's busy, of course, but he always is. He works so hard to take care of me."

Jen didn't have the right response to that, so she just nodded, though there was a piece of her that wanted to wrap her mother up in a hug. When she went on errands, she often slipped up with little things like forgetting where to turn or where she set her wallet, so Dad didn't allow her to go out on her own very much. Jen understood – the most important thing was making sure that Mom was safe – but she also imagined that it must have been so frustrating at times. It couldn't have been easy to feel like you were constantly burdening someone else, like you could barely have any independence. In her own way, Mom was very brave to keep her spirits up through it all.

She held up a tight-fitting top with a checkered pattern on it. "This would look great on you, don't you think?"

Jen's mother had always possessed a keener eye for fashion than she herself did, but she was still mildly skeptical about the pattern, unsure if it was cute or looked like it belonged on a tablecloth. Or both.

She grinned a little bit as she carefully took the hanger from her mom – the garment looked even more ridiculous up close – and returned it to its place on the metal rail. "And when on earth would I have a need for something like this?"

Mom shrugged. "You never know when you'll want something different to wear out with your friends."

Jen accidentally made a small snorting noise. She did not go "out"; she stayed inside with her books and her Robert. "I'm not really the type of person who goes out on the town, Mom."

And yet she suddenly wondered how he felt about checker print. She eyed the shirt one more time – maybe it wasn't bad at all...

In a moment of impulsivity, she snatched it back, deciding that it wouldn't hurt to at least try it on.

As she did, her mother's lips curved into an amused smile. "Have I persuaded you?"

"I don't know, but I'm seeing someone. Like, seeing someone. Like a boy. But don't tell Dad," Jen blurted, then felt her eyes widen in surprise at herself. The words had just tumbled out of her mouth as if someone else was controlling them, and now she didn't know if it was a mistake or not.

Telling Mom was definitely a terrible idea. She might go on to tell Dad or any number of other people. And yet Celie's question for her – You know how things sometimes don't feel real until you tell someone about them? – had been gnawing at the very back of her mind last night and this morning.

Maybe she needed someone to know. Maybe not. But either way, it was too late to go back now.

Her mother's eyebrows shot up, and she braced herself for an incoming bombardment of questions, all those same ones she'd been asking Celie just the night before – What's his name? What's he like? How did you meet? But she wasn't at all ready for the sole question that Mom actually asked.

"Do you love him?"

Jen's mouth was suddenly dry, her body stiffening. Love. She hadn't been thinking about love yet. She'd been thinking about other things, though. She spent a lot of time thinking about his smile, or the slant of his handwriting in the letters he wrote for her. Sometimes, if he was in a hurry, he forgot to dot his is and cross his ts. When she held his hand, her fingers would touch the little calluses on his fingers from where he gripped his pens. He had a papercut on his finger right now from where he'd nicked it on the pages of a novel he was reading to her. His accent came out more the longer he read, as his voice got sleepy, and if she herself had any energy at all left, she would squeeze his hand to tell him that it was okay to stop. But he'd usually keep going for a little while longer. She had been thinking about all of this, but not about love.

"We're– I– it's new," she finally managed.

"I see," Mom said with a small nod, though there was something in the simplicity of her tone that suggested it was not as simple as it seemed. "But are you happy?"

There was no hesitation. "Yes."

And then Mom's smile was bigger than Jen had seen it in a long time. It made it impossible for her not to smile a little bit, too, though it was a shy smile. It felt good to admit out loud that she had a boyfriend, and yet part of her was questioning if she should allow herself to feel that way. If she deserved to feel peace and share it with other people.

"Then I think we ought to grab milkshakes once we're done here, don't you?"

It had been their tradition when she was a kid to come get milkshakes at this incredible ice cream shop in the mall as a way of celebrating any accomplishments she had, like good grades on tests or a slot in the school talent show (which only happened once). But it had been ages since she'd had a good milkshake.

Jen truly grinned now. "Yeah, I'd like that."

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A/N:

we love a happy mother-daughter duo