There is silence on the line.
Then the voice says, “Put her on.”
Lottie pushes the phone closer.
I don’t take it.
My hands refuse.
Lottie’s eyes sharpen. “Take the damn phone, Amelia.”
I do.
The plastic is warm from her hand. I press it to my ear like it might bite.
“Hello?”
The woman on the other end exhales.
“Well,” she says. “Amelia Bell Welles. If you’re Caroline’s girl, then you’re late getting home.”
The world tilts.
Not because she says Welles.
Because she says Caroline like she knew the taste of the name.
My knees go weak, and I sit in the kitchen chair because standing suddenly feels like too much ambition.
“You knew my mother?”
“Knew her when she had more mouth than sense and legs fast enough to run from any consequence but love.” A pause. “She was wild. Beautiful. Too proud. Too scared when she left.”
My throat closes.
My mother was many things in my memory. Tired. Bitter. Funny when whiskey made her loose. Mean when shame made her sharp. Loving in spurts she couldn’t sustain. Dying with Mike Welles’s name in her mouth like a last confession.
Wild and beautiful feels like a stranger wearing her face.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
“They call me Hot Mama.”
“I gathered that.”
A laugh scrapes through the line. “Caroline would’ve liked you.”
Pain hits so suddenly I press a hand to my chest.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Lonerock.”
Oregon.
My childhood rises up in broken pieces. Dusty roads. Pine shadows. My mother packing too fast. A woman with red nails handing me a cookie from the window of a camper. A motorcycle engine outside a bar. A sign I couldn’t read because I was too little. My mother crying in the bathroom and telling me not to open the door for anyone.
Lonerock.