on my porch.
Not a shadow. Not my mind playing a cruel trick before I’d had my coffee. A real baby, small and pink-cheeked, blinking up at the porch light like she was deciding whether it was worth crying about.
She was wrapped in a denim jacket.
My legs went soft underneath me.
I knew that jacket. I’d have known it in the dark, in a pile of a thousand others. I bought it for my daughter, Jennifer, the summer she turned fifteen, and she’d worn it until the cuffs frayed, rolling her eyes at me the whole time. “Mom, it’s not vintage if it still smells like somebody else’s perfume.” That was Jen. Sharp-tongued, soft underneath, gone before I understood what either of those things would come to mean.
The coffee mug slipped out of my hand. It hit the floorboards and rolled, forgotten, before it even finished spilling.
