After the pantry closed and the last child left with a paper bag and a cookie, they sat across from each other in the fellowship hall with two cups of weak church coffee.
For a while they did little but look.
Recognition had its own gravity.
So did disbelief.
Victoria was thirty-one.
Life had not been easy to her.
Her father had died when she was fourteen.
Her mother developed kidney disease and spent years in and out of treatment.
Victoria had taken community college classes part-time but dropped out when working nights became the only way to keep the apartment and medications paid for.
In 2008, after Laverne died, the building above the laundromat was sold.
The family scattered.
One sister moved out of state.
A brother ended up in and out of trouble.
Victoria stayed.
She worked in a nursing home kitchen, then in a school cafeteria, then with a church coalition that ran meal programs for children and seniors.
