The Stranger In My Daughter’s Cover Up

In August, I finally did. We drove six hundred miles east to a small town called Harbor Bend, on the shore of Lake Erie, a town Greg had picked because a coworker of his had a cottage there and said it was quiet, unglamorous, the kind of place with one good diner and a boardwalk half the length of Oak Hollow’s. We booked two nights at a bed and breakfast four blocks back from the water. I told myself I could do four blocks. I told myself I did not have to go near the sand if I didn’t want to.

We spent the first day doing ordinary vacation things, the kind of things that felt almost obscene in their normalcy: walking the main street, eating a lunch that was too big, sitting on a bench while Greg took a picture of a sailboat neither of us cared about. I remember feeling, for the first time in longer than I could measure, something close to peace. It did not last, but I am glad I had that one day before everything changed, because it reminded me that I was still capable of feeling it.

On the second afternoon, we were walking past a café with outdoor seating on a side street two blocks off the main drag, the kind of place with mismatched metal chairs and a chalkboard menu, when I saw a woman standing near the edge of the patio with her back to me. She looked to be in her fifties, maybe older, heavyset, her gray hair pulled back in a low knot. She was wearing a faded turquoise wrap over a plain cotton dress, the kind of garment you’d see on anyone, anywhere, on any beach in the country.

I want to be honest about what happened in my body before my mind caught up, because I think it matters. My heart reacted first. It always does, with mothers like me, the ones who’ve spent years training themselves to notice turquoise in a crowd, to notice a certain tilt of a head, a certain color of hair, only to be wrong every single time. I had been wrong hundreds of times over eight years. I told myself, standing on that sidewalk, that I was about to be wrong again.

Then the wind came up off the lake and lifted the lower corner of the fabric, and I saw a small yellow sun stitched crookedly into the hem, exactly where a dock nail had torn a hole in a cover-up eight years and six hundred miles ago.

I don’t remember deciding to cross that patio. I remember being beside Greg, and then I remember standing directly behind the woman, closer than was polite, close enough that she must have felt me there before she turned.

“Excuse me,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

She turned around slowly. Up close she had a tired, careful face, the kind of face that has spent years being careful on purpose. “Yes?”

“Where did you get that?” I asked, nodding at the cover-up.

She glanced down at herself as if she’d forgotten what she was wearing. “This? I’ve had it for years.”