Papa says it on a Wednesday.
I ask him something. I don’t even remember what exactly. Something small. Maybe I asked if we could get a different cereal, or if he could come to the school thing on Friday. Something ordinary.
He’s reading the newspaper. He doesn’t look up.
“If you hadn’t been so difficult, maybe she’d have stayed.”
He turns a page.
I stand in the kitchen doorway.
Difficult.
He still doesn’t look up. Like the sentence didn’t even leave his mouth. Like it went nowhere. I wait for him to take it back, or look up, or say something else after it. He doesn’t. He just keeps reading.
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I go upstairs.
I sit on the edge of my bed and I think about every moment I can remember where I was difficult. The time I cried at the grocery store because he wouldn’t get the right cereal. The time I was too loud at his work thing. The time I said I wished Annie was my mama.
The wish.
There it is. That’s the one.
I was difficult. I made the wish. Mama left.
I lie back on my bed and stare at the ceiling and I put those three things in a line and they make a kind of terrible sense that I can’t unknow now that I know it.
It’s my fault.
I don’t cry. I’m nine. I’ve gotten pretty good at not crying.
I hear Papa come upstairs later. He stops outside my door for a second. I can see the shadow of his feet under the gap. He stands there for a moment.
Then he walks away.
I listen to his footsteps go down the hall.
Say you didn’t mean it. Come back and say you didn’t mean it.
He doesn’t come back.
I fold the sentence up small and I put it somewhere in my chest where I keep things I don’t know what to do with. Next to the wish. Next to the memory of Mama’s hands tucking my blanket.
I get up. I do my homework. I make myself a sandwich because it’s dinner time and nobody else is going to.
I make it the way Mama used to make it. Crust off. Cut diagonally.
I eat it alone at the kitchen table.
