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I take it from her and mouth the words thank you before turning back to the phone receiver.

I tell my father the address and he says he will be there in a half hour or so to pick me up. I will be late for school. But I could care less. The only thing worse than school is home. I put the receiver back on the holder and stare at it for a long time. Breathe, Iavine, just breathe. He's mad but he won't do anything while I'm in the presence of these people. But when we get home...

How did I get here? It was like a dream or something. I don't remember any of it. Besides walking after school. I was headed nowhere, anywhere. I didn't care. I don't know when I would have stopped and turned back, or even if I would have. Would I have kept on going until I ran out of road? Or maybe my father would have chased me down, put me in the car and took me home and then would have locked me in the closet. The closet, my solace yet a prison. I had come to know that closet as a chamber and also as a dear friend. One friend my father couldn't take away from me. The purpose of the closet was to punish me when I was bad. My father however didn't know I liked the closet, that in the closet where it was dark and empty is where I felt the safest of all. Sometimes during the night when my father was still in bed I would sneak down stairs and sleep in the closet until the horizon was flooded with sunlight and then I would have to creep back up to my room before my father noticed I had gone.

I have known that closet since my mother left when I was six years old. She had been a young mother when she had had me. She was only seventeen at the time and my father was twenty. I was an accident. After my mom found out she was pregnant she dropped out of school and married my father who lived in a beat up trailer and worked at the nearest gas station. They barely had any money but they decided to keep me. My father refused to let my mother receive an abortion and they didn't want to put me up for adoption either. They acted excited and pleased about the pregnancy but I now know they were just denying what they both knew was happening. The coming of my birth was ruining their lives.
After I was born my parents bought an old house, sitting on a corner in the middle of a beat up neighborhood. My mother soon after the move acquired a job at a local K-Mart and sent me to a day care service everyday. My mother would then pick me up on her way home from work. But one ordinary fall day she didn't show up. It was a day like any other. Cool, calm, normal. The leaves floated in the fall breeze, stopping at your feet for only seconds before flying off again. My hair whipped in the wind, around my face and in my mouth. That morning my mother had pulled the loose strands of hair out of my mouth and tucked it neatly behind my ears. She never smiled or made me say thank you. She just acted and kept walking. If i had known why...

A young, friendly lady named Grace stayed with me while I awaited the arrival of my mother later that afternoon when my mother ceased to appear.