Gini’s mother left when she was 12 years old, not a good time for a young woman, a girl really, to lose her mother. Not there really ever is a good time. But Gini was rushing through the highs and lows of her first real crush, a boy who sat across the aisle from her all afternoon, and without a mother to talk to she had only her friend Alicia to rely upon for advice. What to do, when to do it, if she should do it or anything else at all.

            Her mother had known all that stuff. Mothers do.

            It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her mother and father had been fighting steadily for a couple of months, yelling and screaming, followed by the loudest silence on the planet.

            She was in bed. The yelling had stopped, finally. But too quickly. Gini sat up in bed and tried to listen to the sudden quiet. She followed her father’s footsteps out of the bedroom and across the hall and into the kitchen, then a noise in their bedroom. It might have been doors or drawers opening and closing.

            She thought of those TV shows and movies where some character puts a glass to the wall and listens to what’s going on on the other side of the wall and wondered if it actually worked and wished she’d thought about it and brought a glass to bed with her.

            Gini heard her mother flick off bedroom lights. Then her heels echoing on the hallway floor, the long, long hallway floor. It sounded heavier or something, somehow, than the sound her heels usually made on the striped wood, the echo betraying her progress down the hall and to the table by the door and the rattling of her car keys, the door opening, then shutting.

            “Renée is gone, I’m sorry to say,” her father said in the morning, pouring her a bowl of Cheerios and handing them to her. “And I don’t know when or if she might be coming back.”

            He reached to the counter and got the carton of milk and handed it to her.

            “I’m sorry,” he said.

            He’d never called her mother by her first name before, and he never again called her anything else.

            Years passed. She relied on girlfriends, the occasional mother of some boyfriend who’d always wanted a daughter, teachers and counselors and college professors – all of them supplying her with the guidance her mother should have and her father couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

             Because just as she’d lost her mother that night, he’d lost his wife. She would go on with her life, he would wait for his to be over.

             She often thinks of her mother, Renée, still angry that she’d walked away, especially when she leaves her office and walks across campus to teach, walking through a concrete passageway between buildings, the click of her heels echoing her progress.