of it, the travel brochures and the packing lists and even the
passports. In the garbage.
I set the can on the countertop. I looked around, then back
down at the pile in the trash. I couldn’t leave it there. It was a
mistake, it had to be. Maybe there was a new cleaning lady who
had thrown it all away by accident.
I pulled it all out of the bin and stacked it neatly on the
counter. Then I threw away my can. Then I didn’t know what
to do.
I stood there at the kitchen counter with one hand on the
stack of papers. No cleaning lady would throw away passports.
I knew that.
“You’re home.”
I gulped, startled by my mom’s voice, feeling a surge of
guilt about the papers, even though I hadn’t been the one to
throw them away.
“I found these in the trash,” I said. “I didn’t throw them out.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Mom said. “You wouldn’t do that.”
She took the papers from where they lay and knocked them
together against the countertop, even though they were already
perfectly straight. Her dark hair fell in waves around her face.
Her hair was hardly ever down. And I saw that she wasn’t wear-
ing lipstick.
She looked up from the papers and smiled at me. A tired
smile, not a real one. “It was stupid of me,” she said. “I threw
them away. I was just coming down to pull them back out of
the trash.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
She held the stack of papers against her chest. “You can’t
just throw away a passport,” she said, as if I didn’t know that, as
if I’d been the one to put them in the recycle bin.
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