My mother’s foster brother’s girlfriend’s sister dropped me off at college. I’ll repeat – my mother’s foster brother’s girlfriend’s sister dropped me off at college. It was 2008 when she packed her 1997 red Ford Taurus with a large tote of my clothes and a pillow. I sat in the back seat and watched Detroit fade to highway and the highway fade to Chicago. I gripped a laminated page I had torn out of a old photo album, which contained the sole three photographs I have of my biological mother. There is one of her holding one year old me in her arms - there’s birthday cake all over my face and fingers. Another shows she and I standing next to the shiny new Taurus when I was 7. And in the last photograph, my mother is sleeping in a shimmery white dress in a blue casket.
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