She leaned on the downstairs buzzer long enough that I thought somebody had died.
I had been standing barefoot in my kitchen, cutting the brown ends off a bunch of yellow tulips, when the intercom started buzzing. It stopped, started again, then kept going until the cheap plastic speaker sounded like it might rattle out of the wall.
I hurried across the hardwood floor and pressed the button.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. Let me up.”
My mother.
Diane Mercer.
For a second, I honestly forgot how to breathe.
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