Three days later, I was back at the old rural plot.
The air smelled of rain and sweet pine. The red dirt roads were washed clean by a morning storm, and the sagging porch felt a little warmer under the Georgia sun.
Mom was back home, resting in her own bed. She was bruised, sore, and frail, but her eyes were clear. The doctors said she was a fighter—that surviving three days in a dry clay pit at her age took a strength most people didn’t have.
I sat in a wooden chair beside her bed, peeling an orange.
“You’re a stubborn old woman, Clara Vance,” I said softly, handing her a slice.
She smiled, her cracked lips curving into something warm. “Takes a stubborn woman to raise a boy who works eighty hours a week in an oil field just to buy her hip medicine.”
“You knew what they were planning, didn’t you?” I asked, my voice dropping. “When they took your phone. When they brought you out to the pit.”
