Plum
At nineteen, my father drove me eleven miles up a snow-covered mountain and told me the abandoned cabin at the end of the road was mine.
He said it without looking at me.
His hands were on the steering wheel of the Silverado. His eyes were on the windshield. On the snow. On the dark pine trees leaning over the narrow road like they were listening.
“It’s yours, Wren,” he said. “Your mother’s family’s place. Fresh start.”
In the passenger seat, my stepmother Sandra turned around and smiled at me.
“Isn’t that exciting?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.
I was sitting in the back seat with a duffel bag on my lap. Two pairs of jeans. Four T-shirts. A sweatshirt. Some underwear. A toothbrush.
That was what Sandra had told me to pack.
Just the essentials, honey. You can get the rest later.

The road ended at a gate. Rusted. Hanging open on one hinge.
Behind it, at the end of a long white clearing, sat a cabin.
Small. Dark logs. A steep roof heavy with snow. A stone chimney. A porch sagging in the middle. Two windows. No lights. No smoke.
It looked like something you’d find in an old photograph. The kind where everybody in it is dead.

My father parked.
He got out.
He walked around to the back and opened my door.
I got out. My sneakers sank into eight inches of snow.
It was three in the afternoon in January. Eighteen degrees. The sky was the color of dishwater.

He walked me to the porch.
Sandra stayed by the truck. Arms crossed. In her long down coat and her fur-lined boots.
My father pushed open the door.
The smell hit me first. Cold ash. Cedar. Dust. Something old and sweet underneath, like dried apples.
Inside, it was dark. One room. A wood stove in the corner. An iron bed frame against the wall with no mattress. A wooden table. Two chairs. A shelf with a few chipped plates and cups. A braided rug on the floor. Faded red and blue.
No electricity.
No phone.

“Wood’s in the shed out back,” my father said. “Plenty of it. There’s a pump in the kitchen. It works if you prime it.”
He didn’t look at me.
“You’ll be fine,” he said.

I followed him back out to the porch.
Sandra was standing at the bottom of the steps now. Holding out her hand.
“Phone, honey,” she said.
I stared at her.
“What?”
“Your phone,” Sandra said. “There’s no reception up here anyway. No point in you having it. I’ll keep it safe.”
“I need my phone.”
“For what?” Sandra said. “There’s nobody to call. And you’ll just drain the battery and get upset.”
She held out her hand.

“And my money,” I said.
I’d been working at the Elk Ridge Diner in town for two years. Since I was seventeen. Double shifts on weekends. Every tip I made, I put in a coffee can under my bed. I’d been saving for community college. For a car. For anything that would get me out of that house.
Two thousand, three hundred and sixty dollars.
Sandra had taken the coffee can that morning. For safekeeping. While we packed.
“We’re holding it,” Sandra said. “Until you get yourself sorted out.”
“Sorted out from what?”
Sandra smiled at me.
“You know,” she said.
I didn’t know.

A shoebox. Nike. Gray. Held together with packing tape at the corners. My mother’s handwriting on the lid in faded black marker.
WREN’S.

Inside it was everything I had left of my mother.
Eleven photographs. Her in a sundress at a lake. Her holding me as a baby. Her laughing in our old kitchen with flour on her nose.
Six cassette tapes. Mixtapes she made. Mom’s Road Songs. Wren’s Bedtime. Sunday Morning. In her handwriting. With little drawings on the labels.
A pair of her earrings. Silver hoops.
And a little glass bird.
Blue. The size of my thumb. With a chipped wing. It sat on our kitchen windowsill my whole childhood. She said it was a bluebird. She said bluebirds were good luck. She said every morning when the sun came through it, it threw a little blue light on the counter, and that meant the day would be good.
She died when I was nine.
I’d kept that box under my bed for ten years.

My father closed the trunk.
He looked at Sandra.
Sandra looked at me.
“It’ll be safer with us, honey,” she said. “You don’t want it getting wet up here. Or burned. We’ll keep it until you come back down.”
“When?”
Sandra smiled.
“When you’re ready,” she said.

Sandra got in.
She rolled down her window.
“You’ll be fine, Wren,” she said. “It’s good for you. Learn some independence. You’re nineteen. Time to grow up.”
She rolled up the window.

His name is Kenneth Maddox. He’s fifty-one. He sells insurance in Tamarack Falls, Colorado. A little mountain town of four thousand people at the bottom of the pass. He coached my Little League team when I was seven. He taught me to ride a bike in the church parking lot. He used to sing Jimmy Buffett songs in the car with the windows down.
When my mother was alive, he was a different man.

My mother’s name was Laurel. Laurel Ann Whitfield Maddox.
She was a fourth-grade teacher at Tamarack Falls Elementary. She grew up in town. Her family had been in those mountains since the 1890s. Miners. Then ranchers. Then teachers.
She was funny. She was loud. She danced in the kitchen while she cooked. She made mixtapes for everything. Road trips. Rainy days. Bad moods.
She got sick when I was seven.
Breast cancer.
She fought it for two years.
She died in March. When I was nine.

My father fell apart.
He stopped singing. He stopped coaching. He stopped coming to my school things. He sat in his recliner every night with a beer and the TV on and didn’t watch it.
Then he met Sandra.
At a real estate seminar in Denver. A year after Mom died.
She was a mortgage broker. Blonde. Organized. Sure of everything.
She married him eleven months later.

She moved into our house.
She painted over the kitchen. The yellow my mother picked became gray. Greige, Sandra called it. She took down my mother’s pictures. She said it was unhealthy for Ken to live in a shrine. She packed my mother’s clothes into garbage bags and donated them to the thrift store in Glenwood Springs. I found out when I saw a girl from my school wearing my mother’s purple sweater.
She moved me from my bedroom to the smaller one over the garage. So her son from her first marriage, Tyler, could have mine.

My father let her.
All of it.
He let her repaint. He let her take down the pictures. He let her give away the sweater. He let her move me.
He never once said no.

PART 2

My Father and Stepmother Took Everything I Had and Left Me in an Old Cabin, but They Had No Idea What Was Hidden Inside