Waiting

Viola had hated the apartment, though she would never tell her mother this. She disliked the musty smell, as though too many people had lived here before them. She hated the beige paint, the yellow linoleum tile, and the way her mother looked at the chipped cabinets so hopefully—as though a place like this could someday feel like home.

“Good enough,” her mother Anne had said on the day that they’d moved in. They had stepped in from the hallway ahead of the movers to find the apartment’s four dark rooms empty and smelling of sweat.

“Well, anyway,” Anne had said. “Good enough for now.”

In the months following her parents’ divorce, Viola had come to despise that phrase. There were whole days when Viola wondered if the rest of her life might not be a kind of waiting, holding her breath until good enough for now no longer applied.

While the movers carried in the furniture, her mother set to work wiping out the cupboards, and Viola went to stand in her new room. The closet doors had been left open and she saw that someone had left a row of Lakers stickers on the wall, stuck up in a crooked row behind a dozen or so multicolored plastic hangers. On one of the hangers, there was a beaded necklace. It dangled from the blue plastic as though looped around an invisible person’s throat.

Viola took the beads in her hand. They were heavy, accented at the center by a tiny silver cross. Not a necklace, she realized, but a rosary. Left behind as what? A gift? A warning? An afterthought? People...