Grandma, can we swim in the creek?
Do you still have that big blue blanket?
Benita, we’re bringing meat. Leave the key where you always do.
That last kind of message had started to bother me, but I swallowed it. Mothers are trained to swallow small hurts until they become part of the body.
So when the chat disappeared from my phone that Tuesday, I thought I had pressed the wrong thing. I tapped around for several minutes, moving slowly, afraid of deleting something else. I checked the archived conversations. I checked the settings. I even turned the phone off and on again because that was what my grandchildren always told me to do when technology behaved like a spoiled animal.
Nothing.
The group was gone.
I called Carlos first.
He answered on the fourth ring, which meant he had looked at the screen long enough to decide whether I was worth interrupting whatever he was doing.
“Mom,” he said, already tired. “Is everything okay?”
