All You Get Is Me Read Online Free

for good. My dad filed a missing-persons report and he drove all over the city every night, looking for her in neighborhoods and places he’d never even been before. He hired a private investigator who came up empty. He told us that some people just don’t want to be found. My dad wouldn’t give up. He searched on the internet for my mom’s mother and finally found her in Vermont. Shortly after they met, my mom had told my dad that she’d had a falling-out with her mother and hadn’t spoken to her in years, and that her dad was dead. Her mom, my grandmother, told us that no such falling-out had happened and that my mom’s dad was very much alive. She said that my mom had just up and disappeared one day, never contacting them to tell them where she’d gone. My dad put me on the phone. They didn’t even know they had a grandchild. Her voice reminded me a bit of my mom’s. We had an awkward conversation and then I put my dad back on. He cried when he said good-bye to them and promised to keep them posted.
    Through all of this I never hated my mom. I couldn’t very well hate someone who’d taught me how to polka, someone who’d taught me how to read tea leaves, give butterfly kisses, and make butterscotch brownies. When I was six, she gave me a Pentax point-and-shoot camera and taught me how to take a picture. I took photos of everything. Those photos are in a box in my bedroom closet now except for the best ones of my mom. Those I framed. They sit on my desk, pictures of her laughing at the beach, in the kitchen, walking up the street, painting. I got a better camera for my tenth birthday, with a zoom lens. I became a more accomplished photographer but I never got a great photo of my mom. She’d started slipping away by then. Now I never go anywhere without my camera.
    After my mom disappeared for the last time, we left everything just the way it was for a whole year, even the paints, brushes, and canvases. We didn’t touch anything. We couldn’t. During that year I saw my mom everywhere: in bookstores, coffee shop windows, standing in line for movie tickets. But it was my old mom, back when she was happy and beautiful. I would even walk toward her, ready for her to smile at me and take me into her arms, but it was never her. Every afternoon when I came home from school, I half expected to find her there in the studio, painting or watching the world go by on Church Street. But eventually we realized we were waiting for something that was never going to happen. My dad packed up all her art supplies and her paintings into boxes and put them in our storage closet downstairs. One afternoon, not long after that, he picked me up at school and told me that we were moving on with our lives.
    “What does that mean?” I asked.
    “It means we’re moving.”
    “Moving? Where to?”
    “A farm. We’re moving to a farm.”
    “We’re going to live with farmers?”
    “No. We are the farmers.”

Chapter 3
    T hirteen black-and-white photos of the accident hang across the clothesline in my darkroom like crime-scene laundry. The last one is still in the developing solution. I push it around with rubber-tipped bamboo tongs as the image comes into focus. It’s the overturned SUV resting in the middle of the asphalt road. In the upper right-hand corner is an unintentional piece of the ambulance with its back doors open. I must have taken it right after the paramedics loaded the stretchers. Sylvia Hernandez’s bare foot is clearly visible. You can also see part of her other foot, which somehow still has a pristine white sneaker on it. I remove the print from the developer and drop it in the stop bath. I can’t take my eyes off Sylvia’s foot. Next to the accident photos are the rest of the photos from the roll: a Buddhist monk with a shaved head eating a wedge of melon, a young, smiling monk holding a puppy, Steve trying to hypnotize a chicken, a three-legged dog. I took them the day Steve and I drove over to the monastery