by Sandra Lowen

Created on: July 18, 2010

SHE WAS JUST GONE – Short Story

The cops don’t take missing people seriously for twenty-four hours; that is, unless they are under fourteen or over seventy. “Check at some friend’s house,” the sergeant said, “or a boyfriend you didn’t know anything about.” He hung up, but not before his slavering chortle reached my ears.

Laugh on with your evil, dirty mind, I thought. Something is wrong.

Mothers know these things.

Karen was no bad girl; no tryster, no tortured soul looking for escape. She loved Ben and me. Her sun rose and set upon us. She woke up every morning with a sunny, “G’morning, Mommy!” on her lips, and never failed to slip into our room, once she was in her Pjs, and say,” Good night, Mommy!”

Thirty-two, and still calling me ‘Mommy’.

She always minded. If I told her a thing to do or not do, she complied. She talked about going away to college, ‘way off in New York City, but there was no way I was going to tolerate that. The city was too far away, I told her. If she got into trouble, how would Daddy Ben and I ever get to her? Besides, she was our only child, our only little girl, and there was no way that we could live without her. And so she cancelled her big plans and stayed right here with us, going to the community college. She did all right, too; much better than she would have in the big city, with so many distractions. Sure, she had her own mind. But when we told her a thing to do, she went right along with our plan. She gave us absolutely no trouble.

Oh, there was that marriage business a few months back. I told her all along that it wouldn’t work out, but when she insisted that she loved that boy, Ben and I sank our life-savings into her trousseau and the hall and that magical wedding gown. We forested a church and we hired a band, and we outfitted eight bridesmaids and eight groomsmen in finery that would have supported a small Asian village for a month.

The trouble with the boy was that he was so—well, foreign. No, he wasn’t from a foreign country or anything, which we wouldn’t have been able to stomach at all. He wasn’t that kind of foreign. He was—well, a Southerner. Why he had to come up here and put his big ideas in Karen’s head I’ll never know. Ben told me I should let Karen find her own way, but I had to try one more thing. I sat him down and I told him: my Karen had lived in our small town all

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