Despite her slumped little shoulders and quivering lips, Diamond picked her head up from the ground at the sight of the glass door of the tall burgundy brick building before her and Rae. They'd finally arrived home, after one whole hour and a half at their local supermarket. Rae had taken her sweet time wandering through every aisle in search of the pre-made pizza dough she needed for tonight's dinner, dropping tons of other things in the shopping cart as she went; pineapples, potatoes, rice, kidney beans, cereal, milk, eggs, grapes, you name it. Rae just couldn't help it. Though the fridge at home wasn't empty enough to shop altogether for groceries, the deals and discounts for the week were far too tempting── it's not every day that prices drop to such drastic levels and the cashier accepts coupons in addition to them── to the point that, by the time she found the pizza dough, the cart was hard to push around due to its weight.

Now, as she staggered up the concrete, uneven doorsteps because of all the vicious pulling the plastic bags from FoodShop were doing on her tired arms, Rae was facing the consequences. She not only had to keep the muscles in her arms tensed to fight against the bags' pulling, she had to maneuver her way around them so as not to have her hips pummeled by the gallon of milk on her right side, and be mindful of her pace. The bags threatened to break apart at any moment, they couldn't hold their own.

And she had a whole flight of stairs to look forward to once she and Rae get in the building, before they could even reach their apartment. They lived on the fifth floor. And the elevators had yet to get fixed since last month's short circuit problem that kept two of her neighbors stuck in the small, empty space between those four claustrophobic walls for just short of thirty-six minutes. Things would've been easier had she at the very least had her utility cart in the trunk of her car so that she could haul it up the stairs with all the groceries instead of having them hang on her shoulders and arms, but last night she'd brought the cart home for a reason she could no longer remember.

Amazing, really. Truly.

But Rae knew that once all of the groceries she carried were in the comfort of her home and more than anything, off of her, she would be proud of her efforts and grin at the thought of all the extra dollars she'd saved and could leave resting in the bank. There would be more to transfer over on Friday to the savings account she'd been setting up since forever for the Destiny Diamond of ten years from now.

The young Destiny Diamond skipped her way up the doorsteps and only turned to look behind her once there were no more steps to skip over. She gripped onto the egg carton on her gloved hands as she waited for her mother to reach the top and skidded one of her sneakers against the grayish grime, snow, and salt crystals beneath her. Her face was as glum as it'd been on their way to the supermarket and the supermarket itself, but her muddy brown eyes were starting to go back to their usual lively glow.

Rae sighed. "I told you to be careful with the eggs."

"I know Ma. I am," Diamond replied.

"Then why are you holding them like that? Loosen the grip."

Diamond made eye contact with the matching pair in front of her after looking down at her hands. "Like this?" She pursed her lips, opened the carton, and showed them to the staggering Rae. "Mama they're fine. See, see?"

All of the eggs were in pristine condition, lined up in rows of six. Exactly as they'd been when Rae checked each and every one of them for cracks in FoodShop. Rae wrinkled her nose. "Fine, fine. Close them already."

A cheeky smile crossed Diamond's face as she closed the carton of eggs. Rae couldn't help but roll her eyes and chuckle at that, but she made sure to look down at the snow-covered ground as she did so. Hopefully the howling of the wind covered up the sound she'd made. She couldn't let Diamond know she won her mother over with something as simple as a shit-eating grin. Rae didn't like it when others saw her lose or be wrong about anything, period. Nevertheless the eight-year-old-going-on-nine she'd given birth to and raised. It doesn't necessarily make her blood boil, but it did poke at her ego in some way or another. In this case, it amused her, too. It left a funny, bitter taste in her mouth.

Cheeky little brat, Rae thought. I'll show you... !

To distract herself from the fact that her face was hot from embarrassment, Rae tried to reach for her pockets for the keys to their home but every plastic bag on her arms stood in her way.

"Mama do you need help?" Diamond's honeyed voice chirped. "Do you want me to open the door? I'll grab the keys from your pocket!" It only took a mere second for Rae to nod in defeat, and by then Diamond's face was already beaming. "Don't worry Mama, I'll be careful with the eggs too! Look look, I'll put them in my backpack. And I won't skip anymore, I promise!"

It didn't take long for Diamond to put the egg carton in her backpack, rummage through Rae's pockets, and find the keys. Once they were in her grasp, she took her sweet time to strut her way to the door, and as she did so, she made a sorry attempt of a whistle that the gap in her teeth couldn't support. When she finally got to the door, she held up the silver keys and one by one, moved them over to the other side of their dark enamel keychain until she got to the glass door's key. She then used it to open the door as wide as she could and held onto the door's outer handle.

Diamond motioned for Rae to go in. "After you Mama."

Rae found herself rolling her eyes again, but this time, instead of a chuckle, the corners of her lips followed after them. She bit her cheek to suppress the smile as soon as she'd noticed it, but by then it was too late. There was an ecstatic fire in her daughter's eyes. Diamond knew.

Rae walked into the building with her tail between her legs.

"Mama my hands are free now, I can help you even more now! Can I hold the milk?"

Such a cheeky, cheeky little brat. God I love her.

♦♦♦

Home sweet home.

After all those painfully endless flight of stairs, Rae, at last, made it to the fifth floor in one piece, contrary to what she'd believed. When she'd just reached the second floor, she was convinced that her left arm was going to fall off. She kept asking Diamond to check on it, but the only thing that actually did fall off was the plastic jar of peanut butter from one of the bags that eventually had to be replaced by another on the fourth floor.

All of the walking for the eight-mile route she'd done during her shift earlier in the day with the faulty, squeaky front wheels of her mail cart was literally nothing compared to what she'd just gone through in the last fifteen minutes. Heck, even her usual longer shifts and routes were nothing compared to those five floors' worth of stairs. She knew she could count on her legs for her job. But this? Rae may never be able to handle it. Her arms were tired── beyond tired, really. They were, for the most part, just big chunks of meat that hung by her sides; dangling heavy weights that pulled on her torso, in the same way that the bags pulled on her arms. No, far much worse than that, even. Dead. Her arms were dead. Just dead weights that were slowly but surely rotting away over time and tearing apart from her torso, piece by piece, muscle fiber by muscle fiber.

So the moment she dropped all of the stretched-out bags on the doormat and threw her back against the heavy steel door of her apartment, had she not heard Diamond's humming throughout, she would've believed without batting a single eye that she had moved on to the heavens. She might've even believed she heard majestic church bells ringing in her ears, or felt the warmth of a welcoming light overwhelm her. But Diamond kept her grounded. Rae's arms were freed from the pressure of the bags, was all.

Rae let all the air come out of her lungs and slid down to the ground to sit for a moment's rest. She undid the thick knots of her boots, shook the boots off of herself, and placed them next to Diamond's now-soggy sneakers. Then, she threw her head back against the door and stared at the discolored ridges of her pale beige ceiling. Somewhere along the way, she felt for the impressions and faint abrasions that'd formed on her arms from all the groceries she'd lifted, and wondered if they'd feel the same as those of her ceiling; rough, bumpy, perhaps raw. It was an odd and hazy thought, but it helped settle herself down.

It wasn't until her little girl called for her for the third time that Rae noticed her eyes were shut. She'd nodded off for a second or two. "Ma! Mama!"

"Yes?" Rae began, as she promptly rubbed her eyes and lifted herself up from the ground. "What is it?"

"Flowers! Lots of flowers Ma, come here!" Diamond exclaimed. "There are flowers on the table Ma!"

Rae's face immediately contorted in ways she never thought were possible. She tilted her head to the side and blinked twice before she responded to Diamond's absurd words with a stutter. "W-What?"

"There are flowers in the kitchen, come here and see them, they're right here on the table! ...Oh!" Rae heard some shuffling. "Is that... ?"

Rae couldn't believe her ears, and seconds later, she couldn't believe her eyes either.

There were tons of flowers on their small wooden round table, exactly as Diamond had said── roses. Roses as deep and as rich as the blood pumping in and out of Rae's heart. As vibrant and as bold as the matte lipstick that contrasted with the ivory patches on that one woman's silky smooth skin, those that matched with the white little clouds of baby's breath that poked their heads out from the spaces in between the roses. All of the flowers were huddled together by their healthy green tips in a red, semi-translucent jar made of glass and wrapped with an intricate velvety white ribbon on the top, filled to the brim with water. Altogether, there were at least nine roses, dozens upon dozens of baby's breath, and a handful's worth of rose petals scattered on the surface of the table, but that wasn't all there was to it.

On the right side of the flower arrangement there was an opened box of chocolates with five slots already missing by the courtesy of Diamond and her chocolate-covered mouth. On the other, a large aluminum tray rested, covered on the top with foil.

At first, Rae's attention couldn't go anywhere for longer than a second, save for the moments when she met the glow in Diamond's expectant eyes. There was too much to take in at once, and yet, there was not. Rae knew exactly where it all came from. But she wasn't prepared. Nothing grand like this had ever happened before, no gesture of this scale. And more than anything else, it was all supposed to be over. She hadn't made contact in months, since that one goddamned day. Neither did Rae. That's how it was supposed to be for the rest of their lives. It was over, over, whatever the hell their relationship, or it, or whatever, were or was!

"Desirae... "

Rae smacked a hand on her forehead, then brought it down to her cheeks to hold herself together. She used her free hand to keep herself afloat against the broad archway of the kitchen entrance. Once again as it had done long before, her heart failed to control itself. It danced to a beat Rae herself could hear past her very own eardrums. One that she didn't want to hear ever again in her life── it was uncalled for, unnecessary. Dangerous, even. Rae wished over anything in the world to have never had the capability of recognizing those damned beats of her heart, what they may have stood for. Had she not been able to recognize it, perhaps all the heat that rose to her cheeks and ears would have ceased to exist, had they existed at all under those circumstances.

"Desirae... what, what are we?"

Diamond saw the faraway look in her mother's eyes and quickly got on her tiptoes. She reached for the sink, turned on the faucet, held a cup below it for tap water, and helped herself to some before rushing to her mother. "Mama?"

Rae raised her well. The thought brought a small smile to the proud mother's lips. "Thank you DD."

Diamond nodded with her own sweet smile and watched her mother wolf the water down. "Mama," she began. "Mama, I── "

"I'm alright, DD. This is nothing."

"Okay," the daughter quickly replied. "But, um, I found this too."

"Hm?"

Rae dug into the black holes of the pockets in her uniform pants and took out a glossy pink card. "Here, I found this too. In the box." Rae honestly didn't want to open it. She'd seen enough already. "Who's it from?" Though Rae knew the answer from a mile away and she wanted nothing to do with that person, curiosity took hold of her. What did that woman write in there?

Rae grabbed the card and braced herself for its contents. The anticipation of it made her hands awfully sweaty.

Diamond's eyes narrowed as she did her best to read out the name written on the front of the card. "A... Am... A-ma... " Diamond didn't have to read the rest for her to clap her hands together. "Mama it's her, it's her oh my god! Can you believe it? It's Ama── " Diamond stopped herself as soon as her eyes darted over to the tray on the wooden table. "So that means... !"

Diamond's hands were already taking care of the tray's cover by the time Rae snapped out of her thoughts. "Wait!" Rae barked. "Diamond wait don't open it── "

If it were possible for fireworks to light up in a child's eyes, then that would've been exactly what happened with Diamond's own. Fireworks of all colors; blue, green, white, orange, purple... every feasible color from in and out of the rainbow. A gasp escaped her before she had the chance to give a voice to her excitement at the sight of the warm veggie-stuffed pastelón before her. The scent of it unapologetically filled the room with itself, and teased Rae's nose. It prompted her all the more to read its creator's card. It had been burning sizzling for attention on her hands for long enough. She walked deeper into the kitchen, sat herself on one of the two wooden chairs from the table, and brushed some petals to a side to make space for the card.

Handwritten in fine print with jet-black ink, and in a seemingly slanted but careful manner, the card simply read: I miss you. It made Rae's heart come to a full stop. She'd read it in that woman's voice, the same exact way she'd heard it when it all ended, down to the cool tone of her voice. She needed a breather.

"Oh~ yeah Mama! No pizza tonight!" Diamond squealed. Perfect.

" ... what, what are we?"

Was the room getting too hot or was it just her? "Sure," Rae muttered. "Let's clean this all up and set up the table. Then you're going to go take a shower and we'll eat after that. After dinner, it's homework time."

Diamond's eyebrows furrowed. "Clean up?"

Rae rubbed her temples. "You know that's not what I meant." Diamond stared at her mother. "I'm not throwing anything away, Diamond."

"Okay."

"Desirae... what, what are we?"

Rae slammed her hands on the table and sprung out of her seat. "It's... it's too hot in here. Diamond, go ahead and get started with the petals or something. I'm going to go turn down the heater a little bit. I'll be right back."

Once she was done with the thermostat on her living room wall, she found herself standing in the middle of the narrow hallway of her apartment, and without meaning to, her attention landed on the dozen grocery bags by the door.

Rae cursed under her breath.