can’t do this anymore,” I told Mom when we walked outside from the Bed and Beyond store. It wasn’t just because I wanted to go home. My head hurt. Maybe I never even saw a box. Maybe I dreamed I saw it.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ve been a good sport.”
“You be the one to drive home,” I said. I didn’t feel like driving. I felt bad I messed up about the box.
“Okay,” Mom said.
We got in the car. Mom was an excellent driver. She could go real fast in the parking lot around all the cars and everything.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said when we got to the road. “I lost the picture of the box in my head. You know my brain.”
Mom smiled at me. “I love your brain, Andy,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
But I was worried. Miss Sara could be chopped up in bags and I couldn’t even remember if she was carrying a pot or a pan.
Chapter Twelve
Keith
I PARKED IN THE LOT OF THE HARRIS TEETER IN OGDEN. stupid to go all the way there with gas prices like they were, but I couldn’t face seeing people in the Food Lion. People would know me there. Want to talk. They’d ask if I knew any more about my mother’s disappearance, because now it was all over the news. All the time they’d be staring at me. It wasn’t like the people in Ogden wouldn’t recognize me—I wore my ID on my face. But at least there, they wouldn’t try to talk to me.
I got out of the car, grabbed a cart and pushed it into the store, which was pretty crowded. I didn’t have a plan. No list. My mother always had a list and she stuck to it like it was the law. Man, I hated this. I bet it’d been five years since I’d been in a grocery store, and then only because I had to tag along with my mother. If I needed to pick up a snack or something, I did it at the gas station. But our refrigerator was almost empty now, and I was finally starting to get hungry even though thinking about that plate of food at Laurel’s still made me gag.
That was another reason the cops thought my mother left on purpose. “Looks like your mom cleaned out the fridge before she disappeared,” one of them said to me. Screw him. I told him we never had much in the fridge to begin with, but I got the feeling he didn’t believe me.
“She cleans out the fridge, but not her bank account?” I’d asked him. If I needed proof something terrible had happened to my mother, that was it. She never used credit cards, so she wouldn’t take off on purpose without cash. When I started thinking about that, the breathing-tube sort of panic would start again.
The cops had a couple of new theories they were playing with now. First theory: She left on purpose because she couldn’t handle the burden of me anymore. Gimme a break. I was less of a burden now than I’d ever been in my life. I’d had all the fight taken out of me. I knew that wasn’t it, and Dawn and Laurel and Marcus all told them that was crazy. They said how much my mother loved me and how devoted she was to me and all that, which made me feel like a shit for how I treated her sometimes, like she was my maid. I’d be different when she came back.
Second theory: I had something to do with her going missing. They didn’t say that, but I didn’t have to be a genius to know what was going through their heads. A couple of them—a guy named Detective Wiley, and I couldn’t remember the other dude’s name—came to the trailer this morning and went through it again, looking for the diary or memoir or whatever. I’d already looked everywhere I could think of. After they tore the place apart, they talked to me for a couple more hours. Their questions started in one spot and then spun out like a spiderweb, looping all over the place until they had me good and confused. I got angry and told them they were wasting their time, and Wiley said, “Settle down, Keith,” which pissed me off more. Like he could settle down if his mother went missing.
They asked me where I was the afternoon she disappeared.
“In school,” I said. Stupid. I knew the minute I said it, I’d screwed up.
Right in front of me, Wiley called over to Douglas High to check the attendance records. “Uh-huh,” he said into the phone, but he was looking at me with these half-closed, suspicious eyes. “Uh-huh. Right. Thanks.” He turned off his phone and talked to the other guy like I wasn’t even there. “She says he left after sixth period,” he said, and they both looked at me, like, what d’you have to say for yourself now, kid?
“All right,” I said. “I went surfing. By the pier. You can ask anybody.” But I knew the dudes who hung out there wouldn’t be able to say if I was there or not. You could be invisible out in the water. That’s why I liked going there in the first place.
The cops finally left, and I spent the next few hours waiting for them to come back with handcuffs—or worse, with a social worker. I couldn’t believe they still hadn’t figured out I was only seventeen. No one at Laurel’s meeting had ratted on me about it, either. Maybe no one knew? Or cared? That was all right with me. The last thing I needed was to end up in a foster home or something. If the cops thought I was eighteen, I’d be eighteen.
I’d managed to get one of those grocery carts with a squeaky wheel, just so the other shoppers would be sure to notice the burned guy. The wheel made the cart tough to push and probably would have killed my shoulder if I hadn’t doubled up on the Perc again that afternoon. The good news was that, even though I was out of food, I had plenty of Percocet. I got them through the mail and my mother must have just re-upped before she disappeared, because three beautiful bottles arrived that afternoon. When it came to pain meds, at least, I was golden.
I lowered my head as I raced through the store, tossing stuff in the cart, not looking at anybody. I just wanted to make it fast, but I didn’t know where anything was. I found the bread and then got some of those packages of ham and cheese. The cart was getting to me, so I traded it in for a smoother ride. Then I got some toilet paper. Some Coke. I pulled one of the cans from the carton, popped it open and drank it warm as I tooled around the store. I passed the cold beer. Oh, man, what I wouldn’t give for a six-pack! I knew this guy at the gas station who’d buy some for me. He got burned in Iraq, so he knew what it was like. I found the cereal and threw a couple boxes in the cart. Then I noticed the price on the shelf below the Honey Nut Cheerios: $4.49? No way. I put the boxes back on the shelf and started looking through the other stuff I’d stuck in the cart. No prices on anything. How were you supposed to figure this out? I’d planned to get out of there for ten bucks. If everything was as expensive as the cereal, I was screwed. How did my mother do it? She was always cutting coupons, so maybe that was the secret to getting by on the crappy money she made at Jabeen’s. I didn’t want to think about her while I was in the store or I’d end up with another crying fit like I’d had in Laurel’s bathroom. That’d be really smooth in the middle of Harris Teeter.
I stared at the meat counter for a long time. I’d had steak maybe four times in my life, and my mouth actually watered, staring at it. I wasn’t even sure how you cooked it. We had this old charcoal grill, but you needed lighter fluid to grill stuff. Just the thought of spraying the coals with lighter fluid and tossing a match on them made me hyperventilate. I was never going to be one of those guys who got his rocks off cooking things on a grill.
I looked up from the meat counter to see this old lady. She was holding a package of ground beef, and she was staring at me. At my face. I’d let down my guard while I was salivating over the steak.
“What are you lookin’ at?” I asked, shoving my cart past her. I had to get out of there.
I
