lungs.
But when she told Daddy that night at dinner, when she handed him the check, he was silent. Quinn stared at his plate and disappeared into his room right after dinner. I didn’t know what to do with myself in all that quiet, and finally, reluctantly, I left them alone. Later, the words that crept under my door (trust and cheat and whore) wound their way into my dreams. He asked her, in whispers like pins, Do I have to watch you twenty-four hours a day? And I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine what would happen to us if he never left the house again. The next day he got a headache that didn’t go away for a week.
A month later, my mother had stopped getting out of bed in the mornings. I knew she was awake, listening to hear Daddy either getting ready to leave or clicking on the TV and settling onto the couch for another headache day. In my own room, I was doing the same. Quinn was the only one of us who seemed real anymore. While the rest of us wandered about the house like ghosts, Quinn went to work every morning, and he came home every night with stolen milk from the Shop-N-Save, eggs, and packages of sliced cheese so that we would have something to eat besides the contents of the dusty cans that had been in our cupboards since last winter.
One morning, after Daddy hadn’t gone to work in three days, I thankfully awoke to the familiar sounds of his work boots shuffling across the linoleum, and the sound of Quinn cracking his back, twisting first left and then right. And finally, the rattle of the truck disappearing down the road with the two of them inside. I waited until I couldn’t hear his tires crushing gravel anymore and then I crawled out of bed.
Summer was almost over, but the air was still hot. Sticky and stifling. I had taken to sleeping in one of my mother’s old slips to stay cool, and in the kitchen, in my mother’s tattered lingerie, I poured the last of the coffee into a mug. I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee, but today I didn’t care. I kicked the screen door open and went outside. Sitting on the rusty porch swing in my mother’s slip, drinking the forbidden coffee, I pretended things weren’t falling apart. That it was just another summer day. But my mother would not get out of bed, and there were clouds caught in the tops of the trees.
Inside, I walked tentatively down the short hallway to the door to Mum’s room and peeked in.
“Morning.” She smiled, rolling over to look at the clock.
I sat down on the bed, and she reached for me with her little hands, motioning for me to lie down next to her. Sometimes lately I’d felt as if she were the child; she was so small. But when I lay down next to her and she put her fingers in my hair, I was the little one again.
“Is it nice out?” she asked. Her breath was musty. I knew what she meant was, Is he gone?
“It will be. It’s cloudy, but it’ll burn off.”
“Promise?”
I nodded.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
I shrugged. She hadn’t wanted to do anything for weeks, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
“I told Gray’s sister I’d help her clean out the rest of his house. She said we can take anything we want.”
Gray Wilder had been our closest neighbor, about a quarter-mile down the road from us, near the Pond. He had died that spring. He was the first dead person I knew. I was curious, and the idea of spending the day on an adventure with my mother thrilled me.
“I was thinking we might be able to find some things to sell at Boo’s,” she said.
My heart thudded in my ears. I wondered what Daddy would say if she came to him with another check. My hands shook with the prospect of another night listening to those words. But she held me so tightly, I couldn’t say no. She needed this. She needed me to agree. And I missed her.
We walked to Gray Wilder’s house carrying suitcases, and the sky threatened rain. It felt as if we were running away, but the suitcases were empty, and I wasn’t wearing any shoes. My mother walked slowly, noticing things: a late raspberry, the red almost brutal amid all that green. A hornet’s nest in the top of a tree. A perfect silver feather in the middle of the road. With her gestures, she tried to make all of this beautiful, to distract me from the gutted-out car over the bank near Gray Wilder’s house and the bag of trash somebody had dumped there. But my eyes lingered on the crushed Valentine’s candy box, empty aspirin bottle, and single filthy sneaker.
Gray Wilder’s house was a trailer on concrete blocks. It smelled like an outhouse when my mother finally found the key and let us in. I’d never been inside a dead person’s house before, and suddenly, I didn’t want to be there. We collected a few things from the living room: a clock made out of lacquered wood, a wicker magazine rack, two candles made of layered wax that looked like a sunset. But the smell got to me soon, and while my mother scoured Gray Wilder’s garage for something valuable, I waited for her outside on a rock, picking the dead skin off my feet. The sky rumbled angrily.
After a long time, she finally came out holding something wrapped up in the pages of a dirty magazine. She unwrapped it quickly, tossing the crinkled pages on the ground. In her face I could see something like desperation, as if her very happiness depended on what was inside the glossy pictures of skin and hair and lipstick. I couldn’t help but stare at the fragments of women’s naked bodies, at their pubic hair, shaved into tiny triangles, and at their swollen breasts, their colorless nipples. They reminded me that my own body (though I was growing in height) had yet to go through the magical transformations that some girls in my class had gone through one or even two summers before. I made myself turn away, looking up instead at the red glass vase in her hands.
“That’s pretty,” I said. I wanted her to know she had found it: the perfect thing that would save this day.
She set the vase on the rock next to me and looked at it. Without sun, the glass was dull and dark red, almost brown. I could smell rain coming. I could hear thunder somewhere, not too far away.
“Boo will love it,” I said. “She will. She has all of those vases, the Depression glass ones, remember? But she doesn’t have any red ones. I bet we could get twenty dollars for it.” My words were tumbling, eager and clumsy.
She picked it up again, smiling, and ran her fingers across the rim. But she hesitated halfway around, her smile fading.
“There’s a chip in it.”
“Where?” I asked, as if it couldn’t be true. As if she could have mistaken this imperfection. I stood up, went to her, looked at the glass. The chip was small but certain. The vase wasn’t worth anything.
She set it back down on the rock and walked away from me, disappearing into the garage. I picked the vase up and cradled it, briefly, like an infant in my arms. I set it back down, embarrassed, and felt the first cold drops of summer rain on my shoulder.
She was inside the garage for a long time. I could hear her feet shuffling across the dirt floor. When she came out again, she was carrying a hammer. My throat felt thick. She scooted me out of the way and contemplated the vase again.
I looked at her, and her face grew soft. In a glance, I asked her to please stop.
“It’s ruined,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. “Already.”
I stared at my hands. When I looked up again, she was standing over the vase with her eyes closed. When she swung the hammer back, her shoulder blades were sharp, like a bird’s wings at her back. And the vase made a sound like
