Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(70)

“It’s the blue one,” she said. “But have a seat. I just need to cool down a second. Hot out there, isn’t it?”

I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, which was decorated with a vase of plastic sunflowers and a set of porcelain dog and cat salt-and peppershakers. Mom drained her glass, then drew aside the curtains over the sink. The sunlight made bronze highlights on her skin. I saw her in an airy dress of yellow and green tatters, gliding across a dark stage. I took the saltshaker and tried to become absorbed in turning it in small circles.

“That was Fred’s mom’s. He keeps talking about boxing up her stuff and putting it in the attic, but he never does.”

Mom moved from the sink and took a seat across from me. She toyed with the plastic sunflowers.

“He has all these old handwritten cookbooks of hers, and he’s working his way through them, trying to relearn the recipes. He says when he smells her meatloaf, he comes this close to remembering her.”

Mom smiled at me over the flowers. For a second it was as if we were back before the outbreak, sitting at the kitchen table after school, as we had a hundred times before. In the weeks since I’d first seen her, I’d come up with a hundred things I wanted to ask, but all of them suddenly left my head. It had been stupid to follow her.

I bent down and reached for my backpack. “If you show me which chair you want moved, I can—”

“I know who you are.”

I froze, my hand suspended over the pack’s strap.

“I saw you in the alley that time. And then again the night—” She took in a breath. “The night you came here.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’m not going to—Fred didn’t recognize you and I don’t think . . . I don’t know why, but I don’t think you’re dangerous. Are you?”

I shook my head.

“Why’d you come here that night?”

Her voice sounded exactly the same then as it did when we were little and one of us had gotten into trouble for something. Dad always yelled, but not her. She’d ask why we did what we did, as if she were just curious, as if we might have a reason and that the reason would matter.

“I thought that man, Fred—I thought he might have taken you.”

“Why did you think that?”

I shrugged. What could I say? There was a squeak as Mom’s chair moved closer to the table. She took the peppershaker and turned it over in her long fingers, studying it as if a secret code had been scratched into its side.

“We knew each other before,” she said. “Didn’t we?”

I started to speak, but then there was a surge of noise from the party as the glass door to the porch slid open.

“Sara! Everyone all right in here?”

Mom jumped up from the table and ran to Fred as he came into the room. She slipped her arm around him and kissed him on the cheek. “We’re good! This is, uh . . .”

“Tom,” I said quickly.

“Tom. Right. He worked on the gardening crew with us. He was going to help me get that chair for Mrs. Beamon.”

“Ah, so he’s a lifesaver then!” Fred crossed the kitchen in two brisk strides and shook my hand. I could feel the waxy scar I had given him just behind his knuckles. “I’ve had this twinge in my back for weeks and can’t seem to shake it. In thanks, we’ll send you home with thirty-five to forty pounds of leftover tuna noodle casserole.”

He turned back to Mom and clapped his hands together.

“Now! My dear one. My sweet. I’m sorry to say it, but the time is almost upon us.”

“Seriously?” Mom whined. “Can’t we just skip it and run away somewhere? Come on, it’ll be all mysterious.”

Fred laughed, and then, when he saw that I didn’t understand, he said, “We promised our friends that if they brought their instruments, Sara and I would kick off the dancing. She’s nervous.”

“I know it’s silly,” she said. “But I’m positive that I have two left feet. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. I’m going to be a disaster.”

“You’re going to be wonderful,” Fred said.

“I just have to pull myself together.”

He kissed the tip of her nose. “Bourbon’s in the cupboard,” he said. “I’ll go stall. Tom, thanks again. Feel free to come over and lift heavy things for me anytime.”

There was another rush of noise as he opened the porch door and closed it behind him. I followed as Mom moved to the living room, to a window that looked out onto the backyard. Fred was circulating through the crowd, catching up everyone around him in great bear hugs and then laughing.

“Not long after I met Fred, this guardsman was going door-to-door,” she said. “He had a stack of papers, and he was telling everyone who they were. Fred already knew who he was by then, but I didn’t. When the guardsman came to our house, I had Fred tell him to go away.”

“Why?”

Mom’s forehead wrinkled with concentration. “When I try to look into that place, into the time before, I have this feeling that . . .”

She shook her head, frustrated.

“What?”

“There were good things then,” she said carefully, as if she were making her way across an old bridge, testing each step before she committed to it. “I know that. There were people I loved, who loved me. But there’s something else in that place too, something that . . .”