Don’t Let Me Go(9)

“It’s not very late,” she said.

“But I won’t see you again before bed. So that’s why the goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” she said. Rather flatly.

Billy slithered back inside for the night.





Grace



Grace missed one day of school, but then the next day Yolanda came and got her, and took her to school in a car. It was too bad, in Grace’s view, because, really, she could miss every single day of school from now until the end of time and it wouldn’t hurt her feelings even one tiny little bit.

“How am I supposed to get home?” Grace asked Yolanda. “I’m not allowed to walk by myself.”

“Your mom’ll come and get you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I had a long talk with your mom, and she promised me.”

“What if she breaks her promise? It happened before.”

“I’ll keep an eye out. But this time I’m pretty sure. She told me she’s ready to pull herself together.”

“That would be nice,” Grace said.

But it was just a thing you say. Maybe it would happen, and that would be nice, but maybe it wouldn’t. And Grace knew it would be extra-hard if she spent all day thinking how nice it was going to be, and then it wasn’t. Grace hated that worse than anything.

So she tried hard not to think too much about it all day, but she thought about it a lot while she was waiting for the bell to ring. It made her feel nervous and weird. It made her want to eat the very last chocolate bar she had hiding in her backpack; but she didn’t, because she figured the teacher would catch her, and if the teacher caught her, she’d take the candy away. And that was Grace’s last one. If she’d had more money she’d have spent it on more chocolate, but that was her allowance, and it was all gone for the week. Grace always said she’d make the candy last, but then she never did.

When the bell rang, it made her jump.

She ran out into the hall, dug out the chocolate, and unwrapped it while she was running. Well, walking fast. She ate it on the way to the back door, where her mom always met her.

She was there. Her mom was there! Grace was surprised. At least, a little bit surprised.

“What are you eating?” Grace’s mom asked. She didn’t sound too slow, and she seemed pretty much awake, at least, as best Grace could tell.

“Nothing.”

“Now don’t lie to me, Grace Eileen Ferguson. You still have some of it on your lip. It looks like chocolate.”

“Oh. Yeah. That. We had that last period.”

“I’m going to talk to your teacher, then, about not giving you junk food. You know I don’t like it when people give you junk food.”

“Please don’t. This is the first time I’ve seen you in days. I mean, not seen you, but seen you. I mean…you know what I mean. I mean, I wish we didn’t have to fight.”

Grace knew her mom felt guilty, so she was pushing on that guilt button just a little bit.

“OK, you’re right,” Grace’s mom said. “Let’s just go home.”

While they were walking home, Grace was thinking, Wow, she’s all pulled together, and that’s nice. But she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want her mom to know that she’d only just then started believing in it.

Her mom made Grace macaroni and cheese and hot dogs, which was the favorite of all her mom’s dinners. Sometimes when her mom was guilty…well, it was not always such a bad deal. While they were eating, Grace’s mom asked if she wanted to go to that nice AA meeting at the rec center, and Grace said, “Definitely, yeah.”

So, after dinner, they rode there on the bus.

There was this weird guy on the bus who kept staring at them. He was sitting right across from their seats. He didn’t look weird on the outside, Grace noticed. He had on a nice coat and a wedding ring, and his hair was clean and all, but she could tell he was weird on the inside because of how he was staring.

Her mom didn’t seem like she noticed.

Grace’s mom had this little plastic bottle of water between her knees, and after a while she put her head back and dropped something in her mouth and washed it down with a slug of the water, but Grace couldn’t see what it was she dropped in.

So she said, “What was that?”

“It’s nothing,” her mom said. “I have a headache, that’s all. Don’t forget who’s the mom and who’s the kid.”

“Right,” Grace said. “Got it.”

“I’m trusting you to stay out of the candy basket tonight, OK?”

“I can have one piece of licorice, right?”

“You can have one piece of anything you want. But one is enough.”

Grace’s mom said that every time, but she couldn’t really watch the candy basket every minute, so usually Grace ended up with more.

But this time the way it played itself out was all different. It was good, in a way, but not so good, all at the same time.

The candy basket situation worked like this: the basket was passed around the table, and everybody took one piece (unless you didn’t want a piece, which some people didn’t, and Grace always found that impossible to understand), and then it made the rounds again so people could take one piece of whatever was left over. But Grace was not sitting at the table with them. Grace walked around wherever she wanted, just being quiet so they could have their meeting. So she could pop up wherever the basket was, and just keep getting more candy. And the only thing that could stop her was her mom.