Mothered (77)

Grace tossed the spoon in the sink and threw away the plastic cups. She wasn’t hungry, but she got out the ice cream and scooped some into a bowl. Thunder rumbled behind her, and she opened the back door to see the sky. It was getting darker. She watched through the screen door as she licked at the cold, creamy treat. A tendril of lightning rippled over the neighborhood, quickly followed by an explosive clap of thunder.

Her mission continued to be finding ways to distract herself. Watching a storm wouldn’t have been her first choice, but at least it was something a little different. While the ice cream felt good going down her throat, she was barely aware of its flavor. Her mother’s accusation had become a sickness of its own, a parasite that was working its way through Grace’s bloodstream, attaching its offspring to her organs. It was one thing when she’d consoled herself with the possibility that Jackie could mistakenly believe something. But now Grace knew that her mother had discussed the matter with Robert, which meant it wasn’t a newly conceived invention, designed to rattle her. Unless the bit about Robert was part of an ever more elaborate deceit.

No one in their right mind would create such a histrionic lie. But that left Grace where she’d started, unsure if Jackie had gone around the bend or . . . Grace had once been 100 percent sure that her mother’s version of Hope’s death couldn’t be true. Now she was only 70 percent sure. Sometimes less.

Rain started pelting the screen, and Grace quickly shut the back door and locked it. She returned to her nest in the living room, all too aware of her Groundhog Day existence. Hadn’t she been living this day for a week already? Laughing at herself as she did it, she turned on the television to check the weather, as if she didn’t already know it might rain. She flipped to a local channel and a red banner streamed along the bottom, warning of flash flooding and severe thunderstorms. After another shattering peal of thunder, Coco scampered in and crouched at Grace’s feet.

“It’s okay, Coco.” She rubbed the nervous cat’s head. Grace and the cat both bolted upright at an unfamiliar sound, the rat-a-tat-tat of BBs bouncing off the windows. But the windows weren’t being shot at—it was hail, growing louder by the second.

Coco darted upstairs to find somewhere better to hide (probably under Grace’s bed), while Grace hurried to the big back window to watch the spectacle. It wasn’t her brightest idea to stand at a window in such a storm—there’d been a few tornadoes in Pittsburgh over the years—but the novelty of it gave her a little thrill. The hail, fat as gumballs—the big ones that cost twenty-five cents when she was a kid—pummeled the windows. And then the wind shifted and the hail beat against the side of her house.

The electricity blinked off, taking with it the illuminating brightness of the television and lamps.

I was blind—and blinded—in a dream.

It looked as if it had snowed in the backyard. Hail clustered in the low spots. Grace had never seen a hailstorm that lasted more than a minute. She grinned, absorbed in Mother Nature’s show. A branch splintered off her back neighbor’s tallest tree, and she gasped as it crashed down. Then it occurred to her that the electricity was still off, and given the force of the wind, the relentless rain and destructive weight of the hail, power lines could be down. The longest she’d ever been without electricity was a couple of hours, at most. Even that had been too long, and she had a sinking feeling that this storm, which had earned a red alert banner, was worse than anything she’d experienced before.



Her excitement fizzled in tandem with the downpour. The thunder and hail moved on to batter another neighborhood, leaving Greenfield soggy and stunned. The storm had been a coveted diversion, and Grace was almost sad to see it go. She stayed at the window for another minute, watching the balls of ice melt into the summer mud.

Now what?

The sun was setting. It was eerily quiet in the house without the constant rumble of the air conditioner and the refrigerator. Oh shit. She stepped into the kitchen and stared at the silent appliance, full of brand-new perishable food. Surely the electricity would come back on before all the food spoiled, right? She flirted with the idea of eating the rest of the ice cream. It wouldn’t matter if the old loaves of bread thawed—they would still be edible; the same couldn’t be said for a tub of melted sugary milk.

As she was about to rescue the ice cream, it occurred to her that everything in the refrigerator would last longer if she didn’t open the doors. She retracted her hand but was hungry now that she didn’t have access to the food she’d just purchased. In quick succession she ruled out all the things she couldn’t eat: a bowl of cereal (not without jeopardizing the milk in the fridge); popcorn (not without the microwave); frozen ravioli with jarred sauce (nope and nope). Fuck. The electric stove was, without power, a fancy dead box.

She rummaged through her utility drawer in search of a flashlight.

“Oh.” She’d forgotten about the old clunky thing she now gripped in her hand. It was probably twenty-five years old and ran on hefty cylindrical batteries. She pressed the switch and was pleasantly surprised when a weak yellow light came on. She clicked it off to preserve the batteries and dived back into the drawer, feeling with her fingers for the item she hoped to find. It took a minute to locate it among the mess, but she finally retrieved the tiny LED flashlight–key chain. A more practical person would have such a key chain attached to their keys; Grace preferred useless, kitschy key fobs.