I’m home. Mom’s in the kitchen. She looks terrible.
Are you going to talk to her?
Tomorrow. Tonight I’m eating ice cream feelings.
She put the phone down and looked at the ceiling and thought about Bea saying “nobody asked me” and Tyler puttinghis hand on her shoulder and the ice cream melting faster than any of them could eat it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bea was in the kitchen when Anna came down.
That was the first surprise. Bea on school mornings operated on a fixed schedule—alarm at six-forty-five, shower, dressed, out the door with a granola bar and her backpack by seven-twenty. She did not sit at the kitchen table at six-fifteen with a bowl of cereal and her phone face-down beside it and the look of someone who’d been awake for a while.
Anna stopped in the doorway. The kitchen smelled like coffee. Bea had made coffee. Bea didn’t drink coffee.
“I made coffee,” Bea said. “For you.”
“Thank you.”
Anna crossed to the counter and poured a cup. The pot was full—Bea had made the whole thing, the way Anna made it, with the scoop-and-a-half that Joey had once called “structurally sound.” Anna carried her cup to the table and sat across from her daughter.
The November light was thin through the kitchen window. Early. Grey. The kind of morning that hadn’t decided what it was going to be yet.
Bea ate a spoonful of cereal. Anna drank her coffee. The quiet between them was different from last night’s quiet — last night’shad been the silence of a door closing. This was the silence of two people sitting on either side of something, figuring out how to start.
“I should have told you,” Anna said.
“Yeah.”
“I was scared. Which is a terrible reason.”
“It’s an honest reason.” Bea stirred her cereal. “Scared of what?”
Anna wrapped her hands around the cup. The coffee was good. Bea had made it right.
“Scared that you’d look at me the way you looked at me last night.”
Bea’s spoon stopped.
“I’m not mad,” Bea said. “I was mad last night. This morning I’m—” She looked at her cereal like it might have the word she needed. “I don’t know what I am this morning.”
“That’s okay.”
“It doesn’t feel okay.”
“I know.”
The fridge hummed. A car passed on the street outside. The house held them the way it always did.
“I like him, Bea.”
Straight and clear. She’d softened and avoided and timed and planned and hoped Bea wouldn’t find out instead of saying the true thing for far too long.
Bea looked at her.
“I know,” Bea said.
“You know?”
