I whirl around at the voice, not incredulous like Mark’s had been, but no less surprised. Tara is standing less than twenty feet from me, her hand holding open the creamery’s door for the other girls to spill out into the parking lot with her. My face warms when two of the girls see me and start whispering.
“Wow, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. Not since—” She cuts herself off and her cheeks flush.
Tara’s dad is the sheriff and one of the elders at our old church. He helped my parents find a lawyer for Jason. He also stopped letting Tara come to my house, and limited our other interactions so much that there was very little friendship left to lose once that awful summer ended and I didn’t return to Telford High.
I know she only did what her parents made her do, and I’m certain that she felt really bad about it. Looking at her now, with the added color still flushing her pale face, I can tell she still does. It doesn’t fix anything between us though, and it hurts to see her and feel like we’re strangers.
“—and Mark was just out here with her,” one of the girls with Tara whispers none too quietly. “I hope he’s okay.”
Tara steps toward me just as I back away from her. She rocks to a halt. “I’m really sorry about everything, but—”
The girl who mentioned Mark—I think her name is Shannon—pulls at Tara’s arm. “We’re gonna miss the movie. Let’s go.” She looks askance at me and then transfers that same disapproval to Maggie.
“We have to wait for Emily,” another girl says, pointing back inside. With jolt I recognize Dawn Beckmann, another former friend I went to school with since kindergarten. She used to have the biggest crush on my brother, and when the news first broke about Cal’s death, she was my staunchest supporter in believing Jason was innocent. Now she can’t even bring herself to look at me. I don’t know whether that’s from guilt over deserting me, or if she’s still freaked out because he was guilty.
I don’t care. Tara looks like she’s considering doing something awful, like inviting me and Maggie to go with them, and the other girls look like they’re trying to psych themselves up to start interrogating me about having a felon for a brother.
“Please,” I say, to Maggie. “Can we just go?”
We leave, because Maggie isn’t as selfish as I am.
The sky opens up as we drive back to her house, pouring enough rain down on us to wash the earth clean.
CHAPTER 15
My unease chases me home, up the steps of my porch and through my front door. It snaps at my heels when I hear the muffled sobs coming from the closed pantry. My footsteps slow, but I forget to step over the one creaky floorboard in the hall. The crying cuts off midsob.
A moment passes.
Another. I have to lift my foot again to move, but the second I do the floor creaks again.
“Brooke?”
I force my voice to be light. “It’s me, Mom.”
She clears her throat before speaking again, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that she was crying and has been for a good long while. “I was looking to see if we had any of those canned tomatoes left, but I’m suddenly not feeling very well. Would you heat up the leftover lasagna for you, Laura and Dad?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Brooke?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“There’s fixings for a salad in the fridge too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mom slips out of the pantry and upstairs while I’m getting the food ready. When I call that dinner is ready, Dad and Laura come, but not Mom. The shower is running upstairs and it will keep running until long after the hot water is gone.
“Jason called?” I ask no one in particular once our silent meal has begun. It’s not that Mom criesonlyon days that he calls, but she always cries when he does.
Dad swallows the bite he’s chewing and fills his fork with another. “Yes.”
One word, no more.
I glance at him, the mere effort of holding my fork up suddenly beyond me. I let my arm lower to the table. Had Mom been with us, her hawk eyes would have immediately noticed that I’d stopped eating and she’d give me a gentle admonishment to finish my dinner, her gaze never moving from me until I complied.
Dinners—really all meals—were a big deal for her, always had been. Growing up dirt-poor in a house with more bellies than food to fill them meant that gnawing hunger was a near daily reality for her as a child. I never knew that getting sent to bed without dinner was even a thing as a kid, because Mom would have sooner driven bamboo skewers under her nails than let her children know the sensation of an empty belly.
