“He’s my best friend. I hope nothing happened to him.”
Lucy stood up abruptly, picked up the printouts, and started toward the door. “I’ll take good care of these, Sally,” she promised. Then, before either Sally or Jason could say anything more, she was gone. Sally, still seated at the kitchen table, held her arms out to her son.
“Come here,” she said softly, and Jason, though unsure what his mother wanted, let himself be hugged. “I love you,” Sally whispered. “I love you so much.”
Jason, wriggling in her arms, suddenly looked up and grinned. “Enough to let me make fudge?” he asked.
For some reason, the devilish look on her son’s face broke the tension Sally had been living under for over a week, and she began laughing.
“Sure,” she said, releasing Jason and standing up. “In fact, making fudge seems like the best idea I’ve heard all day!”
Jason watched as Sally mixed together the milk, sugar, and chocolate, added a dash of salt, and put the pan on the stove.
“Want me to check the thermometer?” he asked.
“You can if you want,” Sally said with a shrug. “But it’s never been off yet, has it?”
“No,” Jason agreed, “but my chemistry book says you should always check your equipment before you start an experiment.”
“When you’re as old as I am, making fudge isn’t an experiment anymore.”
Jason filled a pan with water, put the long candy thermometer into it, and set it on a vacant burner. Then he turned the heat on, and while he waited for the water to boil, fished a bottle of pop out of the refrigerator. Sally glared at him.
“Drink that, and you won’t get to scrape out the pan,” she warned.
Jason glanced at the stove where the fudge was just barely beginning to heat, then at the bottle in his hand, which was all ready to be drunk. “Aw, Mom,” he muttered.
“Make up your mind.”
Reluctantly, Jason put the pop back in the refrigerator. “Dad would have let me drink it,” he complained as he went back to check on his pan of water. It was beginning to simmer, and he climbed up on the kitchen stool to watch the thermometer.
It read 200 degrees, but even as he watched it, he could see the mercury climbing. He shifted his attention to the fudge. It, too, was beginning to boil.
“The thermometer’ll be ready in a minute.”
Sally was buttering a pan. She glanced up, smiling at the intensity with which Jason watched the thermometer.
“When it gets to two-twelve, let it sit a minute. If it doesn’t go up any farther, it’s reading right. Then you can move it over to the candy pan. But don’t stir the candy!”
“I know,” Jason said, his voice filled with scorn. “If you stir it, it crystallizes. Anybody knows that.”
“You didn’t till I taught you,” Sally teased. She began chopping up some walnuts, but kept an eye on Jason when, a few moments later, he moved the thermometer from the boiling water into the candy. “Now, don’t let the candy go above two-thirty-four.”
Jason, his eyes glued to the steadily creeping mercury, ignored her.
He watched as the temperature reached 230 degrees, then 232. He was about to get down from the stool, ready to pick up the pan as soon as it rose two more degrees, when suddenly the temperature seemed to spurt.
As the red column in the thermometer started past 234, he picked up the pan and groped with his left foot for the step that should have been there.
It wasn’t.
Startled, he tried to set the pan back on the stove, but it was too late. His balance was gone, and he tumbled to the floor, the pan of boiling fudge still clutched in his right hand. His scream of fright made Sally look up just in time to see the searing liquid gush over Jason’s arm and spread out on the floor.
Sally forced back the scream that boiled up from her own throat. She dropped her knife as she scooped Jason up from the floor and instinctively moved him toward the sink. Then she began running cold water while she held his arm under the tap.
As the brown mess washed away, she saw the blistering skin underneath.
Jason, strangely still, stared at his arm.
“Why doesn’t it hurt?” he asked. Then, again, “Why doesn’t it hurt?”
Pausing only to snatch her car keys from the table and wrap his arm in a towel, Sally rushed Jason out the back door. A moment later she was on her way to the