The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,17

her mouth to speak, but no words come out.

“Eileen,” I say.

My mother shakes her head and writes something on a gum wrapper from her purse. “Could you please call Merle Mitchell? It’ll be long distance to Kerrville, I think. I can give you some money.”

“No no,” the lady says, taking the wrapper. “It’s fine.” She shuts the door behind her, locks it.

I look up at my mother. “She’s acting like we’re killers.”

“Well, we could be for all she knows. How is she supposed to know?”

I look at our reflection in the window, and I realize that it is true: neither of us looks like a normal person. I am still wearing the stupid pink-and-white dress, and my mother looks a little crazy, the barrette still hanging down by her ear, trails of mascara under her eyes from when she was crying.

“That’s exactly right,” she says. “If ever some people come knocking on our door and I’m not home, I don’t want you to let them in either. I don’t even want you to answer the door.”

“But what if their car broke down?”

“Too bad for them.”

The lady opens the door just an inch again and tells us Mr. Mitchell said he would leave right away. We can wait on the porch, she says. She’ll leave the light on.

“Thank you so much,” my mother says. “Thank you.”

The lady shuts the door, opens it again, and asks if she can bring us a bowl of ice cream.

I ask what kind, and my mother pinches the back of my elbow. I can see the lady’s mouth through the door, her lips bluish and thin. “Um, I’m not sure, dear,” she says. “I’ll have to check and see what we have.” My mother says she’ll just have a glass of water, if that isn’t too much trouble.

When the door shuts again, she tells me it’s rude to ask what kind, and that beggars can’t be choosers. I’m sick of her saying this to me.

“We’re not beggars,” I say. “Our car just broke down.”

The lady comes back with a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a glass of water, and since we are sitting on the steps now, she has to stretch to pass it to us so she can stay inside, keeping one foot behind the door, like a baseball player getting ready to steal home. I tell her thank you, and she smiles. She is younger than I thought she was, wearing an apron over a flowered dress, tennis shoes on her feet.

“Say thank you,” my mother whispers.

“I already said it.”

“Say it again.”

I say thank you again.

“Certainly,” the lady says, and shuts the door again. We both look down at the green ice cream.

“I don’t like mint chocolate chip,” I say.

My mother nods. “Yes. I know.”

“It’s the only kind I don’t like.”

She closes her eyes. “Yes, Evelyn, I know.”

She says she will eat the ice cream if I won’t, and that when Mr. Mitchell comes, we can ask him to take us someplace to eat, as long as his wife isn’t with him. If his wife is with him, she says, we won’t say anything at all.

“Why not?”

“Because I said so.” She points up at the sky. “Look, see that up there? That’s the Big Dipper.”

She’s telling me this like she’s teaching me something new, but of course I know the Big Dipper. It’s the easiest one. I also know the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Orion’s Belt. Ms. Fairchild said the stars in the constellations are not really close together; it only looks that way because they are so far away from us. They only make shapes if you are looking at them from Earth. If you were looking at the Big Dipper from another solar system, she said, it would look like something else, or maybe like nothing at all.

I can hear cicadas from the field across the road, the sound a plastic straw makes when you bend it, back and forth, back and forth. Moths circle the porch light over our heads, and I watch them, my head resting in my mother’s lap. They are like the birds, fluttering and flapping on top of one another, trying to get inside. The bottom of the bulb is dark with the silhouettes of moths already dead, their wings still against the glass.

I wake to headlights shining on my face, the sound of Mr. Mitchell’s truck. He kills the engine and steps out, squinting to see us on the porch.

“Oh Merle,” my mother

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