The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,35
to Pine Ridge because I heard they were hiring.”
He makes a face. “You walked that far in this heat?”
“It wasn’t bad going there, just coming back.”
“Were they hiring?”
“They took my application. They wanted to know if I had a car.”
“Oh,” Mr. Mitchell says. “Well, maybe they’ll call.”
“Maybe.” She shakes her head, looks down at her sunburned hands. Only the tops of her hands are red; the palms are still white.
“If they don’t,” he says, “we’ll work something out.”
My mother gives him a long look, smiling slowly.
He tells her if she wants to jump in the shower, he will help me make a salad so it will be ready when she comes out. She likes this idea and disappears down the hallway, humming to herself. He takes lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes out of the refrigerator. He gets a bowl down from the cabinet above the sink. He knows where everything is.
“Okay, squirrel,” he says, lifting me up on the counter. “Your job is to tear up the lettuce. You think you can handle that?”
“Aren’t you going to wash it first?”
“Huh? Oh yeah.” He holds the head of lettuce under the faucet and hands it back to me. He scrapes and chops the carrots, whistling “On Top of Old Smokey.” I don’t know how long he is going to wait to bring in the roses, if he is going to do it in front of me or not.
He starts to sing, making up words that are wrong.
On top of Old Smokey, all covered with cheese I ate a bad hot dog, threw up on my knees.
He laughs, and I laugh too. It would be nice if Mr. Mitchell came to live with us. I wouldn’t mind if he moved right in with us and married my mother. It wouldn’t even be so bad if we just kept going on this way, with him living somewhere else but coming by sometimes to give us pizzas and flowers, cutting up carrots while my mother takes a shower.
He asks me why I am so sunburned. I tell him they took us to the park. When lying, it is important to keep all your lies the same.
Mr. Mitchell looks up at me and smiles again. “You’re a good kid,” he says. “I like having you around.”
I hear the shower water turn on. “When are you going to give her the roses?”
He looks up. “Huh?”
I roll my eyes. “The roses you bought today. From the flower shop.”
He yells “ouch” and “dammit,” and I look down to see he has slipped with the knife and cut his thumb, the one on the same hand as the two purple fingernails. He looks away and puts his thumb in his mouth. “What do you mean?” he mumbles.
“I saw you today. I saw you buying roses.” I am surprising him by how much I know. “Where are they?”
He turns and looks at me, and when his blue eyes meet mine, they flinch. “How did you see me buying roses?”
He sounds angry, like I am in trouble, and I wonder if he knows I am lying about the teachers taking us to the park. “I was at Arby’s, after we went to the park. I saw you come out of the flower shop. You bought roses.”
He takes his thumb out of his mouth, holds it under the faucet, and asks me what I was doing at Arby’s on a school day, the cut from his thumb turning the water from the faucet pink before it rushes down the drain. He has a ring too, just a gold band though, no diamond.
“Oh. They were for your wife?”
He shuts the faucet off and rubs his eyes. He looks up at me and then down, shaking his head. I can feel my mind stretching, putting pictures together very quickly. I see Mr. Mitchell carrying the roses out of the shop, then going home and giving them to his short, small-eyed wife. Oh Merle, thank you. She would put them in a vase on a table in their house. She could be looking at the roses in the vase right now, this very moment, her nose against their red petals.
He must not hate Mrs. Mitchell after all. He might love her again, maybe as much as he loves my mother, but in a different way. Or maybe the same way, at different times. Or perhaps he doesn’t really love either of them at all. I feel bad for him, standing there, looking down into the