The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,53

and she says yes. She tells him about the shoes, and how we had to take them off because they were too tight. She had tried to carry me, and the heat had just gotten to her. That was all.

When he pulls up to our house, he gives her his card and tells her she can have him paged if she starts to feel bad again, or if there is anything she needs. We get out of the car, and he rolls down his window, asking her again if she thinks she will be able to look after me.

“Yes,” she says, her arm cool around my shoulders. “Yes, I’m sure.”

The next morning, there is a pair of Keds in front of our door, left there in the middle of the night. They are a size too big, but this is better than too small. I stuff toilet paper in the toes so they will fit and show them to my mother, but she doesn’t smile. She stays in bed all day, her eyes open, looking up at the ceiling, still wearing the yellow dress. She doesn’t even get up to eat. I don’t want to go into her room, dark and humid, starting to smell. She sleeps on just her mattress now, her broken bed pushed to one corner.

I eat cereal with the watered-down milk for two days, and leave her alone. I stay up late, watching television until they play the national anthem and the stations go blank.

On the third day, there is no more cereal, no more milk. I go back into her room and jump on her mattress. I yell at her and tell her she has to get up. When I pull off the sheets, she rolls over and turns away from me, the yellow dress pale and wrinkled. Her hair is awful, the back tangled in red-brown knots.

Finally, she stands up, her hands in her hair, looking not at me but at her reflection in the mirror. She closes her eyes and opens them again. “Okay, Tina,” she says. “Come on.”

She goes into the kitchen and finds some powdered milk. She fries an egg for me. She tells me not to worry. She will try to fill out the yellow-and-blue booklet again. She should not have talked to the lady at the desk like that. She says she is just having a bad time right now, but she still loves me. I am her little light in the world, she says, and she will always take care of me. Everything will be okay.

I eat my egg and watch her move around the room, listening to her talk. Everything will not be okay, I know. She has lost her job. She is going to have a baby, Mr. Mitchell’s, and he has moved away with his wife somewhere, probably to get away from her. She sat down on the sidewalk downtown and cried like a little girl with her underwear showing until the police had to come.

I don’t say anything, but in my head, things have changed. I’ve drawn a line between us, the difference between her and me. It’s like one of the black lines between states on maps, lines between different countries on the globe. They don’t really exist. You don’t really see a long black line when you cross from the United States into Mexico, from Kansas to Missouri. But everyone knows where they are, and they are important, keeping one state separate from the other, so you can always tell which one you’re in.

eight

IT’S JANUARY, AND LONG, SHARP icicles hang down from the roof. Eileen says she had a friend who was killed by an icicle; it fell off the building just as he was coming out the door, and it went through his head like a knife, split it right open.

My mother and the new baby are still gone. He was born too early and too small, with a weak heart and lungs that don’t work by themselves. He has to stay in the hospital, a respirator breathing for him, in an incubator to keep out germs. My mother has to stay because her blood is too thin, and she needs rest. She’ll be fine though, Eileen says. She’ll be home soon.

Eileen has come up from Wichita to stay with me. She says the baby, Samuel, is most likely an angel who will only visit Earth for a little while before he flies back up to heaven. But it will be