mother’s arm, but Cathy wouldn’t look at her or answer. “Isn’t she your prayer partner?”
Cathy wept, silently steering with one hand, the other pressed to her middle as if she might be sick.
As the car neared Jenny’s driveway, I saw a piece of white paper sticking out of their front door. Cathy pulled into the garage, but as soon as she entered the house, she walked straight to the front door from inside, opened it, and pulled out the note.
“Is that for me?” asked Jenny.
Cathy slammed the door and locked it. “No.” She unfolded the page and gave it a quick glance. I saw, before she crumpled it, that it was a phone number and looked like Billy’s handwriting. “It’s nothing.”
Jenny followed her mother into the kitchen and watched her toss the ball of paper into the sink. I think Jenny might have protested but the mess in the kitchen distracted her.
The sink was splattered with an odd mix of foods. Vegetable drinks, protein powder, and granola. Perhaps Dan’s favorites. The jars and cans still lay open around the drain. The tall rubbish can nearby overflowed with half-empty packages of molasses cookies, seaweed crackers, and power bars. A nearly full jar of fig jam was crammed in the top, upside down, where I assumed Cathy had stuffed it after Dan walked out.
“I didn’t do this, did I?” asked Jenny
When her mother failed to answer, Jenny followed her down the hall.
The dining room and living room were littered with broken glass and bent picture frames. Photos of Jenny’s family had been mutilated so that her father’s image was torn or twisted from each picture. The only one still on the wall was of Jenny as a baby, alone beside a little wading pool.
Cathy kept walking, down the hall and into the office, where many shelves had been emptied. A pile of books—business advice, sports memoirs, and how-to manuals. Two tan rectangles of unfaded paint were left under empty nails on the wall where Dan’s diplomas used to hang.
Cathy stepped around the piles and sat at the desk. She picked up the phone and stared at it for a moment before she began to push numbered buttons—not a word to her daughter. Jenny paused for a moment, took in the new imbalance in what had been a very tidy room.
“Bev?” Cathy said, her voice quavering. “Something’s happened.”
Jenny continued down the hall and into the family room, and I followed, wanting to tell her what had happened that day.
The smoke alarm cover dangled at the top of the doorway; a liquor decanter lay empty on the carpet. The floor was strewn with board games, pink and blue paper money, dice, Scrabble tiles. And there in the far corner, where Jenny used to sit with her parents every morning for Bible study and prayers, where I had to sit with them just yesterday (if that was possible), there the three chairs lay broken and charred atop a huge melted burn mark in the rug. The Bible itself I had saved—it sat on the arm of the sofa—but Jenny saw another book had been torn to shreds and singed. Scraps of burnt pages and the twisted brown binding lay all around the chairs. Could she tell it was her journal? Jenny picked up what was left of the diary she was once forced to keep. The pages were mostly gone. A jagged wing of paper fluttered from the spine as she dropped it back into the ashes.
She looked up—a black cloud hung above this mess, a smoke stain, four feet wide, on the ceiling.
“Jenny.” I spoke her name and she turned, but not to me. She looked at the doorway and her mother appeared, eyes red, arms filled with cleaning supplies.
“We made the mess together, we’ll clean it up together,” said Cathy.
Jenny looked proud. “We did this together?”
Cathy handed her a scrub brush and a spray can of spot remover. “We need to make it right before anyone sees it,” she said, pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and kneeling in the Prayer Corner.
CHAPTER 10
Helen
HIS CHEEKS WERE PINKED FROM the wind and his hair ruffled. A strand stuck to his forehead in a curl that made my heart ache.
“Hey.” He smiled, hands in his pockets.
“Hey.” Jenny moved back, swinging the door wide, and he stepped in.
She had rescued his note from the kitchen sink, where her mother had thrown it, unfolded the page that was covered in running ink, and managed to read