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  Daddy looked down at his hand on my ankle, and I noticed for the first time since Theron left how the skin of his cheeks folded like draperies beside his mouth. “Me too, honey.”

  Then a thought come to me, as if it walked in the door and sat on the bed with us. “Maybe what make—makes—her happy now is being sad. And being sad is the way she’ll always be from now on.”

  Daddy squeezed my ankle again. “I sure hope that’s not true.”

  He sat there on my bed while the wind-up clock they gave me last birthday ticked. I counted forty-three ticks. When my stomach growled, I realized the only thing I’d eaten since breakfast was half an apple—and none of Meadow Lark’s pretzel sticks.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to go downstairs?” I asked.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Daddy say, and raised one eyebrow. “But if she starts to hum, let her sing.”

  At that moment I’d have given anything—even my emerald ring—to hear Mama hum again.

  Chapter 4

  That Sunday, as Mama and I sat in church—holy hot dogs!—my stomach started growling again.

  “Shh!” Mama say, keeping her eyes on the altar. This was her sacred time.

  My stomach felt stuck to the back of the pew, I was so hungry, and all I could think about was the stack of blueberry pancakes waiting at Doby’s and the little bottles of syrup all lined up at each table. So I pressed my hands over my stomach and hunched over to muffle the noise, wondering if that little cube of bread about to come around on the silver tray could keep it quiet until lunchtime.

  Mama flickered her eyes at me as a warning. She never let me go to Sunday school. She say Sunday school was a waste of good time for a girl like me, so ever since I was old enough to remember, I come into church with her and Daddy and Theron. These days Daddy stayed until the offering plates started passing across the pews, and then he slipped to the side and out the back door. He say the Cathedral of Nature was the only church he cared to attend anymore.

  “Pay attention,” Mama say. It was what she always say to me whenever communion began and a hush as heavy as whipped cream filled the sanctuary. While other kids had doodle pads to keep them quiet, I wasn’t allowed. I had to sit up straight with my ears perked and eyes wide open. If ever there was a time to pay attention, Mama say, it was during communion. While Pastor talked about the body, and then broke the loaf of bread in two, Mama stared straight at him. “Keep your eyes on that bread,” she always say when he broke it, “because that’s when you might see the truth.”

  “The truth of what?” I always ask, but she always just shushes me.

  Sometimes I think she meant Jesus, after he come back to life and ate with his friends. I haven’t seen him yet. Haven’t seen him in the stained glass behind the communion table, haven’t heard him in the flapping of bulletins, or smelled him in the breath of prayers around me. Haven’t ever sensed a glow of him crouched in the murky space beside the pulpit. When I asked Mama if she ever saw the truth during communion, she say, “Not yet.”

  But I learned that, for Mama, that’s what hope is—the moment just before the bread breaks or when dusk falls. It’s the moment she holds her breath and waits to see with her eyes what her heart longs for.

  After service, Mama stopped to talk to Pastor, so I threaded my way through the crowd and went outside to find Daddy. Before Theron left, Daddy often stood on the grass with the other men. Like Daddy, they wore pastel-colored shirts. Like Daddy, the smell of their aftershaves floated on the breeze. And like Daddy, they belonged to the Cathedral of Nature, the Church of Fishing, and the Fellowship of Barbecue. But these days he was usually in the car, reading the paper or listening to the ball game or thumb-tapping the steering wheel waiting for Mama and me to finish.

  I was never sure if it was their choice or his that he be in the car by himself instead of with the men, but I knew it had something to do with Theron and what everyone say he’d done. I hoped it wasn’t the men’s decision to leave Daddy out, because church—like family—was supposed to be a place to forgive.

  After I left Mama, I went out to the parking lot to look for him. Today he wasn’t in the car, but then I looked across the lawn and saw Daddy standing with the other men.

  It had begun to rain a fine mist that drifted like fog, the kind of drizzle that started off soft and steady but hinted at days and days of rain to come. I stepped carefully on the grass to keep from sinking into the moist earth.

  As I got closer to Daddy, he reached out his arm to touch me as soon as he could. All the time it took me to reach him, he didn’t stop looking at the other men as they talked. Usually they leaned back and laughed or put their hands in their pockets, or slapped their thighs. But today, by the way they stood like a grove and crossed their arms over their chests or leaned in to one another, or rubbed their cheeks or pulled their chins, I knew this conversation was of a serious nature.

  I ran into Daddy’s arm, and when he wrapped it around me, I tried hanging off him.

  “How big are you now?” Mr. Clapton asked. He had one tooth that stuck out, even when his mouth was closed.

  “Eleven.”

  “Well, you’re way too big to hang now. You’re almost in high school.”

  I looked at Daddy, who shrugged at me, and then back at Mr. Clapton. I remembered he didn’t have any kids, and decided he didn’t know how old you had to be in high school. Also, Mama say he’d had a hard life and relied on his community for help, and that we needed to be good neighbors.

  “Almost,” I say, to be polite. Then I whispered to Daddy, “Mama’s dying for Doby’s.”

  “Mama?” he say, and raised his eyebrow. He put his finger to his lips, not like Mama in church, but as if to say, Wait a little bit, until we’re done talking. Whenever Daddy talked to me like that, I had trouble believing I ever heard him raise his voice to Theron.

  “I’m telling you,” Mr. Mittell, Sonya’s daddy, say, “we’re in for a flood this year. Watch the rain, watch the bridges. You remember that summer—”

  “Rain didn’t swell the river that summer, Vin,” Daddy say. “It was snow melt.”

  “It was rain, Ingram,” Mr. Clapton say to Daddy, though he looked at me. “The same year the old bridge flooded and you—”

  “No,” Daddy say, very short. I felt his arm tighten, and he shook his head like a muscle twitch, as if to tell Mr. Clapton to stop talking.

  The covered bridge? I wondered.

  “If you hadn’t been on the bridge to save them . . . ,” Mr. Clapton say, and then glanced at me without another word. By the way Daddy had tensed up and cut Mr. Clapton off, I knew better than to ask what he meant. So I just waited for Mr. Clapton to open his mouth, to see if all his teeth were crooked.

  Daddy waved away the conversation. “That was the past. It’s all over with,” he say, and then I knew that Daddy had a secret.

  “It can happen again,” Mr. Mittell say, looking up at the gray sky. “The rain’s already started.” Then he looked straight at me. “And you, young lady, you stay off the bridges.”

  After Daddy and I moved away from the men and went looking for Mama, I asked, “What were they talking about?”

  But all he say was, “Did someone say something about pancakes?”

  On the fourth Sunday of each month, Mama takes flowers to the family. She piles all the gardening equipment into the trunk—spades, gardening gloves, the big metal watering pot, and a cardboard box lid with the flowers she bought at Pike’s Nursery the day before—and then lets Daddy take over until we arrive at the Green Memorial Cemetery.

  Every time before we go, she say, “River, take that watering can outside and run the hose through it.” There’s usually a spider or two that made a home in that can since the month before, but sometimes it’s worse. Two years ago I found a dead mouse. Daddy set it aside and Theron and I buried it later behind the stone-wall fence because I
felt sad for it.

  But this Sunday there was only one spider. Not a big, hairy one, but a daddy longlegs. They don’t really qualify as spiders because I’m not afraid of them. This one was still alive, and I let it walk up my arm before lowering it to the grass.

  Mama stopped driving after Theron left us. She say it was like a hunger strike, but Daddy grumbled that the only person affected was everyone else. Meaning him, who had to drive her everywhere she couldn’t walk to. I think Theron was just an excuse, because by the time she stopped driving, she had put dents in both sides of the back bumper, sliced off the side-view mirror on a mailbox, and driven off the road more than three times in the same month.

  Just after Theron left, Mama was driving us to Concord when a thunderstorm hit. In three seconds the highway turned into a pond. Daddy told her to slow down. I had a bag of pretzel sticks in my lap and was about to put a pretzel in my mouth when the car wiggled and spun around, and then it took off and slid clear across the highway.

  I watched Daddy’s hands grip the dash until all his knuckles turned pink and, when he was sure nothing worse was going to happen, heard the breath wobble out of him. Later, Mama say that I screeched so loud she thought we’d hit a clowder of cats, and I didn’t stop screaming until we come to rest a foot from the cement divider wall.

  Nothing hit us, and we didn’t hit anything, we didn’t flip over, and no one got hurt. We spun around and around and stopped, facing in the right direction. That’s when I remembered my pretzels, but when I put one in my mouth, I poked a hole in my cheek because my hand shook so.

  As Daddy’s breathing come back to normal, Mama stared straight out the windshield. “What did I tell you?” she say. “Angels.”

  After Mama loaded the trunk that Sunday after church, she left it open until Daddy inspected it to make sure everything was there so we wouldn’t have to turn back once we got to the cemetery. Then we all climbed into the car. Even with the sprinkling rain, there were no exceptions to going to the family. We had ponchos and umbrellas if the sprinkles turned into a downpour.

  Beside me in the backseat was that empty yawn where Theron would have sat. He’d be sitting behind Mama because Daddy had to push his own seat back and Theron’s legs were too long.

  We drove through town and along the lonely two-lane road that eventually ran into the highway. Daddy turned the car onto the narrow gravel road, and the tires crunched all the way to the little hill in the shade, near the faucet that poked out of the ground. Some of the headstones had little flags beside them, others had flowers, and those without either looked left out.

  While Daddy carried the box lid full of flowerpots and I filled the watering can, Mama put on her visor and slipped on her gloves. Then she took the spades over to the family headstones and started digging.

  Mama planted flowers according to the season. In summer she planted pots of phlox and daylilies, in fall she planted asters and chrysanthemums, in winter she brought arrangements of grasses and leaves and twigs, and in spring she planted pink impatiens and crocuses and columbines for the family. And she always brought more than we needed, and dropped off the leftovers at the hospital, where she used to volunteer, a few miles down the road.

  Today she carried a box of daffodils, a flower that bloomed in the seam of spring and summer. Also because it was Grampa Raymond’s favorite flower.

  By now Daddy was done with his part of the job, and he sat in the car with the door open and one foot flat on the ground. The ball game was on the radio, and the announcer’s sharp voice cut into the cemetery quiet.

  “Bring some water over here, River,” Mama say after she patted down the dirt around Grampa’s flowers. I lugged the can over to her, trying to keep the water from sloshing out.

  She sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with her arm. “You remember your Grampa Raymond, don’t you?”

  I looked at the headstone. Nothing about it helped me remember my grampa. “I remember his cheeks were scratchy.”

  “Well, you were just a baby—I mean, just a little girl,” Mama say, as if she’d forgotten I didn’t come to them until I was almost two.

  “Well, he lay asleep for a week, and your grandma thought he was gone. Suddenly, he sat straight up and opened his eyes wide, like he heard a thunderclap, and said, ‘There they are, Mother.’ And then he lay back down and closed his eyes.”

  “What did he see?”

  “We don’t know, because right after that he was gone,” she say, and leaned forward onto her knees again and finished patting down the dirt, though it already looked perfect to me. “But Grandma thought he might have seen . . . people.”

  I knew Mama meant angels because she believed in them, but she say, “We’ll never know.”

  She planted three flowers for every stone in the family, which was four—plus the big one that the two sets of great-grandparents shared—and there was always one extra flowerpot in the box lid.

  “There,” Mama say, and brushed off her hands. We were done for the month. She gathered up the spades and her gloves and pushed herself up. “Pick up the extra one, honey.”

  I lifted the box with the last daffodil pot in it and followed Mama a few yards to June R. Wadleigh’s stone. June R. Wadleigh was a family friend, and her stone sat far enough away to respect the family boundaries but close enough to peek in its windows.

  Mama got to work digging up last month’s flower and putting in the daffodil. As always, after she dropped the new flower in the hole, she say to me, “Now you fill in the dirt and pat it down.”

  When I finished, Mama sprinkled the last of the water on June R. Wadleigh’s daffodil. Then she handed me the spades and gloves. “Take these back to the car. I’ll be there soon.”

  That’s what usually happened every time we went to the family. Mama told me to go on to the car, and then Daddy and I packed up while Mama stayed behind a few minutes, tidying up everything one last time before we left.

  Daddy stepped out of the car. I followed him to the trunk, and as he took the box from me, I glanced beyond him and saw Mama with her hand on June R. Wadleigh’s stone. What she did look so familiar, but also so new. It seemed like I noticed for the very first time that Mama always spent the last moments of each visit with June R. Wadleigh.

  “Move that for me, will you?” Daddy say, pointing his chin at a bag of books inside the trunk. I knew a distraction when I heard one.

  “Daddy, why does Mama always touch that stone before we go?” I asked, clearing a space for the watering can.

  “That stone? Well, your mama felt very close to June.”

  Mama pushed her hair off her face and started walking back to the car, so I had to talk as fast as possible. “You mean close like best friends?”

  He looked over his shoulder, in Mama’s direction, and then back at me. “River, you’re almost in high school, right?” he asked and winked, though there was no smile on his face. I didn’t know why he was pretending to move things around in the trunk when everything already fit. Then he leaned against the taillight and his eyes looked very sad.

  “They were close like sisters.”

  That was all Daddy say, but from that little bit I learned something new about Mama. That she, too, have a secret.

  We got into the car. Daddy turned down the volume on the baseball game before Mama had to tell him to, and we left until next month. All the way home I thought about what Daddy had told me about Mama’s friend June. Mama once had a best friend as close to her as a sister.

  Meadow Lark was becoming my friend. We both had something to be afraid of and we both sat W and we both liked Cheetos. She gave me a yellow flower bead, and we floated that perfect feather with our wishes down the river. I hoped that she and I, like Mama and June, could become best friends just like sisters.

  Chapter 5

  “This came out of my grampa’s mouth,” Daniel Bunch s
ay, as he waved his hand right in front of my face. I knew what it was—a molar with a silver filling in it—but I made a point of not looking at it.

  We sat at big butcher-block tables in art class, eight kids at a table, on stools that teetered and thudded. The tables were big enough that we could spread out our collages. I set mine longways in front of me so it wouldn’t touch anyone else’s, especially Daniel Bunch’s. Daniel sat across from me. I don’t know why Ms. Zucchero sat us at the same table, because she had to know that something with one eye open slept between us.

  “That’s so interesting,” Sonya Mittell say. Sonya had worn a bra in fourth grade, and she needed to. Then kids started calling her Sonya Barbie, but not for long, because she liked it.

  “Brave guy, nerves of steel,” Kevin Kale say, sitting kitty-corner to me.

  Normally, when kids talk too much, Ms. Zucchero gave a warning. But maybe because it was Friday, or art was last period today, or the school year was almost over, she only say, “When your collage is done, please tack it to the wall.”

  Ms. Zucchero’s hands were always holding something—carrots or paintbrushes or fabric. Today she held a crochet hook that went in and out of a green square speckled white. She wound the yarn around her finger and plunged the needle back into the square. She usually finished one square during each class. Ms. Zucchero told us that when all the squares were done, she was going sew them all together to make a blanket for next winter.

  “My grampa hated dentists,” Daniel say, because he knew Kevin’s daddy was a dentist. The air coming from Daniel’s way smelled like bacon grease.

  I squeezed a blob of glue onto my collage, next to the porcelain doll head with no nose, and set the bottle in front of me.

  Daniel snapped his fingers. “Glue,” he say, and I slid the bottle to the center of the table. As I did, I saw what else he had on his collage. A stick with a dirty string wound around it, a Twinkie wrapper, some coins, and a jagged chunk of rock that he say come from a meteor.