Fixing Delilah Read Free

breeze blows over my skin, jostling the branches of a giant weeping willow next to the unfamiliar driveway where we’ve stopped. I peel my cheek from the cashmere leather seat and shake off the road-sleep, scooping up my backpack and climbing out of the car.
    At the top of the driveway, there’s a house, big and solid, mustard yellow with white trim. It’s framed on both sides by rows of giant sugar maples that seem to reach all the way up to the sky.
    I know those trees.
    This is the house at Red Falls Lake where I spent every summer for eight years. My grandparents’ house. We’re here.
    The old place seems only to have changed in relation to me. I’m bigger. It’s smaller. I’m older. It’s ancient . It’s still the same color that I remember, but now the paint along the bottom peels down in golden curls like lazy spring daffodils. The shutters are loose and crooked, some open on both sides while others are shut or half-shut, sneaking looks as if after all these years, the house no longer recognizes me.
    I pull my backpack tight over my shoulders and walk alongside a row of maples that leads me around to the back. Warm and honeyed in the sun, the yard yawns and stretches its way down the hill to Red Falls Lake. The water, which is neither red nor falling, looks like a giant blue whale, shimmering peacefully behind the bleachers on the western shore. They used to hold boat races down there, loud and growling and filling the air with smoke. I remember hiding under the bleachers with Little Ricky from next door, creeping through the dirt in search of discarded soda cans that could be converted to nickels for candy at Crasner’s in town.
    Little Ricky. I look across the yard at the neighboring blue-and-white Victorian and wonder if his family still lives there. We were so close back then—best summer friends. I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickiness to each other like magnets on the fridge. It’s funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day— nothing . You share nothing. It’s like none of it ever happened.
    Only it totally happened, I know it did, the memories of it forced suddenly from their hiding places by the reality of this house. My chest tightens, a lump rising up inside me with everything I want to scream at my mother. It’s her fault my grandmother died alone here, forgotten. It’s her fault our days back home melt into one another in their dreary sameness, a thick gray soup of don’t wait up. Not tonight. Not now. I look at the trees and the grass and the lake and wonder—is this my destiny, too? In twenty years, will I drive across the states with my own daughter, back to my mother’s house in Key, back to bury the things I tried for so long to forget?
    When I find my mother at the top of the slope, I wipe my eyes on the back of my hand and stomp across the yard, ready to let loose all that I’d bottled up on our long drive from Pennsylvania. But as soon as I see her up close, sitting there in the grass and looking out over the town’s namesake lake beyond, all the fight in me scatters, clearing the way for something worse.
    Fear.
    In these quiet moments, Claire Hannaford doesn’t belong; her face is vulnerable and far away. She watches me awhile with a tilted head, strands of brown-and-gray hair blowing gently over her eyes as I approach. I wonder if she’s thinking about her departed mother, or Aunt Rachel, or the sister that died when they were younger, or the call from the Blush Cosmetics security guard, or maybe the cattails at the edge of the lake—how she used to cut them with a pocketknife and chase me with them, all the while my grandfather laughing from his wheelchair parked in the grass, pointing out circus animals in the clouds overhead.
    “Mom?” I rub my arms as I get close to her,