Fixing Delilah Read Free Page A

though the air doesn’t seem chilly enough to make my skin prickle.
    “I couldn’t go in,” she says, yanking up fingerfuls of grass. “I got all the way up the driveway, but once I smelled that honeysuckle, I couldn’t go near the front door.”
    I sit down next to her on the ground, not touching or talking, wedged into the familiar space between the rock part of me that mostly hates her and the hard-place part that dies to see her so uncertain.
    “I just can’t believe my mother is dead, Honeybee.”
    Like the fragile side of my mother, her old nickname for me no longer fits. Awareness of its long absence creeps between us like a serpent in the grass of her childhood home, and Mom shakes her head as if to erase the word, looking back out over the water.
    We sit for a while, watching the lake breeze carry seagulls in search of castaway popcorn along the shore. The birds sing to each other in a mournful way, the echo of their calls floating up from the beach, and I try to imagine what it’s like for her—eight years dodging that one phone call, that one ringing in the middle of the night, the death knell for someone she once loved. I think about the Hannaford women and can’t help wondering if we’re all alike—me and my mother, she and hers, all of our problems starting this way. A tiny crack in the previously solid understanding of one another. A crack to a fissure. A fissure to a break. And then a gulf, big and empty and impossible to cross.
    “Aunt Rachel will be here soon.” Mom stands to brush the grass from her pants and holds out a cool hand. I take it without hesitation because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Because I don’t want to know the lost side of her, and I need to feel her hand in mine, familiar and strong and absolutely certain again. Because I need to know that eyes on the road, mind on the goal, everything really will be okay.
    But I can’t know that, and neither can she. The old house on Red Falls Lake is like a cemetery now—hallowed. Haunted. Not the place for questions.
    I squeeze her fingers anyway.
    Mom takes a deep breath and marches us toward the driveway, shedding her frailty like a jacket too warm for summer.
    “Let’s move this stuff into the house,” she says, dropping my hand. “I’d like to get my workspace set up before Rachel arrives and the arguing starts.”
    “What time is she coming?”
    “She said two o’clock,” Mom says. “That means four.”
    Ignoring the front door, we head for the porch that starts on the side of the house near the maples and wraps around back in a giant L. The third stair creaks loudly as we land on it, one foot after the other, marching up to the unlocked side door and through it, into the kitchen.
    “Wow,” Mom whispers, setting her purse on the counter. “It’s the same. Exactly the same. Even the curtains.” I follow her gaze to the white fabric panels hanging limp over the sink, tiny red-and-gold roosters trotting across the bottom in pairs. The cupboards are the old kind—wood painted white with windowlike panes so you can see the dishes inside. On the spots where the sun hits sideways, the blocky, black-and-white-tiled floor reflects in the glass. The skin on my arms prickles again as the breeze moves through the screen door, the red-and-gold roosters marching back and forth, back and forth as the curtains sway.
    I leave Mom with her memories and start unloading the car, never venturing beyond the kitchen entryway, never raising my eyes more than the transfer of our belongings from the black sapphire pearl car to the black-and-white-tiled floor necessitates. As I travel from the car to the driveway to the third creaky stair to the kitchen and back, the series of accidental screwups that earned me a summer of estate sale duty fades from my mind, clearing the way for the scattered memories of our last trip to Red Falls—the yelling. Tears. Flashes of the fight between my mother, Aunt Rachel, and my grandmother that