Scared Stiff Read Free

be right behind her and had left it open for us, I thought. I called to her as soon as we were inside the apartment, but there was no answer. We walked through to the kitchen, and I put the grocery bag on the table and called again.
    Nothing. A fly buzzed on the windowsill, but that was all. Upstairs I heard Mrs. Prather fixing supper; her walker thumped every time she moved.
    â€œWhere’s Ma?” Kenny wanted to know.
    She wasn’t in the bathroom nor in her bedroom. She wasn’t in the apartment at all, though she’d been there. The stuff she was carrying for me was there on the front-hall table, some of it spilling off onto the floor on top of the sweatshirt I’d dropped there yesterday. Ma was always after me to hang up something, I thought guiltily as I kicked it out of the way.
    Maybe she’d gone across the hall to borrow something from Sally Pope. I went over there to see, but Sally shook her head. “Haven’t seen her today,” she said.
    There wasn’t anybody else in the building Ma would be visiting. She wouldn’t even have gone to Sally’s this close to suppertime unless she needed something she’d forgotten from the store.
    So where was she, then?
    I picked up the stuff that had fallen on the floor, added the notebook she’d dropped outside, and dumped it all on my bed.
    â€œI’m hungry,” Kenny said, almost whining.
    â€œYeah, me too,” I agreed. “Let’s go ahead and start fixing supper. Ma’ll come back in a few minutes, I guess.”
    But she didn’t.
    We heated the hot dogs until they were fat and juicy, and I opened a can of corn and warmed up the buns. Ma would have made salad, but I wasn’t very good at that and I figured one meal without it wouldn’t hurt too much.
    Kenny turned the burner off under the hot dogs and looked at me uncertainly.
    â€œWhat do we do now? Where’s Ma?”
    â€œI don’t know. I guess we better eat without her. She must have been delayed somewhere,” I said.
    So we ate, but my appetite wasn’t as good as it had been earlier. I was getting worried, because Ma had never done this before.
    When I thought of Billy Cowan, my stomach suddenly cramped. Billy wasn’t in sixth grade, only in fifth, so I didn’t know him too well, but everybody in school knew what had happened to him.
    He’d been worried because his folks were fighting and he was afraid they were going to get a divorce, but he wasn’t prepared for what they actually did. One day he came home and found everything gone out of the apartment except the stuff in his own room. His mother and dad had split, and each of them thought the other one would take Billy, but they didn’t wait to see. They moved out, separately, and never bothered to check on Billy. They just abandoned him.
    Mrs. Ratzloff, the school nurse, saw him crying on the front steps and stopped to findout what was the matter. Billy’s in a foster home now, and he likes it okay, but he’s always afraid his foster parents will get tired of him, too.
    Pa wasn’t tired of Kenny and me, I thought, but I guessed he was tired of Ma. Anyway, he left all three of us. What if Ma left, too?
    She wouldn’t, I thought, my chest aching so it was painful to breathe. Not ever.
    But I jumped up from the table and went to her room and threw open the closet door, just in case.
    All her dresses were still there. I jerked open a dresser drawer, and it was still full of underwear.
    So we hadn’t been abandoned.
    But where was Ma?
    We didn’t clean up the food from the table, thinking surely Ma would be there any minute, starving, not minding that we hadn’t made salad. She’d want to eat right away.
    But she didn’t come, and it got dark enough so we turned on the lights in the living room. Kenny turned on the TV, too, but I didn’t pay any attention to what was on.
    Finally it was time for Kenny to go to bed,