“Mind if I join you?”
I turned at the sound of the voice. Mom was standing just behind me, fanning herself with a folded-up sheet of paper. She was in khaki shorts and a button-up shirt that was covered with embroidered flowers. Her deep brown skin was glowing with sun and sweat. She came up to the table and poured herself a glass of water.
“Did you get something to eat?” she asked once she drained it. “There’s plenty. More than plenty. Though, I hope you like tuna noodle casserole. There was so much canned tuna in the last supply drop, we have six of them.”
“Sara!”
Mom turned and waved at someone on the other side of the yard. “Jessica! Is Richard here?”
“He’s right behind me. He and Jack are lugging the grill.”
“He’s not going to throw out his back again, is he?”
“Fingers crossed!”
Mom laughed. I put down my glass and started to walk away. “I should probably let you—”
Mom grabbed my shoulder to stop me. “I hate to ask, but do you think you could help me with something?” She pointed up the back stairs to the porch door. “We’re giving one of our neighbors a chair we don’t need, and since you’re the only strapping young man currently present, I thought maybe you could help me carry it down.”
“I—”
“Nope! Won’t take no for an answer. Come on! It’ll earn you an extra slice of cake!”
She threaded her way through her guests and up the stairs. It was cool inside the house, but there was an odd musty smell that made me think of mothballs and lace. I flashed back to the last time I was there. Fred on the ground. Mom screaming. I looked to see if there was any trace of blood left on the floor, but it had all been wiped away.
“Can I get you anything?”
Mom had gone to the kitchen and was pouring herself another glass of water from the sink.
I shook my head. “No. I’m fine. Thanks. Which chair do you want to . . .”
“It’s the blue one,” she said. “But have a seat. I just need to cool down a second. Hot out there, isn’t it?”
I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, which was decorated with a vase of plastic sunflowers and a set of porcelain dog and cat salt-and peppershakers. Mom drained her glass, then drew aside the curtains over the sink. The sunlight made bronze highlights on her skin. I saw her in an airy dress of yellow and green tatters, gliding across a dark stage. I took the saltshaker and tried to become absorbed in turning it in small circles.
“That was Fred’s mom’s. He keeps talking about boxing up her stuff and putting it in the attic, but he never does.”
Mom moved from the sink and took a seat across from me. She toyed with the plastic sunflowers.
“He has all these old handwritten cookbooks of hers, and he’s working his way through them, trying to relearn the recipes. He says when he smells her meatloaf, he comes this close to remembering her.”
Mom smiled at me over the flowers. For a second it was as if we were back before the outbreak, sitting at the kitchen table after school, as we had a hundred times before. In the weeks since I’d first seen her, I’d come up with a hundred things I wanted to ask, but all of them suddenly left my head. It had been stupid to follow her.
I bent down and reached for my backpack. “If you show me which chair you want moved, I can—”
“I know who you are.”
I froze, my hand suspended over the pack’s strap.
“I saw you in the alley that time. And then again the night—” She took in a breath. “The night you came here.”
“I don’t—”
“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’m not going to—Fred didn’t recognize you and I don’t think . . . I don’t know why, but I don’t think you’re dangerous. Are you?”
I shook my head.
“Why’d you come here that night?”
Her voice sounded exactly the same then as it did when we were little and one of us had gotten into trouble for something. Dad always yelled, but not her. She’d ask why we did what we did, as if she were just curious, as if we might have a reason and that the reason would matter.
“I thought that man, Fred—I thought he might have taken you.”
“Why did you think that?”
I shrugged. What could I say? There was a squeak as Mom’s chair moved closer to the table. She took the peppershaker and turned it over in her long fingers, studying it as if a secret code had been scratched into its side.
“We knew each other before,” she said. “Didn’t we?”
I started to speak, but then there was a surge of noise from the party as the glass door to the porch slid open.
“Sara! Everyone all right in here?”
Mom jumped up from the table and ran to Fred as he came into the room. She slipped her arm around him and kissed him on the cheek. “We’re good! This is, uh . . .”
“Tom,” I said quickly.