After the service, Mom collapsed in Dad’s easy chair, where she slept all night. I put the boys to bed and covered her with a quilt. She opened her eyes long enough to tell me I was a good girl, then drifted off again. I fished a wad of gum from her mouth and squeezed it in my hand. Her bones were too prominent, like Nathan’s are now, and I realized that during the course of one summer my mother, who wasn’t fat to begin with, had probably lost fifteen pounds.

            I was outside the next day, watching the boys. They were putting up that tent again, and I was making sure the spikes didn’t rip into the roots of the pear trees. I didn’t see Reverend Fisher until he was at our front door. He rapped twice, then let himself in. I decided I needed a drink. I entered through the front door, same as he had, giving two raps. There was Reverend Fisher in Dad’s old chair, and my mother was across from him, wearing make-up, in a good dress, and looking the best I’d seen her look since the accident. The thinness that had bothered me the night before now exaggerated her good looks, especially her eyes, but maybe that was because of the mascara. She was wearing so much her eyelashes clumped. 

            “You remember my daughter, Lorraine?” Her hands were moving faster than they did over the keys.

            Stephen Fisher nodded, then said heartily, “Hello young lady!”

            I ignored him. “Mother, I want a bottle.”

            Now that shocked her. She sat up straight and looked at me. “All right,” she said, a warning look in her eyes. “But you’ll have to fix it yourself. It’s somewhere in the kitchen cabinets. Your grandmother cleaned them out and moved everything again.”

            I went to the kitchen and poked around. I finally found my bottle of Ovaltine behind the spices and a can of Crisco, along with a bottle of whiskey. Now I knew what the worry in her eyes had meant. I also knew, because the whiskey bottle was still in the cabinet, that there was some kind of test going on between my mother and my grandmother.

            Reverend Stephen Fisher and my mother continued to talk in the living room, so immersed in their conversation that they didn’t even know I was around. I made my bottle out in the open. I was quick about it, though, because it would be just like Grandma to come through the side door unannounced and catch me. She didn’t like that bottle, said I was too old for it, and wanted Mother to throw it out. Mother wouldn’t. She’d said, “You brought them in, but you can’t throw them out.”

            I’d just washed out my bottle when I heard an unexpected sound. Mother was laughing. Really laughing, not the forced laughter I’d heard come out either painfully or politely since the accident, but deep chuckles. I peeked through the louvered doors and saw they were smiling at each other. An immediate dislike came over me, especially when I heard Reverend Fisher say, “I can see the two of us are going to be friends.”

            “Of course,” Mother said, laughing again. “Friends.”

            I hated him.