Leaving Home: Short Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page B

phone and she didn’t answer.”

    “So what? Maybe she turned it off. Maybe she’s at a movie.”

    “Dude,” says Yak, who plays the drums. That’s not his real name, by the way. I think it’s Absalom or Alistair or something like that. “Is there a problem?”

    “Our mother’s gone missing.”

    “Sweet,” Yak says. “Could she take mine with her?”

    I leave them alone in the garage and sit on the edge of the porch. There are flowers all along the edge of it – a net of purple and cobalt; a startling orange tiger lily, its open mouth raw and pink.

    The portable phone I’m holding (just in case) rings, startling me. “Hi,” I say breathlessly, but it is only my father. He calls every day from the station, to let my mother know which train he’s catching. I think it’s less about her peace of mind and more about making sure his dinner is hot when he gets home.

    “Pumpkin,” he says. “Mom around?”

    “No,” I tell him. “She left us a note –“

    “Well, tell her I caught the 5:58,” he says.

    “Look, Dad –“

    “Gotta run, honey, if I want to make this train…”

    He hangs up, and I let the phone fall into my lap, where it rings again almost immediately. “Dad?” I say, picking it up.

    “No,” my mother answers, “it’s me.”

    “ Mom ? Where are you?”

    In the silence, I can hear other people talking – loudspeakers, announcements I can’t quite make out. “Jenna, listen, there’s meatloaf for supper,” she says. “It’s in the tinfoil on the second shelf of the fridge. You can open up a bag of salad, too.”

    “You mean you won’t be here for dinner?”

    “Did you talk to your father?” she asks.

    “He said he’s catching the 5:58.” My throat closes like a fist. “Mom, what’s going on?”

    For a moment, she’s quiet. Then she says, “I’ll call you when I get there.”

    “Get where ?” I demand, but an electric eel of static crackles in my ear.

    “Jenna,” my mother says. “I’m losing you.” And as the line goes dead I think, No, it’s the other way around .

    #

    By nine o’clock at night, we are all sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the phone to ring. My father is still wearing his dress shirt, but it’s creased like a map and the sleeves are rolled up past his elbows. In front of him is the bowl of Life cereal he didn’t really eat for dinner, solidifying into cement. “Jenna,” he says, for the bazillionth time, “you have to remember something .”

    It figures, the one time anyone wants to listen to me, I can’t remember anything important. I have already told them everything Mom said; the problem is, we really need to know what she didn’t .

    “Could it have been an airport?” Devon asks. “Is that what the announcements sounded like?”

    “I don’t know.”

    My father has already called the police, but they told him that you can’t file a missing persons report for twenty-four hours. And besides, it’s not really a missing person if the person herself chose to go missing. That, the sergeant said, is just bad luck.

    He scrubs his hands over his face. “Okay,” he says, as if telling himself this might make it come true.

    I have been tugging at a thread on the placemat in front of me. “Do you think it’s something we did?” I ask, my voice so tiny that it rolls like a pebble to the center of the table.

    At first, I assume that nobody’s heard me, or that they’ve ignored me, which is par for the course. But then Devon looks up. “I forgot to fold my wash. She asked me, like, ten times, but I never got around to it. And I kind of didn’t take out the trash either.”

    His face pinkens. “It was pouring , and I knew she’d do it if I didn’t, anyway.”

    “I told her it was practically child abuse to make me take the late bus home after soccer practice, when she was just sitting here anyway and could come pick me up,” I admit. “And remember when you wouldn’t stop playing your