Why the Sky Is Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

dropped her book bag by the stairs and then started for the kitchen too. She stopped where the kitchen and the dining room met and looked at me.
    “Are you feeling better, Mom?” she asked.
    It took me a moment to remember that when she left that morning—a pocket of time that already seemed ripe with age to me—I had been throwing up in the bathroom.
    “I am,” I said and smiled. Not exactly a lie.
    “You look a little tired,” she said, cocking her head in worry.
    “I’ll be fine, Kate, really,” I said. “So how was your day?”
    She sat down in a chair across from me and told me about the math test she took, what the cafeteria had for lunch that day, and that Shelley Gifford had let a boy kiss her behind the gym. She was properly disgusted, and I couldn’t help but smile. And feel relieved, if only for a moment. Her innocence and naiveté were so soothing to me. I hated her knowing and understanding what had happened to me. I didn’t want her to know I was pregnant on top of everything else.
    The phone rang then, and Dan poked his head around the doorway.
    “It’s your mom,” he said, communicating with his eyes a reminder of what we had agreed to on the way home: Tell no one. I could tell he was wondering if that meant our parents too. I didn’t know what to communicate back to him with my own eyes. How could I know? We were making this up as we went along.
    “I’ll take it upstairs,” I said, leaving him to hang up the other end and wonder.
    My mom had called almost every day since the attack. She and my stepdad, Stuart, had been on an archaeological dig in Egypt when they got word that I had been hurt. They both wanted to drop everything and come to Minnesota, but I had insisted they stay at the excavation and finish. Just the week before, they had returned to their home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
    “Claire, it’s Mom,” she said like she always does. I’ve always thought that funny. Like she thought I wouldn’t know her voice.
    “Hey Mom, how’s it going?” I said, stretching out on Dan’s side of the bed in our bedroom.
    “Well, that’s what I was going to ask you,” she said, like she was disappointed I had asked her first.
    “I’m doing okay.”
    “We’ve got everything settled here at the University. We don’t have to go back out in the field for a while,” she said. “Why don’t we come out and see you kids?”
    It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her. I did. I just didn’t want company. Not yet. And that’s what Stu was to me. I was fond of Stu, but he was a part of my mother’s life after me. She met him when I was away from home as a freshman in college, and they were married that same year. Stuart was incredibly smart and funny and a gifted archaeologist, but he still felt more like a gentle hearted, next-door neighbor than a stepdad. I didn’t want him in the inner circle of those who knew the worst about what happened, even though I knew he already was. We were good friends. I thought having them visit me for the sole purpose of sharing my trauma would alter that.
    “Mom, I’m doing fine. Really I am,” I answered. “You’re coming at Thanksgiving, and the kids will be out of school then. There really isn’t a whole lot to do, what with Dan at work all day and the kids in school.”
    “We wouldn’t be coming up to do things,” she said, a bit miffed. “We would be coming up to be with you.”
    “Mom, I just want my life to get back to the way it was,” I said with a sigh. “I need for it to. And so do Dan and the kids. I need for things to be normal. It isn’t normal for you to come in October.”
    “I feel like we’ve done nothing to help you,” she said after a pause. “I hate being this far away when there’s trouble.”
    She was sniffling. And no doubt remembering the miscarriages and that she had been in Israel and Cyprus with Stuart at some of my darkest hours.
    “I know,” I said. “I don’t like it either.”
    “Why don’t you