Chapter 7: Telling Mom

I drove to Shoreline alone the next morning.

I didn't tell Jem where I was going.

He knew anyway.

He walked me out to the van and put the keys in my hand and said, "Yellow lights."

My mother was in the backyard on her knees in the tomato bed.

She had a bucket of the split ones beside her and dirt up to her wrists.

She saw me at the side gate and didn't get up.

"Pete's at the hardware store," she said. "He'll be an hour. He'll be two, if they have a new kind of sandpaper."

"I came to talk to you."

"I know you did."

I knelt down across the tomato bed from her.

I picked a split one off the vine and put it in her bucket.

"I'm going to be with Jem," I said.

She stopped with her hand on a stem.

"I'm not asking," I said. "I wanted to ask. I practiced asking the whole drive. But I'm twenty-seven, and I'm not asking."

"No," she said. "You're telling me."

"I'm telling you before anything happens. Nothing has happened."

She looked up at that, sharp.

"Almost nothing," I said.

"Lindy Ann."

"We kissed. In the workshop. Under your wedding picture."

My mother sat back on her heels.

"The one with the frosting?"

"The one with the frosting."

She put her dirty hand over her eyes.

I thought she was crying.

She was laughing.

Then she was crying a little too, and she wiped her face and left a line of dirt across her cheek.

"I'm scared," she said.

"Of what people will say?"

"I don't care what people say. I dispatched school buses for twenty-two years. I've been called worse things by better people."

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