Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Christmas Eve

Mr. Coe didn't stand up, and he didn't stop smiling.

"Your mother is confused, Miss Duquette."

"I was seventeen," my mother said. "I'm not confused about seventeen."

Then she looked around the round room, and I watched it go out of her face.

"Is it lunch?" she asked me. "I'd like the soup."

I took her down the tower stairs one step at a time with my arm around her waist.

I didn't look back at him.

In 214 I sat her on the bed and knelt and took off her slippers.

"Mom. What night boy?"

She thought hard. She hated it when she couldn't find a thing.

"He was a nice boy," she said. "He had a cowlick. He wanted to be a forest ranger."

"What happened to him?"

"Mr. Coe sent him out to bring in the flag. It was almost twelve." She twisted my father's ring around and around on her finger. "Then the doors locked. He knocked all night. He said my name."

"And you couldn't open the door."

"Mr. Coe stood behind the desk and held my arm. He was very polite about it." Her eyes filled. "At six the boy walked out on the ice."

I held her cold feet in my hands.

"Peggy," she said suddenly. "Don't ever work nights here."

Then she asked me if I was the nurse, and if the soup was coming.

For nineteen nights after that, nothing knocked.

Every night at one my mother came down to the desk and asked for my father or for the water.

Every night she fell asleep on the bench at three, and I didn't sleep at all.

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