Chapter 9: The Program

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my cardboard in the storage room and listened to the house tick.

At four, I got up out of habit.

There was nothing to scrub. I'd scrubbed it all.

So I sat on an overturned bucket in the dark and waited for Odette.

She came down at seven, in a white robe, humming.

She opened the fridge for her yogurt, the one with the gold lid that nobody else was allowed to eat.

I stood up behind the fridge door.

She jumped and almost dropped it.

"God, Minnie. You scared me."

"You laughed in Noreen's car," I said.

She went very still.

"When I was six. In Champaign. You said they were going Thursday. Then you laughed."

For one second, her face did nothing at all.

It was like looking at a TV that's been switched off.

Then her eyes filled up and her lip shook.

"Minnie, I don't know what you're talking about. You're scaring me."

"No I'm not."

She put the yogurt back in the fridge without opening it.

She walked out of the kitchen fast, with her robe held shut at the throat.

I went to find my mother.

She was in her dressing room on the second floor, in a chair in front of a big lit mirror.

A lady with a blow dryer was doing her hair.

"Can I talk to you?" I said. "Alone? It's about work."

My mother laughed a little. "Work. Okay, honey."

She sent the hair lady out for coffee.

I stood in front of her chair with my hands behind my back, the way you stand to give a report.

I told her what I had heard, and what I had seen from the stairs.

I told her it was Odette's laugh.

I was very careful. I only said what I knew.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Thought Love Had to Be Earned Through Chores, They Hugged Me from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.