Chapter 15: Will's Mother

"Answer him," I said.

Tyler stared at me. "And say what?"

"Whatever you'd say any other night."

His thumbs hovered.

Then he typed: "Gym. Couldn't sleep. Chill."

We all watched the screen.

Three dots. Then nothing.

Then: "Come by the house tmrw. Dad wants to talk."

Tyler put the phone away.

"Eight days," I said.

"Eight days," he said, and went down the stairs two at a time.

Maddie shut my door behind him and leaned on it.

"I need a cookie," she said. "Or a lawyer. Or a cookie lawyer."

On Tuesday, Will's mother came down on the bus from Massachusetts.

He went to meet her at the station.

I spent the afternoon cleaning a room that was already clean.

Maddie sat on my bed and watched.

"You've wiped that desk four times," she said.

"It had dust."

"It had nothing. You're scared of a lady who cleans offices."

"I'm not scared."

"You're the chair of a university board, and you're scared of Will's mom."

"Very scared," I admitted.

There was a shared kitchen at the end of our hall.

Two burners, a dented oven, and a sign that said LABEL YOUR FOOD in four colors of marker.

Will's mother walked into it at five o'clock.

She was small and wiry, with short gray hair and her son's steady eyes.

She carried two grocery bags and a casserole dish wrapped in a towel.

"You're Georgia," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You're taller than on the video." She handed me the casserole. "Hold that. Don't tip it."

Then she looked at Maddie.

"And you're the one with the stitches."

Maddie went pink to the roots of her hair.

"How do you know that?"

"My son talks about you on the phone more than he talks about his vegetables," his mother said. "Which is not hard. He never talks about vegetables."

"I eat vegetables," Will said from the doorway.

"Name one."

"Pizza sauce."

"That's a tomato, and it's a lie." She pointed at the counter. "Peel those carrots."

He peeled the carrots.

I had never seen him so obedient in my life.

She made a pot roast in an oven that had never made anything better than frozen burritos.

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