Chapter 4: Tomato Soup

The cast was blue, because the nurse asked me to pick a color and I said blue before I could think about it.

It went from my knuckles to my elbow, and it weighed more than I expected.

My mother signed a paper that said I could stay with Aunt Dot "for the weekend."

She signed it fast, with the social worker watching her from the doorway.

In the parking lot she bent down and kissed my forehead.

"Sunday," she said, bright and quiet. "Dylan's home Sunday. He'll want you there."

"Okay, Mom."

"Be good."

"I always am."

She looked at me a second longer than she needed to.

Then she got into her car, and I got into Aunt Dot's.

Aunt Dot lives on Quarry Road, a mile past the last stoplight in Marlow, in a narrow yellow house with a barn out back.

It was almost midnight when she parked.

The porch light was on, a real one, with a moth going around it.

"Welcome," she said. "It's not much."

It smelled like wood shavings and coffee and something sweet I couldn't name.

There was a long table in the front room covered in blocks of carved wood, and a drying rack with a dozen black-and-white prints clipped to it.

A heron stood on the nearest one, up to its knees in grass.

I stopped in the doorway.

"I made that for you," Aunt Dot said, behind me. "Two summers ago, after you sent me the drawing. It's been waiting."

"I sent you a drawing?"

"You mailed me a heron on a napkin, with no return address and no note."

I had no memory of doing that.

Then I did, and my face went hot, because I'd been ten, and I'd had a bad week, and I had walked it to the mailbox when nobody was looking.

"It wasn't supposed to be a big deal," I said.

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