“We’re not . . . together . . . really.”

“So you dumped him?”

“No.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“With the principal and the counselor and some lady from DHS.”

“Why?”

“I’m not really sure why she was there. They don’t really know what to do.”

“About what?”

“When, uh . . . Alder died . . . they did some tests, and they came back weird. So they did some tests on Sonny. Those were fine. So they asked me for a blood sample.”

“I’m completely confused, but I think you’re going to make sense any minute,” Frankie said, shoveling the spoon of Whatever Blizzard into her mouth.

“So, they tell me today after school that Gina’s not my mom.”

“What?” Frankie said, standing up, her mouth still full of ice cream.

“And Gina’s not even there. I mean . . . they said they told her, so she knows, but she wanted them to tell me at school. She didn’t come to be there when they told me. So I don’t know if I’m supposed to go get my stuff, or if I have a place to live, or . . .”

Frankie pulled me into her chest and wrapped her arms around me, and it was then that I realized I was sobbing.

“Baby girl,” she said, rocking me ever so slightly from side to side. She pulled away and held my cheeks in her hands. “What are you doing here? You can’t work like this.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go!”

Frankie held me again, making soothing hush sounds like most mothers did. Except for mothers like Gina, who probably wasn’t sure what she was more indifferent about—knowing she raised someone else’s child, or that her biological child was dead.

The road was quiet, and not many people must have felt like ice cream, because we had only two customers by the time baseball practice let out, and Frankie waited on them both.

“He’s going to drive straight over here. I bet he’s been so distracted and dying to see you he could barely stand it,” Frankie said.

I chewed my thumbnail, staring at the red Chevy parked across the street. “No way. Not after the way I treated him.”

“Honey, if he can’t understand that you had just gotten the shock of your life, then he doesn’t deserve to see you.”

The driver’s side door of the Chevy opened and shut. The truck quickly backed out, paused for less than a second, and then surged across the street, not stopping until it was behind the Dairy Queen. I rushed to the back door, but Weston had already opened it.

I practically lunged for him, and he caught me, letting me squeeze the life out of him without complaint. He made the same soothing sounds Frankie was before and I cried again.

Frankie stood in the doorway, staring at me like I was dying. “Take that girl home, Weston.”

“I don’t . . . have a home,” I said, bawling.