Grammy doesn’t say a prayer, but the car starts anyway. The rumbling of the engine reminds me of the purring kitten, but I swallow my tears to protect Grammy. As she puts the car into reverse, I look back up at the house, and standing there on the porch, with her arms folded and that smug smile, is Tressa.

Chapter 37

EGGS AND POTATOES

I hand Ronan a Strong Shoulder jar half filled with lemonade. “Here. There wasn’t much left, so I split it between us.”

“Thanks,” he says, taking a drink.

I sit on the bench next to him, shaking my jar a bit to hear the clinking of the ice cubes. Noticing that the jar is half full. “So.” I hold up my jar and look at the sun through lemonade. “Would you say that this jar is half empty or half full?”

He stares and thinks for a few seconds. “Neither. The jar is just twice as big as it needs to be.”

“That wasn’t a choice.” I laugh.

“Of course it was.”

I shake the jar to clink the cubes again. The jar is cold and wet and slippery, so it falls away from me. I reach, my fingers scrambling to catch it before it hits the patio. Glass smashes on the cement.

I move forward, but Ronan is already off the bench. “No! You stay. You have bare feet.”

Oh yeah.

He picks up the big pieces of glass and stacks them in a pile. A little tower of broken glass.

I think of the day I broke the candy-covered frame with my mother’s picture in it. And I think of Grammy’s puzzles, all broken up until someone puts them together.

“Ronan?” I ask.

“Yeah?” he asks, picking up pieces of smaller glass caught in the grass that grows up through the cracks in the cement.

“Do you think a person can break like a jar does? Can a person be hit so hard by something that they . . . that they break?”

“Naw. A body is too soft to shatter into pieces.”

“No, not break into pieces. I mean like the insides of a person.”

“You mean like appendicitis or something?”

“No,” I say, my voice trailing off. “Not like that. That’s not what I mean . . .”

He stands watching me. His head tips to the side. “What are you talking about, Delsie?”

My mouth doesn’t want to say the words.

He waits.

I stare him dead in the eyes. “Do you think we’re broken?”

His eyebrows scrunch up. “What do you mean . . . broken?”

“I mean . . . broken. Why would my mother just leave me? And why would your mom send you away? There must be something wrong with us.”

“No. Don’t say that. That isn’t right.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And besides,” he interrupts, stepping forward, “even when something is broken, you can fix it.”

I shake my head. “I mean, you can fix a dishwasher, but not everything can be fixed.” I point at the pile of glass he’s made on the cement. “We can’t put that jar back together.”