Chapter 18

“My mother has turned our tiny attic room into an office,” Charlotte Dalton told Sue Barker over lunch in the Wooster High School cafeteria. Conversations were all held at a higher volume there than in the classrooms or hallways of the school, and the clank of silverware on trays was constant. The din surrounding them was a comfortable and distracting level of the muted chaos, which allowed Charlotte to share her increasing concerns about her mother’s behavior.

“A few days after New Year’s. She pushed all the boxes into the corners and set up a little table by the window for her typewriter and stack of paper and pencils.”

“Why?” Sue asked, before taking a large bite of her liverwurst sandwich.

“Who knows?” Charlotte answered, with a shrug more casual than she felt. “She’s been acting weird since before Christmas. Well, weirder. She seems really frosted at my dad, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed yet.”

“Ha, that’s typical, isn’t it? My dad’s the same way. He has no clue.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed, and took a bite of her apple. As she crunched, both girls scanned the rest of the cafeteria. “I mean”—she shifted the apple into her cheek so she could talk—“she seems really, really mad at him.”

“So, really frosty frosted?” Sue scrunched up her nose the way she did when she made her little word jokes. “Like, her frosting is frosty frosted.”

“We didn’t even go to Akron this year to look at the Christmas windows.” Charlotte ignored the frosty frosting comment because Sue, as usual, was making everything into a joke, and Charlotte felt like this was kind of serious. “We’ve gone every year, as a family. I was kind of looking forward to it. You know, shopping and having lunch at O’Neill’s.”

“Aw.” Sue offered a supportive pout. “We went. It wasn’t so great. Don’t feel bad. Do you think I should get another piece of cake?” She craned her neck in the direction of the food line.

Charlotte knew Sue was just being nice about O’Neill’s. O’Neill’s at Christmas was always great. The weekend they were supposed to go, her mother had been sick. So sick, she couldn’t get out of bed, and Charlotte had brought her orange juice and toast and chicken broth. Then, at around three p.m. on Sunday she just popped right up out of bed and insisted on cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and making dinner. Charlotte thought it had either been a really quick virus, or her mother had faked the whole thing just to avoid going up to Akron.

“She was actually being kind of scary.” Charlotte stared trancelike at a spot just beyond Sue’s shoulder, remembering her mother with the knife in the kitchen that one night, and all the plate-stabbing with the fork.

“And, did I tell you, she invited this Italian couple for dinner one night?”

Sue’s eyes bugged out as she frowned over her mouthful.

“Yeah,” Charlotte continued. “Some lady she works with. And after she made that big stink about how I can’t bring Rosie Gianetti home anymore.”