Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [31]
A car door slammed outside. Grandma’s car sat in the drive below. I clicked off the desk lamp so she wouldn’t notice the light in the attic window. Before me, the last high school journal was open to an entry in which I had written:
Things to Do Before Thirty
See the Sistine Chapel
Have own apartment
Read all of Austen, Tolstoy, and Chekhov
Complete first novel
Skinny dip in ocean
Wear size 6 jeans
Publish (short story or novel, but preferably a novel)
Find decent and, if at all possible, tall man to marry …
“Find anything?” Mom’s voice called.
“Hold on,” I said. I slipped the family photo from Texas into the notebook to mark my place.
“Walk on the beams,” Mom demanded at the sound of my footfalls. “I don’t want you sending your foot through my ceiling!”
There was something unabashedly territorial in the way she’d taken lately to referring to everything in the house with the possessive singular (“My ceiling!” “My kitchen!”), as if my brother and I had been intruders our eighteen respective years living in the house.
She had taken my room. The attic would be next.
“What on earth have you been doing?”
I peered down at my mother. “I got distracted. Which boxes did you say you put them in?”
She wrapped her sweater tighter around her body, shuddering at the onslaught of winter air. “They should be in the one marked glasses.”
In the far corner I found three sealed boxes marked kitchen-wares, Kitchen 2, and glasses. The one marked glasses contained elementary school papers, popsicle-stick Jesus puppets from Vacation Bible School, and shoe boxes plastered with construction paper hearts for Valentine’s Day card exchanges.
“Did you find them?” she called.
“It’s all junk.”
“What?”
I teetered back toward the hole in the floor. “The boxes are labeled wrong,” I said. “I don’t know how you’re going to find anything.”
“Did you look in kitchen-wares?”
“It’s just bowls.”
“What are you nuts doing?” Grandma’s head appeared around the corner.
“Mom wants glass globes.”
“For the wedding,” Mom explained. “You know those flickery lights we saw on the Internet?”
“Oh, those were lovely.”
“I don’t think they’re up here,” I insisted.
“You sound terrible,” Grandma said. “Pamela, tell her to get down from there before she comes through the ceiling.”
To date I’d broken two windows, one vase, three glasses, and an antique chair at Grandma’s. Justifiably, she had no faith in my sense of balance.
“You’d better get down,” Mom said, exasperated. “I could have sworn they were up there.”
I was slow coming down the attic ladder. Grandma floated her hands to the right and left of my body to spot me. Mom had disappeared.
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked.
“She’s nervous,” Grandma said. She was wearing a bright purple and orange silk wraparound, a sort of sari-muumuu hybrid. Her earrings dangled flirtatiously over her shoulders. She winked. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”
Mr. Moore arrived at six, bearing meticulously wrapped presents and what appeared to be a giant blue diaper bag. He was a little shorter than I remembered, a stout man with a bushy pompadour of gray-white hair. His face seemed naked without the old matching mustache.
“Amy.” He nodded his head in greeting.
“Come on in,” I said.
Mom was upstairs applying her lipstick for the third time since he’d called to say he was on his way. We stood in an uncomfortable silence until Brian came bounding up the stairs. “Richard!” he called. He’d been running on the basement treadmill and was naked from the waist up. His arm, more flesh than muscle, jostled as they shook hands. I wished he would put a shirt on.
“How’s school?” Mr. Moore asked.
“I’m getting by, getting by,” Brian said. He was panting. “One day at a time.” He took what I now learned was an insulated Crockpot (hot cider spiced with cinnamon sticks, a recipe from Sandra Lee) and directed