The day after Easter, Mother disappeared. She didn’t leave a note, not even for Grandma. She left everything: her clothes, the silver bottle, the whiskey and her kids. She had money from the settlement and I suppose we could have found where she’d gone from the lawyers (even if they’d been sworn to secrecy, we had rights), but Grandma Lizzie didn’t pursue it. She only said, “Carmen will come home when she gets over this.”

            Carmen never did.

            Nor did we hear from her. I missed her terribly, but the boys didn’t seem to. Grandma Lizzie bought our house and Mrs. Sanders’ house as well, and they had two yards to play in. A call was made to Athens, Ohio, but Reverend Fisher denied knowing her whereabouts. I didn’t believe him at the time, but did some months later when news of his disgrace was splashed across the front pages like my father’s death. ESTEEMED MINISTER CAUGHT WITH MINOR, CINCINNATI MOTEL ROOM YIELDS SIN, REVEREND STEPEHN FISHER DEFROCKED, CHARGES BROUGHT. Reading the headlines, I clapped my hands as happily as I once did over the bubbles. 

            Grandma moved in with us for six months, then she had a stroke. It was bad. She couldn’t move her left side or get out of bed. Dad was dead and if anyone knew where my mother was, they didn’t say, but by now, I was a tougher and smarter kid. I’d shoved my way back into the group and was hanging out with Jane Lee Veach’s crowd. Was it worth it? I don’t know. Jane Lee would alternately torment me and be my best friend, all the way through high school. 

            Your mother has taken up with some man, she told me one day in the lunchroom. She’d timed it so that the whole group was there. I didn’t look at them again in the face until the end of the year. Aunt Lena said so. She’s landed a rich one. That’s why there no money trail. Jane Lee paused, then shrugged philosophically. Or she could be dead. Aunt Lena said if she hasn’t found a man, she’s probably jumped off a bridge. Without a man, she can’t make it. Lena says, that’s the way your mom is. 

            

Miss Lewis is young and hesitant. Her grandparents lived in Harsbarger Mills, but she was raised in Clovington. Her face tells me she now knows who I am and probably wishes she hadn’t written. Yes, I’m that loud-mouthed woman in the papers: the one who threatened to sue the school board over a complaint about my daughter’s skinny jeans, which, since they didn’t have a dress code, has caused the Board to meet practically every evening until they can pass a ruling which will please not only me, but everyone in Callope County. But I rein myself in because I want to find out what’s wrong with my boy. 

            Miss Lewis talks around the subject in a series of long ellipses about her views on teaching, discipline, even her GPA when she graduated from Burnell.

            I tell her mine.