with tap water, her mother retreated to their room. CeCe could hear the mattress groan its familiar embrace while she put away the kitchen stepstool. CeCe brought in their chairs, rinsed and put away their cereal bowls, played with her toys, made lunch, walked her dragon, and came back inside to settle herself on the couch with one of the picture books Mrs. Castellanos had given her. CeCe fell asleep there. When she awoke from her nap, CeCe saw her mother next to her, folded into their old armchair with damp knots of tissue scattered around her like spent bullets.
CeCe said nothing, just rose from the couch to wrap her small arms around her mother’s neck. Her mother didn’t respond to her tight embrace. She never did. Not this version of her mother. CeCe kissed her mother’s hair and went into the kitchen. She began her evening ritual of dragging one of the kitchen chairs to the fridge, reaching into the freezer for two frozen dinners, and climbing down to spin the oven dial to 4-2-5. Pushing the chair back to the table, CeCe noticed tufts of yellow winking at her from the garbage can. CeCe’s skinned ached again. There was their sunshine morning, tossed in the trash.
Sitting at the table, CeCe finished her dinner while her mother picked absently at the plate compartments. Her mother had begun eating less and less.
“Why were you sad today, Mama?”
“I just am, CrimsonBaby. I just am.”
THREE
MOSS
CECE CIRCLED THE LOT. SHE only parked the behemoth in corner spaces now. Her first month with Aunt Rosie’s old Lincoln Town Car had earned CeCe four angry notes pinned beneath her windshield. They were bitter scribbles from drivers who had been forced to climb into back seats and out of windows to escape her car’s imposing body. Once, she came out of the movies to find the front bumper hanging in defeat.
Besides negotiating parking lots and navigating the long chariot through traffic, CeCe also learned to ignore the bemusement of her small frame emerging from the oversized ride. Leaving the drug store, yarnless, CeCe heard the familiar cross-lot taunt about a booster seat. She wasn’t even inclined to flip them the bird. The day had greeted her with an empty milk container in the fridge, a client ambush as a result of yet another one of Margolis’ errors of enthusiasm, being stood up for happy hour, a screaming pinched toe from a pair of shoes that decided to hate her, and a scavenger hunt for green yarn—nylon not acrylic, moss not emerald.
Two stops later, CeCe finally stood in a checkout lane, frustrated that she hadn’t driven out to the fabric store in the first place. As she left the register, her cell phone chimed. Looking down at the display screen, CeCe smiled for the first time all day.
“Doris!” she said, slipping sideways past two women blocking the automatic door with their baskets and chatter.
“Kiddo!” Doris replied, the edges of her voice still crumbling from decades of menthol cigarettes. CeCe had met Doris in the smoker’s garden, a landscaped corner exclusively for mall employees. CeCe’s smoking habit lasted less than three months, but her enchantment with Doris, a spirited middle-aged Jewish woman, would last beyond the years they worked at the mall. Even with Doris all the way in Florida, CeCe felt a welcome, comforting warmth at the sound of her friend’s voice.
CeCe had worked at Hip Pocket, selling designer jeans to bony teenage girls and metrosexual college boys. At the other end of the mall, Doris hawked dishwashers and deep freezers at Sears. The two adopted each other straightaway, shifting their midpoint meetings from the smokers’ garden to the food court. They ate lunch together every day for four years. A year after CeCe had left Hip Pocket and landed her current job, Doris had announced her move to Florida.
“You’re taking a break from your sexy senior singles bingo game to call me?” CeCe teased, angling her car key into its lock.
“Honey, I told you I’m only hanging with the cool old ladies,” Doris replied with a laugh, “and we do not do bingo.”
CeCe could imagine Doris’ head tilting back to let that enormous laugh escape, her eyeglass chain glinting in the sunlight. Doris once confessed that her silver chain gave her an edge over the other sales reps because it implied “grandmotherly wisdom.”
“My bad,” CeCe said, attaching her Bluetooth before turning over the Lincoln’s engine. “How are the cool grannies doing? Did Maddie get her driver’s license back?”
Doris told CeCe about the gossip and shenanigans of her retirement community and CeCe told Doris about wanting to lock Margolis in the copy room. CeCe drove the long way home as they talked. They still were chatting incessantly by the time CeCe snaked through the labyrinth of duplexes and four-unit apartments buildings and stretched her car beneath the carport.
“What were you doing out?” Doris asked.
“Mama needed green yarn,” CeCe said.
Doris let out another laugh, smaller this time. “Of course she did,” she said. “Hey, can you get me from the airport tomorrow around ten forty-five?”
CeCe agreed, and the day’s irritations melted away.
FOUR
THURSDAYS
CECE PLAYED IN THE COURTYARD while the lady with scuffed brown shoes talked inside with her mother. She lay on the wrought-iron bench, the front of her body dimpled by the hard lattice pattern. CeCe hung her head over the end of the bench to watch her sundress pucker through the spaces. Shuffling and scooting to align the print patterns on her dress with the crosshatch of the bench, CeCe didn’t hear the screen door or the brown shoe footsteps. Just a voice.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
CeCe raised herself with a jump. She knew better than to let a stranger get so close to her. Snapping upright, CeCe could see that the voice belonged to Scuff Shoes. She relaxed a little. Scuff Shoes was technically a stranger, but had been talking with her mother for a long time now. CeCe edged to one side of the bench and smoothed the front of her dress. She watched the woman cautiously.
“What were you looking at?” she asked CeCe.
“My dress.”
“What does is look like under there?” Scuff looked down to assess the bench.
“Waffles,” CeCe said matter-of-factly.
“Waffles?” Scuff repeated, raising her eyebrows. “Clever girl, Crimson. Clever girl.”
Scuff was a stocky woman, sausaged into a maroon skirt suit. CeCe could see the bulge of her trying to leap from behind the buttoned shirt and blazer. Scuff introduced herself as Tanya Boylin, a social services agent who came to make sure CeCe would be enrolled for school.
“Like the big kids?” CeCe asked, wrinkling her nose and letting her heavy plaits pull her head to one side. She was the youngest person in the complex, but watched the older kids head off with their books and satchels.
“Crimson,” Boylin continued, with a chuckle. “You are a big kid. That means you get to go to school, too.”
CeCe felt her insides tingle. Some lost inner layer begin to warm.
School.
“Am I going to school tomorrow?” CeCe asked, hopping down from the bench.
“Not tomorrow,” Boylin said, smiling as she hoisted one thick leg over the other. “School isn’t open yet, Crimson, but it will be soon. We want to make sure you’re ready for the first day.”
“How many Thursdays?” CeCe asked.
“Thursdays?” Boylin repeated, her cheery smile fading. “Do you mean how many weeks?”
“Thursdays,” CeCe corrected, pulling her own short legs onto the bench and crossing her ankles into a pretzel. After a moment, CeCe remembered Mrs. Castellanos and tugged at her sundress to cover her panties. “I don’t want to miss school when it opens, so I have to count my Thursday tabs.”
Boylin regarded CeCe for a long time,