Allyson In Between ✔︎

Chapter Fourteen

|photo by tranmautritam from Pexels|

The Sunday mornings in my memory are vibrant: sunshine and clatter, pancakes and smiles. But this morning Mom is alone at the kitchen table. The house smells like bacon but the six-burner stovetop is empty. The frying pan is perched, bottom side up, on a drying rack beside the shiny clean sink. Our ritual family breakfast has come and gone, and they let me sleep through it.

"There you are," Mom says, looking up from her cooking magazine. I get a hasty hug before she steers me to the chair she just vacated. "Sit down. I'll get your pancakes. Orange juice?"

"Um, yeah. Thanks. Where are Dad and Lindsay?"

She uses a black and white checkered dishtowel to maneuver a plate out of the warming drawer under the wall-mounted oven. "Your father is on the computer," she says, placing my breakfast on the table in front of me. "He's getting some work out of the way so he can spend the rest of the day with his family."

There's a hint of an attitude, I think. I don't like the way she says "your father." Like he only belongs to me. And did she emphasize the word work? Does she resent the idea of him working on a Sunday morning?

Or am I imagining it?

Yes, I'm sure I am, because I finished reading the IM conversations last night. There was barely any mention of my parents arguing. Nothing at all about Mom staying locked in her room crying.

"Did you say where Lindsay was?" I ask.

"She went for a run with a friend who lives in the neighborhood. She'll be back soon, and—"

"What friend?"

Mom blinks her eyes three times. Because my tone is too harsh. I'm revealing my suspicion. "I mean, I didn't know she had a friend here. In this neighborhood."

My orange juice gets delivered with one of Mom's overly sympathetic smiles. I drop my eyes to my plate and shove an entire piece of bacon in my mouth, because she's absolutely right about the thing she's so hesitant to say out loud. This is hard. Being in this house, under these circumstances, is harder than any of the rehabilitative things I had to do at Faircrest. And I'm having an especially hard time not telling Mom what Lindsay did yesterday—what she might be doing right now.

But there has to be some reason I didn't tell my parents about my sister's drug habit before my accident—because I'm sure it bothered me then as much as it does now. So maybe Lindsay is telling the truth about Mom and Dad. And if it's true then yeah, they don't need one more thing to worry about. Not if I can make the problem go away.

And I can. Lindsay promised me she wouldn't smoke any more weed and I want to give her a chance. I owe her that. I need to trust her—at least until I'm a hundred percent sure that I can't.

"Allyson, honey, did you hear me?"

"Um, no. Sorry."

"I was saying that Lindsay's friend is new to the neighborhood."

Mom deposits the syrup next to my plate, but it's wrong. The bottle is too short and I'm pretty sure the label is supposed to be red.

"I haven't had a chance to meet her yet," Mom says. "Her family just moved to Summerfield a few weeks ago."

Really? Or is that just something Lindsay tells Mom when she wants to "escape."

"There's a transition support group session this afternoon," Mom says. "I'll drive you over—if you think you might be ready for that. Dr. Greene said I could stay there with you, or not stay..."