broken claims

Part 5

"Did you forget something?"

Leigh whirled around from the big window and allowed her hand to drop back down to her side instead of keeping it pressed against the glass. "What? No."

Her grandmother frowned and tugged nervously at the strand of pearls around her throat. Each pearl was kept in place by a tiny knot so even if it pulled apart, the majority of the necklace was safe from ruin. When she was younger Leigh imagined the pearls were tiny snowflakes caught on a gold chain and looped twice around her grandmother's throat, small bits of cold beauty. "Is someone outside?" Stella asked, lowering her voice to a whisper. She drew close to inspect the street below, property ending at a neat fence bordered in by hedges. "Should I have your grandfather call the security company?"

Leigh looked back at the street. "It's nothing. I'm just waiting for the street lights to turn on."

"The lights?"

"Yeah. The street lights. They'll be turning on— see?"

Bright lights snapped on along the sidewalk. A few younger kids turned their bicycles around automatically, a bit like birds finding their flight path, returning to their homes for the evening. Stella hummed and tapped the window with her fingernail critically. "Does this look smudged to you? Maybe I should have Rhoda clean the windows tomorrow when she comes in."

Leigh touched her hand to the plaster cast protecting her wrist. The dull ache was pressed straight into the bone itself, keeping her unable to sleep comfortably. "It looks okay to me."

"You haven't developed an eye for this sort of thing, darling. Trust me. Maids get lazy. When you run a house, you need to make sure they don't cut corners. The company promised that they would have scrubbed this house from top to bottom before we even stepped foot through the door! But I've already marked down the location of two cobwebs. And once you have cobwebs, you're just letting the property value go down."

"Sure."

Stella straightened. "You should come to the table. I have your assignments laid out for you. Tomorrow your grandfather will finish the paperwork for your enrolment and we can get back to a routine. Won't that be nice? Everything has been such a mess lately, but I suppose that's the lifestyle one must endure whilst living out of boxes."

Her stomach twisted at the idea of school. "Why can't I just stay at my old school? I liked the people there."

"Oh, that would be quite the commute, Rosalie," Stella laughed, not unkindly. "You'll love this one even more. I had your grandfather talk to the coach about getting you on the soccer team. You liked playing on that little group, didn't you?"

She had. Leigh rubbed her fingers a little harder against the pink plaster and felt small in the room. Stella's arm wrapped around her shoulder's and gently pulled her away from the window. She didn't say anything at all. She just kept thinking about the lights turning on and the ones back home, the infinite space stretching between the two places.

Leigh tried turning her face harder into the window to try and avoid the hand. The coolness of it felt like a balm to the fever burning her up from the inside out. "Go away," she rasped out, squeezing her eyes shut tight to block out the light from the sky.

Stella was stubborn. Her hand refused to shift back. "Feeling alright?" She asked but it wasn't her mother's voice at all flooding her ears. Leigh cracked her eyes open and squinted at where Daryl was sitting in the driver's seat, the truck itself sitting in the middle of the road.