Turning Pages

Chapter Two

TWO 

I drove slowly home from Melanie's, letting my brain relax. Fall colors had overtaken our small Massachusetts town, turning the trees into flames of red and orange. As I rolled down my car window, I inhaled the scent of crunchy leaves mixed with the unique smell of fall rain. Melanie always laughs at me, telling me it's impossible to smell rain, but she's wrong. Rain has a definite smell, just like snow. 

I pulled up in front of my house and killed the engine, then grabbed my stuff from the back seat of my car. I really needed to clean out all the trash and maybe even give the whole thing a good vacuuming, but who had time? 

My arms full, I bumped the door closed with my hip, then froze as I realized I'd forgotten something. I saw my keys dangling from the ignition, and I could have kicked myself. 

I set my things on the hood, then squatted down by the front tire. I reached up into the wheel well to grab the magnetic key holder I kept there. When I slid it open, I saw that it was empty. The last time I'd locked my keys in the car, I'd put the spare in my pocket, and then into my jewelry box when I changed clothes . . . where it still was. My brother would never let me live this down. 

Quietly, I opened the back door to the house, hoping no one would notice me. A set of spare keys hung on a hook over the microwave, and I grabbed them. Moments later, I entered the kitchen with my keychain safely in my purse, pretending nothing at all was wrong. 

"Addie!" My nine-year-old sister, Jenni, greeted me from the table, where she sat with her homework, and her pet rat in its cage next to her. "Did you bring me a book?" 

"Did I bring you a book? What, you think I work at a library or something?" I bent down and kissed the top of her head, then pulled the newest Janette Rallison novel from my bag. "Here you go, but no staying up all night to read it." 

"Okay," she agreed, but I knew full well I'd be going in her room at midnight to tell her to flip off the light. She was too much like me. 

"Where's Benji?" 

"He's playing basketball. Again." Jenni shook her head. "And Mom's in her studio." 

I poked a carrot stick through the bars of the rat's cage-although I don't know why, because I don't like rats-then walked down the hall and paused in the open doorway. My mother stood before a huge canvas, pondering it with a brush in one hand and a palette balanced on the plaster cast on her other arm. The canvas was completely blank, just as it had been before I left for school that morning. I wondered if she'd been staring at it all day. She did that sometimes-and forgot to eat. 

"Hey, Mom." 

She turned and smiled at me. "Hi, honey. How was your day?" 

I took a seat on the stool nearest the window. "It was okay. Well, it got better toward the end." I told her about Rob's email, and she chuckled softly. 

"See, honey? Didn't I tell you he'd come around?" 

"Yeah, you did." I blushed to think back on that conversation. It had taken place the night Rob came home for summer break the year before. I was so sure he'd take one look at me in all my eighteen-year-old grownup-ness and propose on the spot, but he hadn't. Instead, he'd reached out and rumpled my hair. Like I was a puppy. Or a little boy. Or something else, but not a something he wanted to marry. I'd cried for hours while my mother held me. She promised that someday, he'd look at me and see the young woman I was becoming, rather than a little girl. At the time, I thought she was just trying to cheer me up . . . and to get me to stop sniffling all over her white bedspread. Later I realized how much she'd come to mean to me.