We Find What Is Lost: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 1)

Chapter Thirteen: Al, Saturday

It was quiet on the way home. Mom, for some reason, wasn't her usual chatty self. All his life she'd been the talker in the family, probably because she'd felt the need to make up for Dad's reticence. After he'd moved out, there were evenings when Al despaired of ever getting her off the phone; she felt the need to inform him of every ailment or ungrateful child of every friend of hers, and then he would feel like an ungrateful child for wishing he could end the call.

How ironic, then, that her silence was making him uncomfortable.

"So..." he ventured. "How did you find the memorial?"

She harrumphed, and that surprised him.

"You didn't like it?" he asked.

"Oh, it was fine," she said. "Actually, it was nice that it wasn't a sad occasion, aside from that outburst from your old friend."

"Yeah, that was bad," he said, "but she got some air with us and she was all right." He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as he concentrated on the road. "Was there a problem you had with the memorial?"

"It was just so like her," Mom said. "The slideshow, the schmoozing, the politicians, the dolls... oh, Lord... I'm sure that was in the instructions she left upon her death... the dolls had to be at the memorial. It felt as if she stage managed the whole event from beyond the grave."

Al chuckled. "Did you not like Mrs. Anderson?"

"Oh, she was fine," Mom said, waving her hand as if swatting an invisible fly. "I thought her taking Rachel under her wing was admirable... maybe that's why Rachel was so grief-stricken, she meant that much to her."

Al decided not to tell her Rachel hadn't contacted Mrs. Anderson since she'd left Queensborough.

"The thing about people like Martha Anderson," she continued, "is that being in their orbit becomes exhausting after a while. They exert a gravity all their own. The good works, the meddling in other people's lives... you feel like you have to fight the pull to be like her. Saints have always been reviled in their own time, you know."

Al was intrigued by his mother's assessment. Growing up, he'd thought all grown-ups thought the same way and had the same views on how children should act; a hive-mind, of a sort, that constantly watched the kids, so that as soon as one grown-up knew what they were up to, their parents would automatically know too. Knowing that his mother was irritated by Mrs. Anderson's saintliness made him like her a little better. 

When he'd become an adult, he'd begun to realize how human his parents were, how fallible, how vulnerable. The older Mom got, the more vulnerable she became. He wondered how many more years he had with her. Dad's passing had hit him hard, because he'd still been relatively young, but the knowledge that his mother would also soon be gone was almost worse, because she was the only parent left, and seeing it coming gave him time to ponder the void she would leave in his life, and his own eventual death.

"I forgot to ask you before," he said, "because I went off with the old gang, but do you remember that time when we were kids, and we helped nab that abusive dad?"

"Oh, yes," she said, sighing. "That was something. You kids were running around like cops or something, being do-gooders. I really should have kept a closer eye on you; you could have been really hurt."

"We even had a name, remember? The Lawrence Street Detective Club," he said, smiling.

"Yes. I bet Mrs. Anderson was behind that, too. She always did watch over you kids like some kind of mentor."

"I don't think so," Al said. "It was Rachel's idea first, when we went after that first dog."

"And Rachel was her protege."