Free Cornerstone by Misty Provencher Page A

pauses to smooth out his serious brow and let it wiggle instead. “My brother’s got...skills. Mad skills. He can hold his own.”
    “Against a guy with a shovel ?”
    “Against Furries even!” Iris interjects with a happy squeal. She squashes up her face and growls as she scratches the air with mock bear claws. My mom and the Carbon Copy giggle at Iris’s cuteness. I just grit my teeth and press my toes into the souls of my shoes to keep myself from screaming at the three of them.
    “Does anyone get that the guy Garrett’s chasing is nuts? That I think it’s the same guy that broke my arm?” I raise my cast in the air like a plaster exclamation point. The three of them, even Iris, regard me dully, like I’m just trying to get attention.
    “You know what? Nalena’s right.” The Copy rubs his neck as if he’s massaging a thought to the surface. “Come on in while I call down to the police station too. It can’t hurt to make sure they know what’s going on.”
    “Good idea.” my mom agrees.
    “But Garrett can...” Iris starts as the Copy swoops down with a laugh and scoops her up in his arms. He tumbles her onto his shoulders and she grabs fistfuls of his oil-black hair and squeals, “Giddy Up, Seany! Giddy up!” He gallops three steps down the hall and takes a right into what I assume is the Reese’s kitchen.
    My mom follows them and I follow her, tugging at her shirt until she slows up.
    “What’s Alo?” I whisper in her ear. She clears her throat.
    “Oh...it’s like a title. From the church I grew up in. It identifies me as part of a deacon’s family.”
    I’ve never heard the name Alo, although I’ve heard stories about my grandfather’s dedication to his church community a few hundred times. My mom and Grandpa belonged to some church my mom never names, although she likes to tell me how much everyone loved my grandfather. She always says that the kids thought of my grandfather as theirs too, because he’d slip polished quarters into their pockets whenever he saw them. The way my mom tells it, she and Grandpa were an island, as far as blood relatives go, so they considered the community their family. But after my grandfather was murdered in a robbery that went bad, I guess my mom was too scared to stay, being on her own and pregnant with me, so she moved us away.
    I’ve asked why we don’t go back to her old community now, because it sure seems like it would be nice to have people who are like family, but my mom has always given me cornball answers like, ‘we go there in our hearts’ and ‘we’re there all the time, in spirit’. When I really keep up with the questions, she just sighs and says, “It’s complicated, Nali. It’s very, very complicated.”
    I don’t push it anymore because I don’t really want to end up crammed into some pew, belting out ancient karaoke to musty organ music every Sunday. That’s been enough to keep me from asking until now, but the Reese’s connection makes me rethink how much I might enjoy sitting for hours on a hard wood bench, listening to heated Bible stories, beside Garrett.
    “I thought we didn’t live near any of them.” I say. “How did you know Garrett’s family is part of Grandpa’s church? It’s not like we ever go.”
    “In our hearts, we do.” my mom says, like usual. “I’ve always known the Reese’s were part of Grandpa’s church. I just hadn’t met them formally.”
    My mom says this last part out loud as we step into the Reese’s dining room. It is a long, wide, rectangle, filled almost to the edges with a huge, oval table and oak chairs. My mom smiles at Iris and The Copy as we scoot around the table and she stands at the end of the kitchen counter, lined with barstools.
    I move off to the side, feeling heavy and hidden in the corner, at the opposite end of the counter. Garrett is a part of a church, a family, that my mom never bothered to connect with. She never even mentioned it after she met him. We’ve lived