Free The Mourning Hours by Paula Treick Deboard Page A

weight?”
    Johnny looked back at him. “I’m not dropping weight.”
    “Sure looks like you are.”
    Johnny shrugged again. He brought a spoonful to his mouth slowly, as if in rebuttal. “Well, I’m not trying to.”
    “But you are,” Mom said pointedly. “Are you feeling sick?” She reached across the table for his forehead, but withdrew her hand when he pulled back.
    “I’m fine,” Johnny insisted. “You’re making too big a deal out of this.”
    Later that evening, Dad called Coach Zajac, and Coach recommended less running and more weight lifting, more carbohydrates and fewer vegetables. “Coach says we’ll get him back on track,” Dad said, hanging up the phone. “Although he might not be a bad wrestler in the 150s, if it came to that.”
    Mom pursed her lips together, shaking her head. “You two wouldn’t care if Johnny was a skeleton, so long as it gave him an advantage.”
    When I dreamed that night, it was of Johnny on the mats, a skin-and-bones cadaver performing some strange, macabre dance. In the stands, Stacy was watching him, her hands folded beneath her belly.

eleven
    W inter, which had only been flirting with us up to that point, made a serious appearance in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Overnight, everything green disappeared beneath thick white snowdrifts. Mom dragged the boxes of our heaviest winter sweaters down from the attic, and we began listening to the local news each morning, praying for a snow day. It was so cold that Kennel was allowed inside the barn, where he terrorized our farm cats, essentially treeing them in the hayloft. One Saturday, Dad and Jerry cut down a fir from the woods behind our property and lugged it inside our house, then left it to Emilie and me to decorate with looping strings of tinsel and uneven rows of blinking lights. Mom brought down boxes from the attic, and we dug out our favorite ornaments—the clothespin reindeer Grandma Hammarstrom had made for us when we were little, the palm-print casts from our years in kindergarten, Johnny’s palm then as big as mine now. I ate almost as much popcorn as I strung.
    We hosted Christmas dinner, complete with too-dry turkey and Mom’s creamy green bean casserole. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia were there, as well as our cousin, Brent, and his fiancée, and a few of Mom’s cousins from northern Wisconsin. Jerry joined us, helping to cut the turkey with slow, precise strokes. “This man knows his way around a bird,” Dad had announced, clapping Jerry on the shoulder. With an apron tied around her neck and pot holders for hands, Mom was in her element. Grandpa gave horse rides on his knee to the toddlers, and Stacy stopped by, too, after the Lemkes’ family meal. Through it all, Johnny picked at his food like a fussy toddler.
    It snowed every day of our Christmas break, and once the excitement of our presents had worn off, Emilie and I were mostly cooped up. She practiced the clarinet for hours on end, until even Dad requested that John Philip Sousa be confined to the basement, please. A friend rescued Emilie for a day of shopping in Milwaukee, and Mom took me ice-skating at the indoor rink in Waukesha with Katie and Kari Schultz and a few other girls from school, but otherwise, the weeks passed in a blue chill of boredom. Even as we watched TV or read books or played marathon games of double solitaire, it seemed our whole family was holding its breath for Johnny.
    We didn’t miss a meet that season. Piled into the Caprice, we followed the Ships’ bus to tournaments in Kiel and Fond du Lac and Menomonee Falls, then spent entire Saturdays in the bleachers waiting for Johnny to wrestle, standing every so often to stretch our backs or relieve our behinds. Even Grandpa came along, although he complained that the car ride was too long and we sat in the bleachers too long and it took too long to make it all the way through the brackets.
    Stacy was at every tournament, too. During the long lulls between