Free Words and Their Meanings by Kate Bassett Page B

ever. Deduction part two: I’ll be packing my bags for Hell very, very soon.
    Jazz plays in the kitchen. Gramps must be here. I slink into the room and await my verdict. Gramps glances up from his paper. It’s the New York Times , and the cover photo is of people screaming and running. It looks like a Hollywood movie set behind them, one where a bomb just blew up a fake coffee shop or something. Except, of course, the people in the picture aren’t in a movie.
    I wince a little, waiting for what comes next. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
    But he gets up, tucks the paper under his arm, and walks past, slowing down long enough to kiss my forehead.
    â€œMorning, sunshine,” he calls back.
    I turn around like a girl in boot camp and follow him.
    â€œThat’s all you have to say?” My eyes narrow. I don’t like sneak attacks.
    â€œWhat else would you like to hear?”
    â€œWhere’s Mom?”
    â€œBelieve it or not, she’s out back. Pulling weeds.”
    This stops me dead. I scan our living room to make sure I didn’t fall off the roof last night or get sucked into some parallel universe. Blue couch, worn spot on the left arm. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of books everybody has read and books nobody will ever read. Flat-screen TV, on without volume. Scratched wood floor. Fuzzy cream rug with a faint red stain in the corner from when Nat laughed so hard at Joe’s suck-tastic charade-playing skills, Cranapple juice shot out her nose.
    Yup. Same house as yesterday.
    Mom’s clients used to brag about her horticultural genius, like she’s a fairy yard-mother or something. Dad joked a lot, before, about our own backyard “garden.” He always made air quotation marks when he called it that. He said Mom put in every perennial that was impossible to kill, like daisies, black-eyed Susans, oregano, and thirteen varieties of mint plants.
    The problem? Everything requires some level of care. The mint plants got zero love this spring. A person could argue they’re thriving (because those things spread like green wildfire). Except in reality they’re one giant, tangled mess of suffocating roots.
    Mom’s bent over in the middle of the mint and oregano jungle when I step outside. She hears the sliding door open, and pulls her big brown sunglasses to the top of her head as she turns around.
    She isn’t wearing makeup, and the half-moons beneath her eyes are the color of charcoal.
    â€œCan you go get me a pair of garden scissors from the garage?” she asks. “I think you’ll find them behind the tin tubs of work gloves.”
    I stare at her.
    â€œWell, can you?” she repeats, bending down to pull a monster pricker weed.
    I come back a few minutes later, scissors in hand, sharp part pointed down. When she takes them, I catch a glimpse of my arm. Yesterday’s verse is still there, barely faded at all.
    Yesterday’s words are still there.
    Coffin yoga. My arm. My morning. I spin around and reach for the door so I can run inside and up the steps and into my room and onto my bed and stretch out, eyes wide, trying not to breathe. But Mom grabs my other wrist. She holds on tight.
    â€œHelp me out here for a bit, please?” Her voice is unsteady but she smiles, and it almost feels real. I try to pull away. She doesn’t let go .
    I’m really hot and then really congested and I need to get away but I don’t want to go to Hell (at least not while alive). I stoop over to yank a bunch of weeds and mint shoots as tall as my knees.
    We work like this, not talking, for a long time. We move from overgrown herbs to perennials to shrubs. Bea comes out, hands on her hips, grumbling about how Gramps went fishing and she’s been hiding inside the couch forever and nobody even noticed she was gone.
    My shirt clings to my back and my lips taste salty. Mom glances at her watch and hops off her knees, a huge pile of wilting weeds in her arms.