Free When You Were Older by Catherine Ryan Hyde

to each other. Not everybody’s an ass. I guess I’m apologizing to you for the egg thrower. On behalf of my entire nationality.’
    She laughed a little. It was nice to see a bit of lightness return.
    ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’
    ‘Right. If I ever catch the son of a bitch, that’s what I’ll tell him about
you
.’
    Now her face seemed to have returned to its original relaxed smile. And I thought, What a small price to pay for such a good thing.
    ‘There’s a hose on the other side of the building. In the alley between here and the bank. It’s very long. We use it to hose off the sidewalk out front.’
    ‘Fine. I’ll be back in a bit.’
    I stepped out into the cool morning, glad to have a simple, predictable mission. It was that hour of morning my dad used to call civil twilight – the first few minutes you can see your hand in front of your face. Plus the streetlight on the corner helped. Still, it felt for all the world like a movie set. I still was not convinced I was in a real place.
    I carried the bucket to the front window, and, thinking very little about who put them there and why, scrubbed away the raw eggs. They were freshly thrown, and still wet, so it didn’t take much. I listened to the sound of the scrub brush bristles against the rough brick under the window, and found it comforting for reasons I couldn’t pin down. I felt the pinch of the muscle I’d pulled in my back the night before. But it was OK. It wasn’t too bad. I fetched the hose from the alley and blasted away the soap, using the force of the water to wash it, and the eggshells, off the curb and into the storm drain. I replaced the hose, turning it off and then releasing the water still trapped inside. Because … I don’t know why. It’s just the way I was taught to do things. I poured the soapy water from the bucket down the storm drain and went back inside.
    She looked up and smiled at me. She was just, in that exact moment, slapping an enormous mound of dough – that would soon be my morning donut – on to the table. I stood at the door a moment, watching her roll it out with a heavy wooden rolling pin, in motions almost too fast for my eyes to follow.
    ‘You can just leave the bucket under the sink for now. And you can wash your hands in that sink, or you can use our bathroom. Thank you.’
    ‘Oh, that was nothing.’
    But it was something. It was just something I didn’t mind.
    When I got back from washing my hands, she pointed with a flip of her head to a high stool, which I sat on.
    I watched her cut the donuts.
    In her right hand she held a metal cookie cutter – well, donut cutter – and she moved along the sheet of dough with blinding speed, leaving classic donut shapes marked into the dough, complete with holes. With her left hand she followed along, pulling them up, leaving the centers on the table, placing the perfect circles on a wire rack.
    ‘You want to talk about it?’ she asked.
    ‘What?’ I asked, thinking I sounded like my brother. I could only imagine she was referring to the eggs on the window, and that didn’t require much processing. At least, not on my end.
    ‘You said you had a bad night with Ben.’
    ‘Oh. Right. Well. Not a bad
night
, so much. More a bad evening. Then he went to sleep at eight and forgot the whole thing, and I was so rattled I was up till three thirty, and then at twenty after six he gets me up to drive him to work. So that’s why I look tired. I mean, even more so.’
    ‘Grab a coffee.’
    ‘What a good idea.’
    And I did.
    ‘So,’ she said, when I came back and sat. ‘You want to talk about it?’
    I laughed. It felt good. I wondered when I last had.
    ‘Thought I just did.’
    ‘Well, that’s fine. If that’s all you want to say about it, that’s fine. That’s up to you.’
    I blew on the coffee and took a few sips. I’d never drink any other coffee again. If I ever had to, it would never be good