Free House Under Snow by Jill Bialosky Page A

Louise said.
    “I like a man with hair on his face,” she said defensively.
    “Maybe he can come to my school?”
    “What are you talking about, Louise?” Lilly snapped out of her fantasy.
    “For Father’s Day. Missy’s father works for Channel Five,” she said.
    “Let’s not talk about that now,” Lilly said. She reached over to Louise’s bed and squeezed her hand. “I think it’s too premature to ask Kent,” she continued, in her out-of-body voice. “Girls, he has the softest hair,” she said. “Did you see the size of his shoulders?”
    The tortured look on Lilly’s face, so clear earlier, had faded away. She grew soft and wistful. She was under one of her lovesick spells. She laughed a private, no-good laugh. “Kent’s sweet, isn’t he?” she said to no one in particular.
    I didn’t think so. But I was slowly learning that my mother’s moods could be determined, like changing weather, by the kind of man she was with and how he treated her.
    “Tell me the truth,” she continued. “I’m your mother. You can tell me.” Her eyes darted back and forth from me to Louise and back again. “What’s wrong, Anna?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You didn’t like him, did you?”
    “I barely know him,” I said impatiently.
    “Well, he’s very nice,” Lilly snapped. “Besides, he offered to fix the leak in the garage roof.” She dragged her body up, and with her shoes slung over her shoulder by their straps she closed the door behind her.
    After Lilly had gone into her bedroom, I heard the telephone ring. I could hear my mother talking.
    “Kent, is that you? . . . I don’t know, it’s so late.”
    The spring on my mother’s bed creaked as Lilly rose to go into her dressing room. Then I heard the
swish-swish
from her lace nightgown as she passed our bedroom door on the way back downstairs.
    “Where are you going?” I called through the door.
    “Anna, go back to bed,” Lilly said.
    “But where are you going?”
    “Kent forgot his keys.” Lilly’s voice sounded defeated and tired.
    “If he forgot his keys, then where was he calling from?”
    “Anna,” Lilly said, exasperated. “There’s a hole in the garage about two feet wide.”
    I wished I could travel far into space, like the astronauts who’d gone to the moon. Then my spirit would be safe from the world where my mother lived, with her assorted men and sultry music, her makeup and sexy dresses.
     
     
    Throughout the years
of my mother’s dating, she often sat at the foot of my bed and quizzed me. I didn’t understand why my opinion mattered so much—perhaps she just needed to hear herself talk. But I didn’t want to hear her. I had my own problems. I would have liked her to help me.
    Soon I would start third grade. I couldn’t concentrate on the math equations on the board that year. I had worried about what my mother was doing in the house all day alone. If Lilly had too much time on her hands, she grew vague and transparent as if you could slip right through her.
    “Robert told me he was seeing other women,” she’d said
once. “Anna, is there something wrong with me? I thought we connected. Should I call him?”
    I didn’t think so, but I knew she wanted to hear the opposite. My mother seemed to have an endless desire no man could fill. “When we were at the Reinsteins’ cocktail party, he said he loved children. Don’t you think he was trying to tell me something? When a man touches you . . . well, I thought it meant something.”
     
    After the night of Austin’s party, my body didn’t feel mine unless he was next to me; I felt if he wasn’t in my vision he didn’t exist, or more to the point, I didn’t exist for him.
    That spring and summer there was hardly a place to be alone. Like everything else in Chagrin Falls, my house felt incredibly small. When I wasn’t working or out with Austin, I sat in the living room and in the stream of sunlight I watched specks of dust slowly float into the air, and I