Free The Missing Girl by Norma Fox Mazer Page A

go home.”
    “Okay, I will, I’ll be quick.” Fancy runs up the path into the woods. The sun is going down. In a moment she disappears from sight.
    So there they are, the two of them. He offers her a stick 105

    of gum. She shakes her head. “Sure?” he says. “I have enough.”
    And just as with the bread, she hesitates, bites her lip, then nods. She reaches out and takes the gum. Her fingers brush against his.
    That evening the man weeps. Sitting at the table by the window that looks out over the empty lot, with his supper before him—the tomato soup in a bowl, the slice of cheese on a plate next to the stack of crackers—the man weeps.
    He weeps out of gratitude. Nothing happened. He hasn’t done wrong.
    He holds his head in his hands, sobs juddering through him.
    After a while he gets up and bends over the sink, splashing his face with cold water. The cats are watching him. He nods to them, goes back to the table, and sits down. He’s hungry now, really hungry! He eats with gusto, letting himself slurp the soup and fill his mouth with crackers. Everything tastes delicious! The memory of the girls in the park is delicious as well, and so is the wind blowing around the house.
    106

    He considers his good luck, his wonderful luck. To have found this house, with no neighbors, with waste fields on either side and across the street, with a landlord in another state, a landlord who asks nothing, just glad to have someone responsible keep the building repaired and clean. To have found a job where no one bothers him. To have his lovely birds—yes, lovely, all five of them, even the dim one, even the ugly one, lovely really. In his relief, he knows them all to be lovely, delightful. And then, to have escaped his worst self, the self he works so hard to keep under control. Luck had been on his side. Just as Autumn took the gum, Her Dimness had come prancing out of the woods. A moment later the two of them had gone off together. Oh, yes, luck was his.
    Afterward he takes both cats onto his lap and allows them to stay there while he sits in his living room like any other man, drinking a beer and watching TV.
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    THE RIGHTEOUS PATH
    OVER THE WEEKEND her mother elected
    Beauty to break the news to her sisters, news that she alone had been entrusted with, so far. “No, you’re not going to do that,” Beauty said.
    “Yes, we are.” Her mother blinked hard and screwed her cigarette into the chipped dish she favored as an ashtray. “You tell them for me, honey. Please.”
    Beauty put off the unwelcome task until Sunday night.
    After supper and an hour of watching a show, she told her sisters to come up to her room. “Why?” Stevie said. “I’ve got better things to do.”
    “You need to come up,” Beauty said, and she gazed at 108

    Stevie, hoping her face showed nothing but resolve. She went ahead up the attic stairs to wait for them. In her room she paced. She had been put on the spot by her parents. Nothing out of the ordinary in that. The oldest, the most responsible—who else could tell her sisters as well as she? Not their father. Too rough in his ways. Mimicking a famous saying, he had answered her protests with “I am the decider.” But what about her mother, that tender heart? She had begged off, her cheeks ashen and sagging as she said, “Oh, no, honey! I can’t do it, I just can’t. You know me, I’ll be crying my head off, I won’t be any use at all.”
    “What’s up?” Mim said. She was lying on her bed, next to the window, with a book perched on her stomach. She peered at Beauty nearsightedly.
    Beauty shook her head. “Wait. Anyway, here they come.”
    Stevie was in the lead, her steps quick and firm. Behind her, Fancy toe tapping on each step, and bringing up the rear, Autumn patiently following Fancy. All of them were talking at full volume as they squirmed their way around the room and settled down.
    Fancy seated herself on the floor, her legs crossed, her 109

    knees touching the