Free Miracle by Elizabeth Scott

glasses perched halfway down its nose, and the other one was wearing a pink sweatshirt that said SILVER FOX . They were holding hands.
    I don’t know how long I stood there before I figured it out. Before I got that those bears were supposed to be Margaret and Rose. Before I knew that I could look in every other room in the house and never find another bedroom.
    “Meggie, what on earth are you still doing in the bath . . . ?” Margaret’s voice, loud at first, trailed off altogether. I could feel her looking at me, at the room, at the bears sitting together, and then back at me.
    “You didn’t know.” She sounded surprised. I guess she should have been. I’d always wondered why some people in town and even at church wouldn’t talk to them, why Jess’s mother had glanced at mine and muttered, “Let’s hope not,” the time I said, “Me and Jess are going to be friends forever just like Margaret and Rose,” after we got drunk on peachschnapps we snuck during her aunt’s bachelorette party.
    “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
    “Well, you do now. You want me to drive you home, or do you want to walk?” Margaret’s voice was crisp but when I looked over at her she was staring at the bears with a sad look on her face, like she’d had this conversation before. Like people looked at her after they knew and stopped seeing her.
    “Can I have my sandwich first?”
    She glanced at me. She didn’t smile. She frowned, then squinted at me, and after a long while she nodded.
    So I ate my sandwich, and then she drove me home. “Tell your parents you were at my house,” she said when I got out of the car. “I don’t want them hearing from someone else.”
    “They won’t care.”
    “Tell them anyway,” Margaret said.

Twelve
    “It’s a nice surprise to see you here and not up in your room,” Mom said as she came into the living room. I was sitting on the sofa watching a bunch of news guys yell at each other about taxes. It was just like a talk show except everyone was wearing ties. “Want a snack?”
    “Nah. I’m still kind of full from lunch.”
    “What did you have?” She sat down next to me.
    “Ham. Margaret made it. Well, not the ham. The sandwiches.”
    “Margaret? From church?”
    “Yep.”
    “You . . . you ate lunch with her? At her house?”
    I nodded.
    “Well. That’s . . . did you have a nice time?”
    “Sure. Have you ever been to her house?” I already knewthe answer. One of the guys on TV was yelling so loud his face was bright red.
    “No,” Mom said, and her voice had gone high and sort of strangled sounding. “Is it nice?”
    “Small. One bathroom. One bedroom.”
    She got off the sofa. “I didn’t see your car in the driveway. Did it break down?”
    “No, it’s at school.”
    “I’ll call your father and have him go look at it,” she said, and went into the kitchen. I could have heard what she said to Dad if I’d turned the television down, but I could already guess what it was.
    Dad came home about ten minutes later. He stopped in the kitchen, saying something to Mom I didn’t try to listen to, and then came into the living room. “What happened to the car?”
    “Nothing. I just didn’t want to drive home. Can you give me a ride to school in the morning?”
    “Sure. I’d like to take a look at it though, just in case. And—well, your mother says . . . she tells me you had lunch with Margaret.”
    I nodded. “I ran into her at church.”
    “At church?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What were you doing there?”
    I shrugged.
    He cleared his throat and then kissed the top of my head. “Praying isn’t anything to be shy about, Meggie. And as for Margaret, I think she’s been lonely since Rose died, and I’m sure it did her good to talk. It was a nice thing you did, and if you want to do it again, it’s fine with me.”
    “George!” Mom called from the kitchen.
    “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Dad called back. “Meggie had lunch with someone from