Free The Last Forever by Deb Caletti Page A

color of the spirits,” Cora Lee whispers.
    “Oui,” Jenny says, and winks at me, as if we are sharing a joke. I don’t know if we are sharing a joke, though. I don’t really know her. I don’t paint. I’ve never been interested in painting. I am suddenly filled with the most intense longing for home. Home the way it doesn’t exist anymore. Home where Mom would come home from work with a couple of fat bags of groceries and we’d unload them together. She’d say, I got that yogurt you like. I’d give anything to just hear that.
    I stare at my painting as if pondering my next creative move, but I am really counting up how many minutes my mother lived. Sixty minutes in an hour; one thousand, four hundred, forty minutes in a day; and 525,600 in a year. I dip the brush in the paint and do the math on my canvas. Forty-two years, which is 22,075,200 minutes or so. I write the number 22,075,200 again in purple, the color of the spirits. It looks so large, but it isn’t. It’s not nearly large enough.
    Jenny claps her hands together. Everyone is coming out of their trances and shuffling things and standing up. Elijah stretches as if he’s just run a mile, but his painting doesn’t look all that different from when he began. There is the snapping of paint-box clasps, and Millicent has her perfect back toward the room as she stands at the sink and cleans up. “If I have to paint another flower, I’ll scream,” she says. Funny, I didn’t see the armed gunman who was forcing her to use that brush, but maybe I missed him.
    Elijah holds his canvas carefully between his palms and carries it to the long counter, where he sets it beside the others.
    “So weird running into you last night,” I say to him.
    “Parrish Island, population three thousand, and a good lot of those don’t live here full-time. You always run into people.”
    “Oh,” I say. He’s smashing any image I had of a Meaningful Coincidence. It’s starting to happen again, the vast conversational wasteland. I realize something, though. It’s happening not only because those perfect blue eyes intimidate me, but because he’s not all that friendly. Truthfully, he and Millicent are a pair of icebergs. Still, I can’t forget another set of eyes, ones I’ve been seeing every time I shut my own. I can feel that hand around my wrist right here and now as I stumble for something to say to this boy, who happens to be smiling a billboard smile—large and perfect, but fake. “Your friend Henry seems nice.”
    “Henry is weird,” Millicent says without turning around.
    “Henry’s not weird,” Elijah says.
    “I like weird,” I say.
    “Mill, hustle up. I’ve got to be at work in ten.”
    I try again. “Where do you work?”
    “Hotel Delgado?”
    I shrug my shoulders. I’ve been here all of two days.
    “He’s a waiter,” Millicent says. She holds her hand in the air as if she is carrying a tray. “Baked potato or fries with that?”
    “Fries,” I joke, but they are too involved in their own sibling rivalry to notice.
    “At least I have a job, loser,” Elijah says. “I don’t sit around all day reading magazines and slathering on more sunscreen, my hand out to Mommy and Daddy when I need a little cash.”
    “Who’s the loser? Summer is for rest and relaxation, not for hot grease and cleaning up gross stuff under high chairs. Stupid brother.” She flicks him with her thumb and forefinger. “Well, see ya,” Millicent says to me.
    “See ya,” I say.
    “Later, Jenny,” Elijah calls.
    So much for hanging out tonight. So much for us all going over to the Hotel Delgado, wherever that is, to share dessert. So much for a chance to see Henry again.
    Margaret is struggling to get her sweater back on, the one lone sleeve darting around like a fish on a line. I catch it and help her aim. That old arm has a map of veins on it. Maybe it’s all the turns taken and not taken over a lifetime.
    “Thank you, my dear,” she says. She actually says