Free My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson Page A

to a funeral home? That she was really supposed to be in Semperville, ten miles away? Most of all, that this was not a unique experience?
    Various harmless fictions crossed her mind—she had come to visit a friend, to get the dining room chairs reglued, to buy something big and important on sale that very day in Fredonia—but Mother was no good at fictions, harmless or otherwise. An uneasy liar, she always fell apart two sentences into the lie.
    However, it seemed to her that any answer involving the truth of this situation would surely lead to lengthy explanations, and might well produce some kind of public scene.
    Hoping to avoid all this, she simply said, “I don’t know,” and immediately hurried back to greet the customer, to make polite small talk and to leave before my father could pin her down.
    He said later that she seemed distracted, not herself, her eyes vague and troubled (all perfectly true, since she was then half an hour late for the flower show and had no idea how to get there). He was puzzled by her answer, but not alarmed . . . until the same thing happened several days later.
    Mother had pursued what looked like a sure thing: an elderly Packard, gleaming clean and bearing three ladies in hats. They led her to a high school auditorium—a common flower show arena— and took from the back of their car three different flower arrangements, all of which turned out to be table decorations for a luncheon-lecture on Yugoslavian folk art.
    Mother didn’t know that, though; it looked to her like a flower show, and a very fancy and elegant one, which pleased her. She sat down at a table to make preliminary notes: Good use of daisies in Number 7. Awkward larkspur in Number 10. —and was served, and ate, a dainty appetizer of pineapple and cream cheese before she caught on.
    Thus trapped—“I couldn’t very well eat their food and then just get up and leave, could I?” she said—she stayed until the room was darkened for a slide presentation and then raced for a telephone to call, first, the flower show committee, and then Louis and me, to be sure we were all right.
    As it happened, my father had stopped home between appointments, was already surprised to find Mother gone (“Not much of a gadabout”), and even more surprised to answer the telephone and learn that she was in Concord.
    â€œWhat are you doing in Concord?” he asked.
    Of course Mother was surprised too. She didn’t expect my father to answer the phone and, caught unawares, had no ready reply. Once again, she had followed a strange car to an unknown destination, felt a little foolish and didn’t want to go into it over the phone or, indeed, at all. No doubt she reasoned that what worked before would work again and said, “I don’t know—but I’m coming straight home to fix the fish.”
    The idea here, a spur-of-the-moment notion, was to get his mind off one thing (her whereabouts) and onto something else (supper); and she thought the fish would do it, fish being his favorite meal.
    It had no such effect. Had she gone to Concord to buy fish? he wondered. That made no sense, with a perfectly good fish market not ten minutes away. And even supposing there were better fish, or cheaper fish, or bigger fish in Concord, why hadn’t she said so?
    Louis and I were not only no help to him, but added fuel to the fire.
    â€œWhen you left for school this morning,” he asked us, “did your mother say she would be gone for the day?”
    We said no.
    â€œWell, was she dressed to go out?”
    â€œI don’t think so,” Louis said. “She was in the kitchen, making meat loaf.”
    â€œFor supper?”
    He shrugged. “I guess so.”
    The meat loaf proved to be in the refrigerator with strips of bacon across the top of it, clearly ready for the oven—and in light of this, Mother’s telephone conversation seemed not just strange and