Free Walking Backward by Catherine Austen Page B

fifty cents. Mr. Smitts said they’d spent the whole time in line talking about ice cream and drooling over all the flavors, so when they just bought little Freezies everyone felt sorry for them. They sat at a table outside and ate their Freezies, but they were still talking about the ice-cream flavors other people were buying. So Mom bought them all double-scoop cones, in chocolate and cotton-candy flavors. She asked the girl behind the counter to tell the boys they won them for being the hundredth customers that day. Those kids never even knew that it was my mom who bought them ice cream.
    That story definitely belongs in the scrapbook. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. The other day Sammy and I were in the mall and I was drooling over the bikes, but nobody came up and said, “Here, Josh, this bike’s for you.” I know ice cream is cheaper than bicycles but still, it was a very nice thing to do.
    Interviewing Mr. Smitts took up most of Saturday and Sunday, and I’m not joking. This morning, Sammy and I took the bus to Mom’s office, which is now the crying guy’s office. He didn’t cry this time, or even look like he might cry, so I should stop calling him that. He said I should call him Mitchell. I told him about our scrapbook, and how important it is because Sammy won’t remember Mom when he’s older. Mitchell said he would gather stories from the professors and students who knew Mom. He gave Sammy some highlighters for no good reason. Sam played with them while we were visiting, and Mitchell said he could take them home. Then he looked around and added a pen you can click to change the color of ink from black to red. I thought the pen was pretty cool, and maybe he should have given it to me, since Sammy only knows how to write one letter. But you can’t compete with a four-year-old. I learned that a long time ago.
    I might have been a little ticked off about the pen, because I blurted out the question, “Were you having an affair with our mom?” Mitchell looked surprised. I asked, “Did you put the snake in her car?” He looked even more surprised. He said, “No.”
    Then he said he loved my mom, and he would have asked her to marry him if she wasn’t already married. I told him I didn’t need to hear that. He said my mom loved my dad. I told him they did a lot of dancing in the kitchen. Then I asked, “So who put the snake in her car?” He grimaced like he was having stomach cramps, and he said we may never know.
    Right about then, Sammy started talking to Mom through the Power Ranger, and I said we had to go see our psychiatrist. Mitchell asked, “Can I give you a lift?” I told him we were meeting Dad at his office two blocks away. Mitchell said, “Oh, that’s right.” Like he already knew where Dad worked, which is suspicious.
    I talked to Dr. Tierney about how I’m tired of messing up the laundry—I now have ten socks that don’t match, and my undershirts are pink. I talked about Sammy and how he can’t be weird when school starts or his whole life will be ruined. Dr. Tierney said we shouldn’t be parenting ourselves. I told him it’ll be easier to find another mother than to get Dad to parent us properly. I don’t want another mother, but Sam could use one.
    Last night I found Dad in the basement watching home movies and crying. I didn’t know we had any home movies, so I stayed and watched a few. There were some from before I was born and when I was a baby, and when Sammy was born, and every year of our lives. They didn’t make me cry at all. They made me really happy. We all looked happy in them. Not just one time, but over and over through all the years, we looked happy together. And that’s a really good thing, even if one of us is dead now.
    Before I saw the movies, I thought maybe we weren’t happy together. Or at least maybe Mom wasn’t happy, because she went and died. I thought someone as happy as she was in those movies wouldn’t ram their car into a tree,