Free Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee by Mary G. Thompson

knuckles curled around his fork and the clip holding back my mom’s now partly gray hair. My mom’s nose, narrow and sharp, and her long eyelashes. The glass of milk Jay left on the table.
    And the taste of my mom’s stew, something I never thought I’d eat again. I hold a bite in my mouth, the savory gravy floating over my tongue.
This
is food.
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    It’s dinnertime, but we’re having cereal.
    It’s about a month after he took us, and I’m never sure if I’ll be allowed to eat. Some days we get three meals, but others we get one, even if we do every single thing he asks. If we screw up, we get nothing. I’ve been careful all day not to doanything to set him off. I’ve answered to the name Chelsea, and I’ve called Dee Stacie.
    I’ve sat quietly unless he tells me to do something.
    I’ve comforted Stacie, but not too much. Never reminded her of home, never said a word about the world outside. It’s better if I say nothing at all.
    Kyle pours cereal for both of us, and I’m so hungry, it’s all I can do to wait until he’s done pouring. We haven’t eaten anything all day, but he has. He had canned soup that he heated on the stove, right in front of us, just a few feet away. We smelled it, and Stacie gripped my hand, and we stayed quiet.
    The cereal is dry and bland, but we eat it. Taste means nothing when you’re hungry. There isn’t much that means anything then.
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    As I savor my mom’s stew, I think about the food we had later, what Kyle bought when he finally went to town for groceries. Eggs, milk, whole-wheat pasta, cheap meat. I cooked it well enough so we could eat it and keep going another day. After the girls were born, it started to taste better, even though I didn’t do anything different.
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    Lee calls, but I tell Mom to say I’ll call her back. I like her, and I missed her, too, and I know she’s trying to help me, but I’m not ready to see her again. I want to go to the mall again and to other places with people, but not yet. For now, I need tobe with these three people, these people who cared so much about me that they broke apart.
    Jay goes out during the day. He grabs his bike and rides off the first chance he gets. Mom has taken leave from the post office, where it turns out she works full-time now, so the three of us are at home together.
    Dad drives me to the lake, and we go to the far side, away from the area where there are a lot of people, and sit at the edge of the water in the summer sun. He knows he shouldn’t take me to the river where Kyle found us, but he also knows I like the water, that I need it. I don’t know how he knows this. Maybe it’s because I got that from him. We sit at the edge of the lake and talk about things that wouldn’t mean much, if you were normal. But to me, they mean everything.
    He took over a friend’s business in Boulder, and they have twenty-five employees.
    Beth needed her kitchen renovated, and when she came into his office, Liam ran away from her and jumped into Dad’s lap.
    They live in a two-story house with a garage and a basement and a backyard shed.
    Bea drew with crayons all over the family room wall, and they couldn’t bear to paint over it, so now it’s the wall everyone’s allowed to draw on.
    Dad has to watch his sugar because he’s prediabetic.
    There are sailboats on the lake, and I watch them float around the water as I listen. There isn’t much I can tell him in return, but he lets me be silent. The best parts are when we’resilent together, when a burst of talking is over and we look out at the sailboats.
    I think about the times we used to come here as a whole extended family, Mom, Dad, me, Jay, Aunt Hannah, Dee, and Lee. We’d go to the other side of the lake, where there was