Free The Rose Thieves by Heidi Jon Schmidt Page B

forgotten. Grace in her sleepsuit pointed to a blinking jet, but Pop had ruler and compass to show where the star must emerge.
    â€œThree minutes,” he said, “two and a half.”
    The peonies glowed in the garden. Kate didn’t remember the comet, only the flowers, when she woke in her bed the next morning. Someone must have carried her in.
    *   *   *
    She expects grapefruit for breakfast, as if grapefruits grew on the trees outside the kitchen window, weighing them down. Pop, unrolling his nautical charts at the table, had prophesied such things. But there is no grapefruit, nor bread, nor even coffee. Leaks have buckled the oak floorboards in a high ridge the length of the room, and Kate trips, though she means to step over. In the sink are three cups and one tea bag, which she steeps and squeezes to a pale brew, carrying her cup to the lawn. Solitude was always the real luxury here.
    Shouts, clattering, laughter, and something comes bumping down the flagstone path, pursued by Audie and Grace and their two shaggy, prancing dogs. It is a wheel come loose from the pony cart, and when the path turns in front of the house, it continues straight along to Kate and thuds down. Audie, breathless, flops beside it while the dogs set upon Kate, licking her, sniffing her, spilling her tea.
    â€œGo away!” She strikes blindly, in a flash of rage, and the blow shames her. Both dogs go yelping, one in pain, one in fear.
    â€œWhat’s the matter with you?” Grace is standing above her, more confused than aggrieved.
    â€œI’m covered with tea.”
    â€œWe’ve been working for two hours…” Grace’s voice thins in plaintive anger: What’s wrong with everyone? Why doesn’t Kate just pitch in?
    â€œI was asleep,” Kate says. Let them pack. This isn’t her home anymore. These kitchen plays grow ever more reckless, but soon Ma will be back, the mortgage will miraculously be paid. They’d be luckier if they really could leave.
    â€œPop needs us,” Grace says. “How could Ma go now? She says it’s all Pop’s fault.” She gives a little, stifled cry—this tangle of injustice will not yield. “She took Chucky, and she wanted me to go too and just leave Pop alone.”
    Audie will go home to her husband, and Kate is long, long gone. Grace is the only one left.
    Grace sees their silence as censure. “Pop doesn’t have anyone at all. She shouldn’t have gone. And she shouldn’t have taken his car.” She gives a hopeless glance at the Jeep, the enormous old getaway car, which does seem a droll excess, rusty at its edges but still a brilliant emerald-green. The contents of the linen closet have filled it completely; the frayed tires compress beneath their load.
    â€œWe’re renting a U-Haul,” says Audie. “Forty dollars a day and five hundred miles free.”
    â€œFive hundred miles? Where’s he going?” Kate asks. And where is she going? They all just assume she has plans.
    Audie, from the habit of forbearance, has become the very Dr. Johnson of gesture: her face purses with worry and amusement while her hands fly out to the winds.
    â€œHe doesn’t know,” Grace says. “We should all be together now. It’s not fair.” She covers her face, which is suddenly distorted by tears. It’s not long since she swore she’d never leave her mother, even for school. “I don’t mean…” she goes on. She takes a deep breath, reining herself in, kneeling down between the two dogs, who have settled a safe distance from Kate. “I know Ma’s upset. We all are.”
    Kate tests herself for upset, but it’s as if she’s only watching. “I am imperturbable,” she thinks. Her education will act as a shield. This is just a loss, after all, like other losses. They don’t even have to look beyond these fifty acres to find sorrows greater