Free Follow Me by Joanna Scott Page A

December, she took down the box and counted the money again. This time she counted four thousand three hundred
     and seventy dollars. She recounted the bills, just to make sure, and came up with the same sum she’d counted the first time
     — thirty dollars less than what she’d just counted. Did she count correctly the first time, or this time?
    She pondered the mystery for so long that she still had the box open on the table when she heard the truck coming up the drive.
    She hurriedly returned the box to the shelf and was in her room by the time Uncle Mason and his brother came into the house.
     Through the closed door she tried to hear what they were saying, but they kept their voices low. Later, after Swill had gone,
     she emerged from her room and headed to the kitchen, passing Uncle Mason in the hall, meeting his gaze for a moment, returning
     his nod and wondering about the expression in his eyes, as black as lake water and too deep to see to the bottom.
    A few weeks later, when she was alone in the house, she opened the box and counted the money. Twenty dollars had been added
     since the last time she’d looked. But the following week, she counted the money and came up with a different sum, thirty dollars
     less. From one week to the next, over the course of several months, she never came up with the same amount twice. She didn’t
     believe that the amount was changing. Rather, she was aware of a strange influence in the air that made her mix up her numbers
     when she was trying to count.
    How had her life gotten so complicated? In the early days working as Mason Jackson’s housekeeper in Fishkill Notch, she’d
     been given the opportunity to start afresh, free of judgment, if not exactly blameless. She had worn clothes as unadorned
     as the furniture in Uncle Mason’s house. She’d cooked and cleaned. She’d swept wood curls from the floor. On Sundays she’d
     pumped the pedals of the player piano and taught herself to sing.She’d learned to type. And she had even started imagining
     that she would make things right: one day she would return home and get her baby boy and show him that she wasn’t as bad as
     she’d been made out to be.
    Then she’d found Mason Jackson’s box. And it wasn’t long after that she started to think up new ways to count money.
    Brooms and kitchen pots, music, friends, beehive hairdos and picture shows. It would all have been manageable without that
     box on the shelf. If only she hadn’t found that box. The effect of it was like a strong wind that had blown through the window
     and turned the pages of the book she was reading, if she’d ever bothered to read a book. She’d lost her place and didn’t know
     what was going on or who was who — Georgie, little Stevie, Swill, Gladdy Toffit, Erna, and the mysterious Mason Jackson. And
     what about all the earlier chapters? Why didn’t they matter anymore?
    She tried to look in the mirror on the medicine cabinet to see herself, to make sure she was still there — the same Sally
     Werner she remembered — but the glass was all steamed up from her bath. She used her hand to wipe away the steam, and just
     when she thought she’d see what she expected to see, the door to the cabinet popped open, and her reflection set out walking
     away.
    Did that make sense?
    No.
    Where was she?
    Floors to sweep, songs to sing, and there she was making twenty-five dollars a week for doing hardly nothing. Anything! How
     could she make a slip like that?
    It was easy to slip in Fishkill Notch. The very ground was tilted beneath the tilted floors. She’d slipped all the way down
     Thistle Mountain — slipped and spread and flowed on her way elsewhere, until the current hit the dam that was Uncle Mason’s
     house.
    It all should have been so simple. She was a housekeeper for a nice old man with good manners. He’d never reprimanded her,
     not once. And he’d never been inappropriate. He was a good man with a sad story that he didn’t