Free Nightmare by Bonnie Bryant Page B

got caught up in something at Stevie’s house.”
    She ran upstairs and put her things in her borrowed room. She washed her hands quickly and then went downstairs as fast as she could. Lisa and her parents had started eating already. Mr. Atwood paused to serve up a plate for Carole.
    “I really am sorry,” she said, slipping into her chair.
    “That’s all right, Carole. We understand,” said Mrs. Atwood. “But we do eat at seven-thirty, so perhaps it would be a good idea for you to make a note of that in the future. You shouldn’t have to rush so before dinner. It’s not good for the digestion, you know.”
    Carole gulped. On the one hand, Mrs. Atwood sounded very kind, as if she wasn’t at all annoyed and really did understand that Carole hadn’t meant to be late. On the other hand, Carole
was
late. She’d kept them waiting, and they’d finally gone ahead and eaten without her. Anxiety swept through her. She wanted to be a good guest. She wanted to be welcome. She
was
a good guest, she
was
welcome, but she’d made a mistake and it seemed very difficult to gauge exactly how serious it was. Everybody smiled. At least Mr. and Mrs. Atwood smiled a little. Lisa smiled a lot and continued talking to her parents about the work she’d done on her paper that afternoon. What did the little smiles from Lisa’s parents mean? Would it have been easier on her if they’d been obviously annoyed? When her own father was annoyed with her, Carole always knew it. It was easy to tell with him because he said it right out. With the Atwoods, it wasn’t so simple. The result was that even if they weren’t annoyed with her, she felt as if they were, and that made her more uncomfortable than she would have been if they clearly had been annoyed. Life was complicated when your father was thousands of milesaway, gone for an unspecified time to an unknown place!
    Carole took the dinner plate, thanking Mr. Atwood as she did so, and set it down in front of her. It was a piece of baked chicken, some rice and peas. It was a very normal dinner, the kind of thing she and her father often ate, but it was still different. It wasn’t that it was bad. Mrs. Atwood was a good cook and Carole had always enjoyed everything she’d eaten at Lisa’s house. It was more that it was different. “Different” wasn’t what Carole wished she had right then. What she wanted instead was exactly what she almost always had at dinnertime: her father. She wanted to taste his crispy baked chicken, cooked with what he called his special secret seasonings. (Near as Carole could tell, that meant salt and pepper.)
    Just thinking about the nice glow of informal warmth that always radiated through their kitchen when they ate dinner together made Carole’s appetite disappear.
    “I hope you like the chicken, Carole,” Mrs. Atwood said. “It’s a new recipe for me. I had something like it at the Bradley girl’s wedding a few weeks ago, and I thought it was so good, I just had to try to figure out what they’d put on it. I think maybe it could use a little more tarragon.”
    Carole tried to smile. It wasn’t easy when she was feeling so homesick for something as simple as her dad’s baked chicken. “Oh, I’m sure this is delicious,” Carolesaid. She picked up her knife and fork and took a bite of her dinner. “Very good,” she said, but then she set down her fork.
    “I know it’s always hard when there’s a change in routine,” Mrs. Atwood said warmly. Carole understood that Mrs. Atwood was just trying to reassure her. It wasn’t working, though. What she felt was lonely, even in this room filled with people she normally liked a lot.
    “Oh, Carole,” Mr. Atwood said. “I almost forgot to tell you. You had another call from Sergeant Fowler. It seems she had your father on the other line, and she wanted to connect the two of you up so that you could speak to him.”
    Speak? She could have talked with her dad when she’d been so busy scrolling through