Like Family by Paula McLain Page A

crying. Keith went into his room and didn’t come out. Vera made tea and then forgot to drink it, the water
     turning bitter and dark around the floating bag. At some point, Granny went to identify Deedee’s body, which was found naked
     on the lawn of a church at five o’clock that morning. Drug overdose, the police said, though Vera insisted it was murder.
     Deedee had gone out the night before, late, after money she was owed by a friend. She was broke, she said, and wanted to buy
     the kids Easter baskets. She would see this friend, do her shopping and be back. Vera said it was murder because the friend
     didn’t give Deedee the money she needed for the baskets; he gave her drugs instead. Heroin. And no, it wasn’t the first time
     she had done it, but maybe she was trying to change her life. Maybe this would have been the time for that, this Easter, those
     baskets for the kids.
    Vera wouldn’t let it go. Over and over she told us what Deedee had said the night before, what she was wearing, how clean
     she looked and sober. Granny let Vera talk, but I could tell she didn’t agree. She had of Deedee the same opinion she had
     of our mother: both of them were far too willing to please themselves, regardless of the cost. Some folks could turn over
     a new leaf, sure, but others just had one leaf, one color, and that was
trouble.
    I knew Granny believed that Deedee had turned our mother on to drugs. In coffee klatches with a few of the more forbidding
     mother hens at the Gospel Lighthouse, I had heard Granny use the word
hooked,
which for some reason made me think of a werewolf — a vaudeville werewolf with one furry paw around Mom’s neck instead of
     a cane, as he dragged her offstage and into the woods to do dope-fiend things. When we were with her, there were no woods,
     but I do recall waking up in the back of the car in the middle of the night, alone but for my sleeping sisters: Teresa stretched
     out beside me on the bench seat, her face gone in the dent of her pillow, Penny down on the floorboards like a little ball
     of flannel and hair. We were parked in the driveway of a strange house with a porch light so blue and bright it gave even
     the mailbox and line of trees a radioactive glow. Our mother must have been inside, but there was nothing to do but waft for
     her to remember us.
    As Vera talked over her cold tea and Granny nodded, holding her tongue, I was stuck on two things. The first was what the
     preacher must have seen when he headed out, at first light, to post the title and times of the sermon on the bulletin board.
     It was cold and so early. Deedee’s body must have been white and ice cold, covered with dew. The second was a certainty flat
     as a table that if our mom hadn’t gotten into Roger’s car that day, it could have been
her
on the lawn, her with the tracks up her arm and her photo in the paper for everyone to cluck at,
What a shame.
    For the funeral, we dressed up again in our Easter clothes. Tanya sat in a huddle on Vera’s lap, but I couldn’t tell if she
     was sleeping or not. Keith was crying, still or again, and we were too. My sisters and I sat around him on the bench. If we
     had piled right on him, we wouldn’t have been close enough. The organ started up with a slow version of “What a Friend We
     Have in Jesus,” but it was just so much droning to me. I had my mind on my mother, trying to picture where she might be —
     in a car, a desert motel, a windowless bar with football noises and a stranger next to her saying,
What’s your name again, honey?
    That’s it
, I thought,
that’s where she is,
and I sent her a telepathic message:
Stay gone.
    Mrs. Clapp came to pick us up at Granny’s after supper. It didn’t feel right to go, but it was a Wednesday night and we’d
     already missed enough school. The radio was on when we got into the Cadillac, and it hit me that something had seriously changed.
     Because of Deedee, I knew about people dying. I listened for