All We Had by Annie Weatherwax

Author:Annie Weatherwax
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Loss

My mother bolted upright. “What was that?” She had fallen asleep in her lounge chair.

“McDonald’s just got off the power grid,” I said.

Every midnight when they closed, their lights went out, and a loud zap! left a line of french-fry-smelling smoke drifting in the air.

“Oh, thank God,” my mother breathed with a hand across her heart. “It scared me.” Relieved, she lay back down. Then she found her half-finished glass of wine on the ground next to her and took a sip.

“What were we talking about again?” she asked. But neither one of us could remember.

We sighed and looked up.

“It’s so quiet,” she said.

It was creepy how still that summer had become. Some days downtown was so empty you could hear bits of gravel skip along the curb when the breeze kicked up. That night, the day’s traffic had muffled to a barely discernible hum. Even Mother Nature was mute—no warbles or peeps or rustling in the leaves.

The one thing we always heard was the Hansons’ walking sprinkler. It plodded back and forth across their front lawn at a slow and steady pace throughout the day and night. Hank oiled it every week and Dotty fostered it like a mother; if it ever got stuck, she’d nudge it with her walker and set it moving in the right direction. But one evening the sprinkler strayed and Dotty accidentally ran it over on the street.

They had six similar ones gathering dust on a shelf in their store, but they never replaced it. Within a week their lawn was dead, every green shred of it gone.

In the silence of the night, I thought I heard a noise. I turned around.

“The Hansons’ light is on,” I said.

“Maybe they’re awake.”

“They go to bed at eight o’clock.”

“Maybe there’s something really good on TV.”

“They don’t have a TV,” I said.

My mother fished a gnat out of her wineglass and took another gulp. A tree creaked and a chill tickled the air.

“I’m going to peek in their window,” I said.

“You can’t do that, she’ll think you’re a thief and beat you with her walker.”

She had a point, so I sat back down. Dotty was a maniac with that walker. Half the town had been bruised by it.

Nick at Night had been running a Love Boat marathon all week and when my mother realized we were missing it, we went inside. She had always dreamed of taking a cruise, so this show was one of her favorites. But I couldn’t focus.

“What if they’re dead?” I said.

“For Chrissake, Ruthie. All right, stay here.”

She flung the sheet off and bolted out of bed. The back door slammed shut. I got up and watched her through the window. With her hands tucked under her chin, she tiptoed next door like a rabbit. She stood under the Hansons’ window and pricked up an ear to listen, then tiptoed back.

“I hear snoring. Are you happy? My theory,” she continued when we got back into bed, “is that they fell asleep with the light on in those two overstuffed chairs they have.

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