Don't You Cry by Mary Kubica

Author:Mary Kubica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2016-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

WEDNESDAY

Alex

I wake up earlier than usual and bike to the only twenty-four-hour grocery store in town. There’s hardly a scrap of food in Pops’s and my refrigerator, and what’s there is likely expired or is growing green with mold. It’s a three-mile trip in either direction, and so I bike there and cart home a dozen eggs, a carton of milk, shredded cheese and fruit in a plastic sack that dangles from the bike’s handlebars. There’s not much fresh fruit in season this time of year, but I get a couple of apples and a bunch of red grapes. It’ll have to do.

Back in Pops’s and my kitchen, I start washing the fruit and scrambling the eggs. I add the milk and cheese to the eggs, the way Pops likes them, and some salt and pepper, too. The house begins to fill with a smell of homemade food, but even that doesn’t wake Pops, sound asleep, the door to his bedroom pulled to. I sift through our dishes to find a plate that isn’t cracked or chipped, and begin placing the prepared food here and there, a mound of eggs, a handful of grapes. When I’m through, the plate looks vacant still—empty and sad, a bit pathetic—and I know that I should have gotten more: toast, a bagel, sausage links. Something along those lines, but I didn’t. Oh, well. I pour a glass of milk, and then second-guess it all and think that I should have gotten juice. Or coffee. Or cereal. On a whim I snatch a Mountain Dew from the fridge, just in case. You never know what it is that she likes to drink with her eggs.

And then I load it into my arms, head out the front door and cross the street. I also leave Pops a plate.

She’s still asleep when I come in, but the sound of my footsteps draws her from sleep. That or the smell of eggs. She sits up slowly in her makeshift bed as only an old lady would do, the stretching of body parts—arms and legs and such—as if it hurts, the bones and muscles being thrust back into place, the reviving of limbs that have gone senseless and numb.

“Good morning,” I say, maybe too spiritedly, and she says to me, “Good morning.”

Her words are gruff, her voice still sluggish and dopey, but I smile, anyway.

I’m just glad that she’s still here.

I thought about it half the night, about the fruit and the eggs and whether or not I’d find the house abandoned when I returned come morning. I considered the possibility that she’d be out, wandering the streets of town, or that maybe she’d have boarded the Pere Marquette and headed far away from here. But here she is, in the flesh, her hair a jumble of bedhead, creases on her pale skin. She wears my sweatshirt still, the hood pulled up over her head. The minute I arrive she attempts to shimmy out of it—as if that’s the reason I came—but I say to her, “No.

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