The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

Author:Melissa DeCarlo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

I wrap ice cubes in a wet towel and hand it to Karleen where she sits at the kitchen table. Pressing the bundle gingerly to her swollen face, she asks, “Is beer the only option?”

“As far as I know.” I open the fridge, hoping that Tawny didn’t drink the only one. The bright emptiness reminds me that I left all my groceries over at Father Barnes’s house.

“Crap,” I say.

“Not even beer?”

“I don’t know. Hang on.” Although there’s nothing in here that I want to be in here—like food—when I open the crisper drawer three bottles of Budweiser roll forward stopping at the front of the drawer with a clank. “Found it,” I say.

I turn to hand the bottle to Karleen, but she’s no longer at the table. “Never mind,” she calls out from the other room. “I just remembered something.”

I go in the living room and find her climbing the stairs. I follow her up. When we get to my mother’s bedroom, she stops at the doorway. “Wow,” she says. “The land that time forgot.” She stands there, holding on to the doorjamb, staring at my mother’s room, and then she crosses to the window and opens it a crack. Immediately a cool night breeze pushes into the room and dilutes the thick staleness.

Karleen pauses to look at the conch shell on the nightstand. She lifts it carefully and carries it to the dresser, and then scoots the nightstand away from the bed, grabs the corner of the mattress and starts tugging.

“Help me with this.”

When we get the mattress pulled halfway off the bed, Karleen crawls up over it to the far corner and plunges her hand into a slit in the box springs. She pulls out a large Crown Royal bag. Turning around, she opens the drawstring and dumps the contents. A handful of photo negatives slide out followed by a baggie.

“Bingo,” Karleen says, handing me the baggie. Inside is a handful of grayish-brown dust and some loose rolling papers.

Surprised, I laugh. “Are you kidding? I’m not smoking this moldy old shake.”

She plucks it from my hands and leaves the room saying, “More for me.”

I turn off the light, but before I go back downstairs, I pause and look around the bedroom. A cool breeze sucks the curtains against the screen and then pushes them back toward me. From somewhere in the distance I hear a few notes of music . . . I listen more closely—something classical, but I can’t make out the melody. I shiver although the breeze isn’t cold, and feel a faint prickle of . . . what? Apprehension, perhaps?

From somewhere downstairs, I hear Karleen call for me, so I shake off my strange mood and go down to find her. I’m imagining things. There’s nothing wrong. I’m sure I just left the light on and didn’t shut the gate firmly enough.

Karleen is seated at the kitchen table with the baggie open in front of her.

“This is harder than I remember,” she says. She’s struggling to roll a joint.

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