Eleven Girls on a Trailer Floor

A hard week at school

On Wednesday, Addison came up to Kaylee in the hallway by the gym.

Kaylee told me about it while I was making supper.

“She asked me why she wasn’t invited to mine,” Kaylee said. “Like I was being mean to her.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ask your mom.”

I turned the burner down under the hamburger and sat across from her.

“That was a hard thing to say,” I told her. “Was it true?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m not going to fuss at you for it. But I want you to remember something. Addison didn’t make that phone call. Her mom did. Addison’s still the same girl who had the same tooth missing as you.”

Kaylee looked over at the picture on the fridge. “I know,” she said. Then she went back to her fractions, and I saw her wipe her nose on her sleeve.

Thirteen feet by fifteen

Our living room is thirteen feet by fifteen. Wednesday night I measured it twice with Ryan’s tape measure, and I drew it on the back of an envelope. A sleeping bag runs about six feet long and two and a half wide.

Two rows of five, heads in the middle, feet to the walls. If the couch went out and the coffee table went into my bedroom, ten girls would fit, with a narrow path down the middle to the hall and the bathroom.

On Thursday, before he left for work, Ryan carried the couch out the front door by himself, end over end, and set it on the porch under the eave. He wrapped it in a blue tarp and tied the tarp down with baling twine in case it rained.

“Couch is on the porch,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. “Tell the girls if anybody needs anything fixed, the man of the house works till eleven thirty.”

My mother, Pat, came over Thursday afternoon in her old Buick with a laundry basket full of every blanket she owns. Quilts, two afghans, a scratchy army blanket that was my granddad’s, and a sleeping bag with cowboys on it that I slept in when I was eight.

Mom cleaned houses in this town for thirty-one years. She knows the inside of half the homes on the lake road, and she has never said one unkind word about any of them. She is seventy, she has bad knees, and she still can’t sit down if there’s a dish in a sink.

“Hanson,” she said, folding the cowboy bag. “Courtney Hanson. What was her name before she married Jeff?”

“I don’t know, Mom. Riggs, I think? Why?”

Mom stopped folding. “Riggs,” she said. “Hm.” And she went back to folding, and she didn’t say anything else about it, and I was too busy to ask.

Kaylee came home from school and stood in the empty living room with her backpack still on.

“Where’s the couch?”

“On the porch,” I said. “We need the floor.”

She looked at the bare carpet for a long time. Then she went to the closet in the hall and got down the big box of Christmas lights, and she spent the next hour standing on a kitchen chair, pushing thumbtacks into the ceiling and stringing white lights all around the room.

When she plugged them in, the whole room glowed. She stood in the middle of it with her hands on her hips.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

It was the first time all week I had seen her stand up straight.