Eleven Girls on a Trailer Floor

The knock

I was making hot chocolate. The real kind, milk on the stove with cocoa and sugar, because it was cold that night, near forty, with a north wind coming across the wheat stubble and rattling the skirting.

I had poured ten mugs and set them on a tray, and I was looking for one more for my mother, when somebody knocked on the front door.

It was nine o’clock exactly. I know because the clock on the stove flipped over right then.

In a trailer court, nobody knocks at nine o’clock on a Friday night unless something is wrong. The music stopped. Ten girls went dead quiet, all at once, the way girls do.

“Mom,” Kaylee whispered from the floor. “Who is that?”

I picked up the tray of hot chocolate, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands, and I stepped over three sleeping bags to get to the door.

Through the front window I could see two people on our steps under the porch light. One of them was a girl in pink flannel pajamas, carrying a rolled-up purple sleeping bag in both arms. The other was a big man in a canvas work coat, holding a pillow.

I set the tray down on the end of the counter and opened the door.

Addison Hanson stood on my top step in her pajamas and a pair of her mother’s slippers, two sizes too big. Her nose was red from the wind. Her eyes were red from something else.

Behind her, Jeff Hanson cleared his throat.

“Evening, Brandi,” he said. “Addison would like to come to the sleepover. If the invitation still stands.”

I didn’t even have to think about it.

“It does,” I said. “Come in out of the cold, honey.”

Addison didn’t come in. She looked past me into that glowing room full of girls, and she found Kaylee, who was up on her knees on her sleeping bag by the window.

“I didn’t know,” Addison said, and her voice cracked right in two. “Kaylee, I swear I didn’t know what she said. I just found out.”

Kaylee got up and came across that room, stepping over everybody, and stopped in the doorway in her socks. For a second neither of them said anything.

Then Kaylee said, “You’re wearing your mom’s slippers.”

“I couldn’t find mine,” Addison said.

And they both started laughing and crying at the same time, and Kaylee took one end of the purple sleeping bag and pulled her inside, and ten girls started talking at once.

“You can have the spot by me,” Kaylee said. “We’ll scoot.”

They scooted. Eleven girls, in a room I’d drawn for ten. It turned out there’s always room for one more if everybody’s willing to sleep a little crooked.

On the porch couch

Jeff didn’t come in. He stood on the steps with his hands in his coat pockets, and I could see he wanted to say something and didn’t know how to start.

So I stepped out and pulled the door almost shut behind me, and I untied one end of Ryan’s tarp, and we sat down on my couch on my own porch in the cold.

“Addison’s been asking all week why Kaylee wasn’t coming,” he said. “Courtney kept telling her Kaylee had other plans. Then tonight, about eight, Addison came and found me in the garage and asked me straight out. She said Kaylee told her to ask her mom.”

“I didn’t know either, Brandi. I swear to you I didn’t. I’d have stopped it. I went in the kitchen and asked Courtney, and she told me. She didn’t lie about it. She just sat down at the island and told me what she said to you.”

“What happened then?”

“I told Addison to go get her sleeping bag.” He let out a long breath. “Courtney didn’t stop us. She stood in the front door with four little girls behind her and watched us back out of the driveway. She didn’t say anything.”

“I’m not proud of my house tonight,” Jeff said. “But I want you to know something, and I’m not making an excuse for her. Courtney isn’t who she sounded like on that phone. There’s something in her about this place. I’ve never gotten all the way to the bottom of it.”

“This place?”

“The court,” he said. “She won’t drive through it. Eighteen years married, and I’ve never once seen her drive down this road.”

He stood up and tied my tarp back the way he found it, which I appreciated.

“I’ll come get her in the morning,” he said. “Whenever you say.”

“Pancakes at eight,” I said. “Come hungry. There’ll be plenty.”