Eleven Girls on a Trailer Floor

The rolls had gone in the oven at twelve thirty. The whole trailer filled up with the smell of cinnamon and butter, so thick you could have stood a spoon in it.

Mom stirred powdered sugar and milk and a little vanilla in a cereal bowl for the icing. When she pulled the pans out, the rolls had risen up tall and golden and crowded against each other, and Kaylee and Addison’s two rolls had baked into one, just like Kaylee said.

Every girl iced her own. Ryan ate two standing up at the counter, the way he always does, and said they were better than the ones at the bakery, and my mother pretended not to be pleased.

Around one in the morning, they started to fade. One by one they crawled back into their sleeping bags, sticky-fingered and sleepy. Hailey fell asleep with half a cinnamon roll on a napkin on her chest.

Kaylee and Addison fell asleep in the same spot by the window, their heads touching. Kaylee had her arm thrown over Addison like she was making sure she didn’t get away again.

My mother came up beside me with her coat on and her purse over her arm. She looked at the two of them for a long time.

“That,” she said, very quietly, “is what you do with a closed door.”

She kissed my cheek and went out to her Buick. I watched her taillights go around the gravel loop. She drove slowly past the lots on the far end of the row and, I noticed, she almost stopped in front of one of them. Then she went on.

Donuts at the kitchen table

At five minutes to eight the next morning, I was flipping pancakes on the griddle, eleven girls were in various stages of waking up on my living room floor, and somebody knocked again.

It wasn’t Jeff. It was Courtney.

She was standing on my steps in a good wool coat, holding two dozen donuts from the Casey’s in a pair of white boxes. She had makeup on, but her eyes were red underneath it, and she looked like she hadn’t slept any more than I had on Sunday night.

“Hi, Brandi,” she said. “Jeff said pancakes at eight. I brought donuts. I didn’t know what else to bring.”

I looked at her for a second. I thought about Kaylee face down in that pillow, holding the afghan away so she wouldn’t get it wet.

Then I thought about Mrs. Arnold’s mother, and her bread, and her door.

“Come in,” I said. “Watch your step, there’s girls on the floor.”

She came in. She stepped very carefully between the sleeping bags in her good shoes. Some of the girls said, “Hi, Mrs. Hanson.” Addison sat up in her sleeping bag and just looked at her mother, and Courtney looked back at her and nodded a little, like they’d already said what they needed to in the car.

I poured her a cup of coffee and she sat down at my kitchen table, the one still dusted with flour from midnight. She set the donut boxes in the middle of it.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked. “Before the girls come in.”

I turned the griddle down and sat across from her.

“I grew up here,” she said.

I didn’t understand her at first. “In town?”

“Here,” she said. “In Cottonwood Court. Lot 17. My mom and me. Riggs. From the time I was four until the summer I graduated.”