“Celebrate?”
Mom nodded and ruffled my dark blond locks. They were long overdue for a trim. I’d planned on getting a haircut during spring break, but by then the salons were closed. Dad very helpfully volunteered to lop it all off with his clippers.
Um, thanks, no.
I’d taken to wearing it in a giant topknot instead.
“We made it here,” she explained. “There were a lot of moments we didn’t think it would happen. But we did. And that’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” I ran my finger along the red curtains. They really were terrible.
I wanted to say more, but a burly mover stepped into the room, his arms impossibly laden down with boxes marked MILLIE.
“We’ll think up something fun,” she said. “I promise.”
—
“I’ve never hurt so much in my entire life,” I said hours later, collapsing onto the rug.
The movers had left and for the first time, it was just the three of us in the house. It was simultaneously too quiet yet alive with a host of unfamiliar sounds. The old wooden floorboards squeaked and something in the basement Dad called a sump pump kept issuing unexpected and startling thuds. We hadn’t had a basement in our old house and the one here was full of spiderwebs and weird shadows.
It felt like that calm before the storm in any horror movie. The happy family moves into a new-to-them-but-still-very-old house, and things are good but night falls and then…
I paused, waiting for something weird to happen.
A box mysteriously toppling over.
A flock of birds flying into the window.
Blood seeping down the staircase.
Nothing stirred and I begrudgingly rolled over.
Mom lay sprawled across the couch, her feet propped on too many throw pillows. She was rubbing at her temples as if warding off a headache. Dad was on the floor beside me, trying to stretch out a kink in his back.
“What a day,” he said, wincing as his spine cracked. “That’s better. What are we doing for dinner, Molly?”
“There’s nothing in the fridge,” Mom said, opening her eyes. “We’ll have to go grocery shopping tomorrow.” She paused, self-correcting. “We’ll have to place an order for groceries tomorrow.”
“Think they’ll deliver, all the way out here?”
“We’ll see. Why don’t we order in tonight?” She pulled out her phone, fiddling with it for a second before frowning. “I don’t have any data, do you?”
None of us did.
Or reception.
This explained a lot.
My phone had been unnaturally quiet all day. I’d worried my friends in Memphis had already forgotten about me, but maybe there was a whole slew of messages waiting for me, they just couldn’t deliver.
“Maybe a neighbor has open Wi-Fi?” I swiped hopefully through my settings.
“What neighbors?” Dad asked as the available networks list came up completely blank.
I stared at it uneasily. This was it. This was where all the scary movie stuff would start happening and there would be no way to call for help. “What…what do we do now?”
Mom pushed herself off the couch. “I think I saw an actual phone book someplace.”
“What good will that do? There’s no network.”
Her laugh carried across the hall. “There’s a landline in the kitchen.”
I’d noticed the olive green phone on the wall when we’d first walked through the house. It was one of those old rotary ones with the round plate you swung in a circle to enter the numbers and a spiral cord that hung almost all the way to the floor.
“Does it actually work?” I asked, trailing after her curiously.
Mom laughed again, her amusement tinkling through the house and almost making it feel like home. She pulled a surprisingly slim yellow pages from a cabinet drawer and blew off a layer of dust.
“Mom, that thing has to be a decade old.”
She flipped through the sections, undeterred.
“Looks like our choices are pizza or…pizza.”
“Pizza it is,” I said, leaning against her shoulder to read the ads.
“Which sounds better—Big Mike’s Pizza Haven or Slice of Bliss?”
“Bliss me, baby,” Dad voted, groaning as he flipped over. “I feel like Big Mike has already done a number on me today.”
Mom reached for the phone before pausing and pulling out her trusty roll of disinfecting wipes. She’d been carrying them around the house all day, wiping down handles and cabinet doors. She cleaned off the handset, then began dialing. I liked the clicking stutter of the numbers rolling back.
“Hi, we’re new to the area and wondered if you deliver out to the west side of town…we’re on Milner Avenue?” She recited the address and listened for a long moment to his response. “Perfect! We’d like to order a large pepperoni and mushroom. And—we weren’t able to check online—do you have any salads?…Great! The Garden Melody, family-sized.”
From the living room, Dad groaned. I curled the cord around one finger, watching as my skin turned purple, then white.
“And garlic knots, if you have them.”
He cheered.
“Better make that a double order,” she said, rolling her eyes at me with a grin.
“Okay…yes…Cash. That’s perfect….Thanks! We’ll see you soon.” She hung up the phone with a victorious click. “Here in thirty. Apparently they’re not far. Just down Davis Way,” she said, joining Dad on the floor. “Oh. This was a mistake. Throw me a pillow, Millie? Or twelve?”
I tossed a pair at her.
“So…” I waited till she and Dad were situated comfortably, listening to the seconds tick by, marked by the grandfather clock in the hall. “Tomorrow…Big day.”
They were both due at the hospital lab at nine on the dot, leaving me here to start making headway on all of the house stuff. It had sounded terribly impressive at first—I would be the one deciding where everything went, creating order from the chaos.
Now, looking around, it just felt like a lot of work.
“Big day,” Dad agreed. “Look, Mills—I know it feels like we’re leaving you in the lurch…”
I scanned the wall of boxes waiting to be unpacked. “It is
