“Listen,” I said. Gently. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I stopped in the hallway. We stood in a spill of light from a window in the little nook between our new apartment and the one next door. It lit Etta up from behind like a halo. Made her look like the chosen one. Like pure light.
“Etta, I have to be honest with you about Molly. She’s gone. And I don’t know how to find her for you. And I don’t know how to find her for me. I just don’t know where she is and there’s really no way to find out. And I’m sorry. But the truth is, I don’t think we’re going to see Molly again.”
“Molly,” she said.
And, this time, she pointed.
I spun around.
There she was at the end of the hall, leaning one shoulder against the flowered wallpaper. Just watching me. As though she might decide to stay or she might decide to run.
“Molly,” I said. It came out breathy. As though I were noting a thing beyond belief.
“What do you mean you need me? What does that even mean? You need me how?”
I felt a little tug at the corners of my mouth. Upward. And it had been a while, I can say that for a fact.
“Why don’t you come in?” I asked her. “And I’ll tell you all about it.”
Instead she took a step backward.
“Why should I come in? I mean . . . what’s in it for me?”
Her voice had moved into full-on defense mode. If she could have donned a suit of armor, I think she might have felt better. And I’m pretty sure she would have done it.
“Well . . . are you hungry? I could order pizza.”
At first, nothing.
Then, in a quiet voice, she asked, “What kind of pizza?”
“What kind of pizza do you like?”
“Anything but pineapple,” she said. And, much to my relief, she took a step in my direction. “Or anchovies,” she added.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Molly: Crazy like Family
I wasn’t really liking how the talking was going and I wasn’t really feeling like she cared about me the way I wanted her to, but I was really liking the pepperoni pizza and I think that’s why I stayed.
We were sitting on the floor because nothing was really set up to be an apartment that somebody lived in yet—just more like a big pile of boxes. There was a couch, but it was covered in more piles of boxes, and it felt like too much trouble to fix that. So we were sitting cross-legged on the carpet, and I was thinking about carpet in general, and how amazing a thing it is when you’re used to concrete and dirt. Funny how you can take a thing like carpet for granted if you’ve always had it and you figure you always will.
The baby was chewing on a piece of crust that she was holding really tight in her amazingly tiny, wonderful little fist. She was so beautiful and sweet that I almost wanted to say yes to what Brooke had asked me—the whole babysitting for free because she couldn’t afford day care thing—even though that plan was obviously everything for them and nothing for me.
I wasn’t expecting Brooke to talk, so when she did I jumped a little.
“So you did go see Denver one more time.”
“No,” I said, thinking she was talking some kind of nonsense. “I’ve never been to Denver in my life.”
“Denver the boy,” she said.
“Oh. Bodhi.”
“Right. Bodhi. I mean, obviously he gave you my new address. When did you go see him?”
For some reason, the question made me nervous. Well, not even the question really, but I think more just talking about Bodhi made me feel weird. It made my stomach stop and think twice about whether it was willing to digest any more pizza.
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “It might’ve been four days ago or it might’ve been five.”
She frowned, but she didn’t say anything. And I don’t really like frowns, so I just kept talking.
“I sort of didn’t want to go see him, because I’m mad at him and he hurt my feelings. And I’m getting tired of doing stuff for people when I know they wouldn’t do that much for me. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t really plan to wait and get an answer on that, but I didn’t know what to say next, so a space came into my talking and she used it to answer me.
“Yeah,” she said, “I think I do. But then you went anyway.”
“I figured a promise is a promise.”
I looked away from my slice of pizza and up at her face, and she was looking at me with this weird look in her eyes, like she’d just found out I was an angel with wings or a superhero or something. It made me nervous, so I looked away again.
“Why did you wait so long to come find me?” she asked.
“Did it seem long?”
“Well, yeah. It seemed like forever. But what I mean is, if you had the address for four or five days . . .”
I set down my pizza slice. There were about two bites left before I hit the crust, which I’d also intended to eat, but the conversation was getting serious again, and it started ruining my appetite.
I snuck a really quick look at her face, but she was staring at me, so I looked away again.
“I wasn’t sure you really cared about me,” I said.
And it was more honest than I meant to be, so it made my face get all hot, so I figured it was turning red, and I knew she could see that. So it was a pretty humiliating moment.
“What changed your mind?” she asked.
It hit me that she was talking to me really quietly and gently, like I was super fragile or something. Like I was one of those blown eggs you make for Easter that’re only the shell and you have to handle them just so. Then
