The Right Thing by Amy Conner Page A

steadily worse, my joints aching in time with my throbbing head. I shivered under the long, grubby pink cardigan Starr gave me to wear over my shorts and sleeveless shirt. Like the rest of the few, tired clothes in the closet, it had been left behind when her mother had fled the house.
    And so I sat at the kitchen table, trying to swallow past the burning lump in my throat, racked with the chills of a high fever, while I watched Starr drag pots and a bag of potatoes out from under the sink. Her straggling blond curls tied up in an old scarf, she got a pound of ground meat, an egg, and a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. She was making mashed potatoes, Starr said, and a meatloaf with ketchup on top. In spite of my body’s increasing wretchedness, I stirred the instant butterscotch pudding for dessert, and it felt good, knowing I couldn’t get into trouble there.
    Too soon, according to the clock on the stove, Mr. Dukes’s dinner was ready and it was time for me to go home. In the gray light of the fading day, Starr walked with me next door, across the Allens’ sloping lawn, down to the fence dividing their property and our backyard. I tried to climb over the wire, but my legs crumpled like Play-Doh and refused to do their job. No matter how urgently Starr pushed my bottom upward, I couldn’t get to the top of the fence, much less climb over it. Yellow rectangles of light from my house shone through the sunporch windows down across the lawn. I could see the large, white-uniformed figure of Methyl Ivory passing like a ship of state in the center hall between the kitchen and the living room, and falling to my knees, I rolled into a miserable ball on the ground.
    Starr knelt next to me in the cold grass. Her face was pinched and nervous in the gathering dark. “Annie,” she said. She shook my shoulder. “Hey. Get up. You can’t lay here. I got to get home—it’s almost time for my poppa to come back.” I couldn’t answer her around the blaze of pain in my throat.
    â€œWait.” Limber as a cat, Starr scaled the fence, landing with a soft thud on the other side, in my backyard. “I’ll be right back, okay?” The whisper of her bare feet running across the lawn faded into the chill dusk, and the slow rumble of occasional cars over on Gray Street, crickets, the call of a night bird, and the rasp of my own hot breath kept me company instead. The stars came out, one by one. I slept, I think, at last.
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    Later I woke in my own bed, in my pajamas. In the soft glow of the lamp, my mother and father were sitting on the edge of the mattress. My daddy had his stethoscope around his neck, and my mother’s lovely face wore a worried frown.
    â€œI’m sorry.” That’s what I tried to say, but my throat was a hot hornet’s nest. My mother reached across my father and took my hand in hers. Her fingers were cool, soft, and fragrant with Pond’s hand cream.
    â€œShh,” she said. “Don’t try to talk, Annie. You’re sick.” Her fingertips touched my cheek. “Poor thing, I remember when I had the mumps. It was awful.”
    Daddy smiled down at me. “Now take this paregoric. It’ll help with that sore throat.” Paregoric was nasty stuff, but I was too sick to put up much of a fight. The bitter, banana-flavored thickness slid past my lips, and within minutes, I felt the tidal pull of the liquid’s narcotic undertow. Kissing me good night, my parents turned off the lamp by my bedside, leaving the door cracked open to the bright light in the hall outside.
    It was a severe case of the mumps, and all day Sunday I slept, except for one memorable trip to the bathroom where my swollen face in the mirror looked nothing like my grandmother’s. Monday morning Methyl Ivory came huffing upstairs with a glass of ginger ale for breakfast, all I was up to swallowing. I halfway sat up in the bed, feeling like I was going to