“Mom?” she called out in a sleep-hoarse voice.
“Doing laundry,” came her mother’s voice, up from the basement.
Abby was relieved not to hear any condemnation in it, no hint of, “Boy, are you in trouble when I get up there, young lady.” She could hear sounds and low voices from her dad’s medical office, meaning he was working in there this morning. When he didn’t come storming out to confront her, either, she figured they’d gotten away with it.
Gotten away with nothing, she thought, ruefully.
Mitch would probably sleep in even later than she had, Abby thought, as she pulled out butter and raspberry jam, and he deserved to. She unscrewed the top on the jar of jam, ran a forefinger around the outer edge of it, and then licked off the tangy, seedy overflow. She hoped he hadn’t gotten caught sneaking home. She didn’t envy anybody who had to convince the judge of a false story. It was his profession to be able to winnow truth/wheat from lies/chaff, and it would be especially easy with Mitch.
Around the time that her toast was about to pop up and the room was filling with the warm, yeasty aroma of homemade bread, Abby got the delightful idea of getting dressed and stomping into Mitch’s house and waking him up. If Nadine would let her into his bedroom, she could jump on him and surprise him awake. He’d hate it for about two seconds, until he saw who it was who was straddling him and tickling him.
Abby left the toast where it was in the toaster.
She ran upstairs, got dressed in warm layers of clothes, then raced back down to find her tallest, warmest boots and to toss on all the other layers of protection that made living in Kansas such a drag in the wintertime. She told herself that if she lived on a Caribbean island, she wouldn’t get any snow days. But maybe she’d get hurricane days-
Abby felt goofy with the sheer pleasure of being sprung free for a day.
She flung open the front door.
God, what a gorgeous day!
The sun was so bright, reflecting off the snow, that she almost ran back into the house for sunglasses. Squinting hard against the glare at first, she barely noticed the presence of the sheriff’s car in her driveway. But it was just Nathan Shellenberger, Rex’s dad, her own dad’s lifelong friend, no big deal. Abby was accustomed to all of the town’s families running in and out of one another’s homes. She didn’t give it a second thought.
It wasn’t even all that cold, really. By the time she had high-stepped the length of two front yards, and waved at neighbors who were shoveling, she was so hot she pulled her wool cap off her head and stuck it in her coat pocket.
Abby shook her hair loose, reveling in the crisp feel of fresh air, clean hair, being sixteen.
Yeah, she was disappointed they hadn’t been able to go through with what she’d planned the night before, but it wasn’t like it was the only chance they’d ever get. It had just felt that way to her in the middle of the night when any bad news seems worse that it really is. She certainly wasn’t mad at Mitch about it. It wasn’t his fault that her dad got an emergency call last night. Probably some woman delivering a baby and unable to make it through the storm to the hospital in Emporia. Abby hoped everything had turned out all right. Her dad hadn’t been downstairs very long, and he hadn’t called her mother down to help him make a delivery, so maybe the patient didn’t make it in, after all. No, wait, there’d been the headlights and the noise of a truck in the driveway-
Abby shook off those thoughts, hoping for the best for everybody.
It scared her and made her giggle, all at the same time, at the thought of Mitch hearing her dad coming, panicking, and sneaking out of the house. He must have frozen!
Damn, why did the Newquists have to have the world’s longest driveway?
By the time she had trudged all the way up, she had also peeled off her gloves, and unbuttoned her coat to let the sides flap free. When she reached the big front door, she rang the doorbell. Any other house in town, she could just walk on in, but not here. Nadine had heard too many crime stories from the judge. She believed there was a burglar around every bush and a rapist hiding in every backseat. Abby’s own mother constantly kidded Nadine about it, but that never did any good. Year after year, there was some new security device added to the Newquists’ house-a dead bolt, a chain, one year a security system (in Small Plains!). This past year, they had adopted a dog that barked so much they’d finally had to get rid of it before one of the neighbors got fed up and shot it.
“Abby,” Nadine Newquist said, upon opening the door. She looked her usual elegant, unwelcoming self, Abby thought, only more so, if that was possible. How such a cold fish had given birth to a sweetie like Mitch was more than most people had ever been able to fathom. But she’d known the woman forever, eaten grilled cheese sandwiches in her kitchen, drunk lemonade in her yard, and so she made her usual effort to treat Nadine Newquist just like she treated every other adult in town, courteously and cheerfully.
“Hi, Mrs. Newquist! Can you believe all this snow! Is Mitch awake yet?”
“Mitch is not here, Abby.”
“He’s not? He’s up already? Where’d he go?”
“He drove off this morning with his father.”
Abby laughed, thinking his mom was joking. But when she didn’t also laugh, Abby said, “They really did? This morning? Where’d they go?”
Nadine Newquist looked into Abby’s eyes for a long moment, and then she said, “The judge took Mitch out of town, Abby. We’re sending him away. He won’t be graduating with his class. We’re enrolling him somewhere else. He’s not coming back.”
“What?”
Abby blinked, not sure she’d heard the words she’d heard. They’d come so fast. There was so much weird impossible information in them. She couldn’t grasp them. They slid out of her brain. Nadine was going to have to start all over and say them all again, slowly. That way, the words would turn out to be something completely different from what Abby was afraid she’d heard, words that nobody could ever possibly have said to her.
“What?” Abby asked, again.
Her mouth had gone dry, her heart was pounding.
“As you know better than I do, Abigail, my son came home very late last night from your house, when he wasn’t supposed to be there. He lied to us. Apparently, it was not the first time. Perhaps lying is perfectly acceptable in your home, Abby, but it is not in ours. I don’t blame Mitch. I blame your influence, and not just about the lying, either. He’s feeling far too much pressure from you. Mitch doesn’t know how to say no to you, Abby. And neither he nor we want him to ruin his future by hooking up with a girl who would get pregnant in order to keep him here with her.”
“No! I didn’t…I never…”
Nadine put up a hand, palm out, to stop her.
“We’re taking him away from you, Abby, and you’re just going to have to live with the fact that it’s your fault that our son cannot remain in his own home. He agrees with us that it’s the right thing to do. He will have a far brighter future away from you than he would ever have with you. You’re just a small-town girl and he’s meant for bigger things. You need to forget him. You need to get on with your silly little life.”
Mitch’s mother closed the door in Abby’s face.
Abby stood there, in shock, for about two seconds. Then she rang the doorbell again. When nobody answered, Abby pounded on the door with her fists until it hurt too much to keep doing it. When that didn’t raise any response, she yelled, “Nadine!” The first name slipped out, a personal, desperate plea. “Please, Mrs. Newquist!”
There was no response from within the house.
Abby didn’t know what to do or how to react to the strange, horrible feelings inside her body. She felt as if she were going to explode from panic and grief. She ran around through the snow to the side of the house, trying to see in through the windows, but all the drapes were closed. She ran to the back, even tried the back door, but it was locked tight. For a wild moment, she considered dragging a ladder out of the garage, propping it against the house, and climbing up to Mitch’s second-floor bedroom.