A Year Less a Day by James Hawkins Page A

she’s like—she’ll worry.”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t she worry ...” starts Ruth, but stops herself with the realization she is uncharitably thinking her mother-in-law will be more worried about losing her investment in the café than losing her son. “Oh, it’s up to you. She’s your bloody mother,” she says, letting Jordan take the phone. “I just wish I had a mother.”

    â€œNot if she was like mine,” spits Jordan, and Ruth steams.
    â€œYou ought to be grateful that you’ve got a mother. You don’t realize how lucky you are. You even had a father ...” Ruth pauses and pulls herself together as she sees the hurt in Jordan’s eyes. “Sorry, Jordan,” she says, knowing how much his father had meant to him, but she’d lost her father too—a father she’d never even seen. George Harrison’s death had meant more than the end of her dream—it had forever slammed the lid on the possibility that she could prove her heritage.
    While growing up fatherless may have been difficult, she was barely fifteen when she had found herself entirely alone. “I’ve just lost my mother,” she’d tell concerned adults, and they had always jumped to the same conclusion. But Ruth’s words were not some carefully parsed euphemism. She really did lose her mother and, despite the fact that it has been more than twenty years since she vanished, her mother’s name has never been logged in police records as a missing person. In fact, if fifteen-year-old Ruth had been able to come up with the rent at the end of that month, no one else might have known that her mother simply went out one night and never returned.
    â€œMom will come back eventually,” the teenager had convinced herself as she hid out in their dingy basement and tried to eat her way to happiness; after all, her mother had always returned before—to let the swellings subside and the bruises heal.
    â€œYou’re a good girl, Ruthie,” her mother would tell the young girl as she bathed the battle scars. “You’re not gonna be like me. You’re gonna get an education like your dad.”
    But Ruth had already quit school. Handicapped by her size, she was never able to outrun the mob of girls streaming out of the school at the end of the day.With careful timing she might latch on to a departing teacher, but an ambush usually awaited somewhere on the route.
    â€œMy dad’s bigger than your dad,” never helped Ruth either.
    â€œYou ain’t got a dad.”
    â€œI have so.”
    â€œYeah, he’s a fuckin’ insect.”
    â€œA Beatle ... He’s a Beatle.”
    â€œWell, this is what we do to beetles ...”
    By lunchtime, Ruth has abandoned any hope of persuading Jordan to call his mother, and she is in the kitchen when Trina struggles into the busy café with a wheelchair.
    â€œI brought Mr. Jenson ...” Trina calls to Cindy.
    â€œJohnson,” says a thin voice from under a battered panama.
    â€œHe gets very befuddled,” whispers Trina, then she questions herself and takes a quick peep under the hat. “Oh, you’re right. It is Mr. Johnson. How did that happen?”
    â€œYou said you were gonna buy me lunch,” complains the ancient man as Trina explains to Cindy, “He’s from the home. I’m always mixing them up. Is Ruth in the kitchen? I’ve got a book for her.”
    â€œDon’t give me nothing to chew,” comes the voice from under the hat. “I didn’t bring my teeth.”
    â€œHe likes rice pudding,” says Trina as she dumps her charge and heads to the kitchen.
    â€œYou can’t leave him there,” calls Cindy, but Trina is on a mission. The book, liberated from Marcie’s extensive library of unopened digests, is called
“Fight Cancer with Food and Live Forever,”
and Trina figures the sooner Jordan starts, the