Call Me Tuesday by Leigh Byrne

“Stay there until I say you can move.”
    While I stood with my face to the wall, I continued to try to figure out what mysterious bad thing I had done. And all I could come up with was the time I’d let Audrey chew my bubblegum. I knew if Mama found out there was a possibility I’d given Audrey the flu that killed her, she would certainly be mad. But there was no way she could have found out, unless Audrey had told her before she died.
    Suddenly Mama leaped from her bed and ran into the hallway where I was. She grabbed me by both of my shoulders and spun me around, facing her. “Why did it have to be my angel?” she screamed. “Why Audrey?”
    “I don’t know, Mama,” I screamed back at her. “I don’t know! ”
    She shook me back and forth. “Tell me! Tell me why, why, Tuesday, why?”
    It was the last time she ever said my name.

11
     
    I thought my face to the wall punishment would last only a few minutes, and then I would go back into the kitchen and finish my breakfast. But a few minutes turned to hours, and I ended up staying there for the rest of the day, until it was time for me to go to bed.
    The next day the radical change in Mama’s attitude toward me continued. She went from asking me to stay by her side, in a seemingly protective way, to demanding I be within her sight at all times, as if she didn’t trust me. And she no longer wanted me close to her, by her bed, but rather in the hallway outside her room, positioned so she could watch me.
    She wouldn’t tell me why she was angry. She would say only that I had done something so horrible, she couldn’t even bear to talk about it, and that I needed to be punished for what I’d done. She said the punishment she had chosen was to stand with my face turned to the wall in the hall outside her bedroom door, and not to speak unless she asked me a question.
    As soon as I got up every morning, she ordered me to stand in the same place, in the same position, and that’s where I remained until it was time to go to bed. I ate my meals in the hall. If I had to go to the bathroom, I asked for permission, and she went with me. When she felt well enough to venture out of her bed and do a few things around the house, she took me with her. She said she had to make sure I didn’t do anything else.
    Once Nick passed by me on his way to the bathroom, and asked me what I was doing standing there. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Mama said I did something bad, but I can’t remember what it was, and she won’t tell me.”
    “Leave her alone,” Mama shouted from her bedroom when she saw us talking. “She’s being punished.”
    Nick didn’t try to challenge her. Since her accident, he and Jimmy D. had trod softly around her and indulged her every whim, no matter how outrageous. I was afraid to say anything too, afraid she would lash out at me again, and ask more questions about Audrey, questions I couldn’t, or didn’t, want to answer.
    With each passing day Mama isolated me from my brothers more and more. It got to where whenever one of them passed by me in the hallway, they promptly turned away like they were afraid if they looked too long, or got too close, they might catch whatever it was I had that made me different, made me bad.
    Somehow they were able to separate the way she treated me from the world they lived in with her. Every now and then I caught Jimmy D. staring at me with something resembling pity in his eyes. It was a far-removed emotion, though, the way one might look at a poster of a starving third-world child. Like he felt sad and guilty to see my suffering, but there was nothing he could do about it. I sensed he wanted to help me, but his sympathy and good intentions were always overshadowed, both by his fear of Mama and his great love for her.
    Staring at the blank wall, I listened to my brothers’ distant voices as they played, straining to hear fragments of their con versations, to in some way remain part of their lives. I wanted