Candles Burning by Tabitha King

particularly unusual, so I was unperturbed. I had other causes for anxiety.
    Mama assured Mr. Ree-shard that Ford and I were not a couple of kids playing a silly game. He in turn reassured Mama that he was totally at her service. Then Mr. Ree-shard made some calls to other people attending the convention—high pooh-bahs in the dealers’ association—and, having determined that Daddy was not drunk on the floor behind the sofa in somebody else’s room or suite, he called the police. By then he was somewhat chagrined—for Mama, I think, and only a little for himself, given his standard procedure had so far proved fruitless.
    The chambermaid brought our full breakfast, which none of us ate. A number of folks came and went. Most of the visitors were Daddy’s fellow automobile dealers. Some had a wife in tow and all were worried, solemn, consoling.
    On the arrival of the police, Mr. Ree-shard herded all the concerned callers into the elevator so that a New Orleans police detective could interview Mama in relative privacy.
    The detective told Mama that kidnappers never signed their real names to a ransom note. What could be stupider than that? So there was no point in looking for a couple of female criminals named Janice and Judy. His immediate opinion was that Ford and I were playing a rotten prank and needed a good whipping. When neither of us burst into tears and confessed, Mama shooed us out of the room.
    Ford conjectured to me that the detective was working on convincing Mama that the two of us could have made the whole thing up and that Daddy was in all probability drunk somewhere outside the hotel, or maybe in a whorehouse.
    â€œWhat’s a whorehouse?” I asked.
    â€œWhere the floozies are.” Ford used the tone he employed to imply that I was mentally enfeebled.
    I was not in fact very clear what floozies were, other than potential mothers of Daddy’s other children, or possibly the sort of woman who smoked cigarettes on the street. The word “whore” I heard as h-o-a-r, as in “Hoar-frost twinkles on the trees,” from a poem by Winnie-the-Pooh that Ida Mae Oakes had read to me when I was littler. Ida Mae told me that hoar-frost was ice. A hoarhouse must be something like an ice palace to me, where an Ice Queen might reign. I could make no connection between floozies and ice palaces. The big word Mama used so often when Daddy was late—philandering—I had been unable to find in the dictionary due to the fact that I was misspelling it as fil andering. My best guess was that philandering meant inexcusably late.
    Somebody’s wife—the name is long forgotten, if I ever knew it—looked in on us. She advised us that our mama was prostrate and that in this trying moment, we must be very, very good children. She told us that Mama had sent for Mamadee. The Dixie Hummingbird was making a special stop at Tallassee for her. Likely she would take us home. Then she had us kneel down and pray for Mama and for Daddy’s safe return.
    It was a prayer about me, not Daddy. Prayer, as I understood it, was in the same class of mundane magic as spells and step-on-a-crack-break-your-mama’s-back and tossing a pinch of spilled salt over my shoulder. For all the churchgoing we did, I only knew the Lord’s Prayer and the bedtime prayer by heart. I thought of the bedtime prayer as the One Long Word Prayer and said it as fast as possible to annoy Mama:
    Â 
Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep-
I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-keep-
If-I-should-die-before-I-wake-
I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-take.
    Â 
Lacking a more specific hocus-pocus, I shut my eyes tightly and tried to say the Lord’s Prayer as I had it memorized, adapting the beginning to apply to Daddy.
    Â 
My Daddy, witch art in heaven
Halloween be thy name
thy king dumb come
thy will be done
asset issin heavn
giveusthisday hourdailybred
and forgiveus ourdetz
aswe forgive our deaders
and lead us snot into