Lunatic Fringe by Allison Moon

left,
taking nothing more than a backpack, Lexie’s tiny family had been
sundered. Summer Pace had left nothing more than a fleeting kiss on
Lexie’s forehead and a squeeze of her husband’s hand before walking
out the door. With the wisdom of time and distance, Lexie now saw
the weakness, the fear, and the pain that drove her mother’s life.
Summer Pace was constantly pursuing a dream that never could be, a
dream based on her own incompletion. Lexie had vowed never to
become like her mother; she would never follow love anywhere. She
thought instead of the peace and simplicity of living with Blythe
and the women of the Pack. What a relief it would be to finally
have a home where she felt like she belonged.
    As though Blythe could read her
thoughts, she interrupted Lexie’s reverie. “You from around here,
Lexie?” Blythe said, her fingers still tangled in Renee’s hair.
“You seem like it.”
    Lexie fidgeted, hating that her cover
was blown so soon. “How’d you know?”
    Blythe shrugged.
    “ Spent my whole life in
Wolf Creek,” Lexie replied.
    “ Your parents still
there?”
    “ My dad is. My mom’s
gone.”
    Blythe nodded as though this made sense
of everything.
    “ Mine too,” Renee said,
exhaling another plume of smoke. “What happened to
yours?”
    Lexie looked away, afraid that her
mother would seem cruel, or worse, that the truth would expose
Lexie as undesirable, disposable.
    “ Mine died,” Renee offered.
“Four years ago.”
    “ Mine left. Walked out. I
was eight,” Lexie replied.
    “ Your dad a tyrant,
too?”
    Lexie laughed. “Hardly.”
    “ Mine was,” Renee said, her
eyes fixed in the space before her, dragging her cigarette, casting
great chasms of shadow along her cheeks as she sucked.
    “ They all are,” Blythe
said. She delved her fingers deeper into Renee’s mass of hair and
massaged her scalp. “Your mama sounds like a smart woman.” Lexie
looked at her, confused.
    “ Not for abandoning you, of
course,” Blythe hurried.
    “ Why did she leave, Lexie?”
Renee asked.
    “ I don’t really know. Never
got the real story, if there even is one. It was so long ago. All I
remember is a kiss on the forehead in the middle of the night. When
she left, my father stood stock still in the kitchen, looking at
his feet. Didn’t say a word. He was so . . .
restrained.”
    Lexie had replayed the scene
innumerable times. Each time it was the same: the kiss on the
forehead, her mother’s long, black braid grazing Lexie’s cheek,
then Lexie standing at the door as she watched her mother walk
away. She had watched her for as long as she could, the cold air
rushing into the house as tiny flakes of snow drifted down,
covering the ground in a diaphanous veil of white.
    Beneath the night sky, her mother had
looked radiant, as though glowing with an inner moonlight. She took
that radiance with her as she walked away, heading west toward the
bus station, leaving tracks in the new snow. She never turned to
look back, though Lexie had tried to will it so. Instead Summer
Pace walked straight down the street until the night enveloped her.
After a long while, Lexie’s father walked wordlessly to the door
and pulled it shut, locking it before climbing the stairs to his
bedroom, where he promptly shut that door behind him. Not six
months later, the tree stand Ray had been working in collapsed, and
that was that. Recovery, unemployment, and a new life of tending to
one another in odd bursts: Lexie as she grew older, her father as
he healed. Lexie didn’t tell the girls that part.
    The three women watched the rest of the
Pack work at the house, stacking cups, washing dishes, and picking
up trash from the dying party. Through the back door, Lexie spotted
Sharmlaee holding Hazel by the arm as she jumped up and down in the
trash bag, mashing the soiled cups and plates like a tiny,
hyperactive trash-compacter.
    “ Why is she doing that?”
Lexie asked, squinting through the glass door at the
scene.
    “