The Golden Thread by Suzy McKee Charnas Page A

and Barb wasn’t talking to me because she thought Bosanka was a racist.
    To tell the truth, Barb and I had been having some problems anyway. “The Great Witch-Girl,” she called me sometimes. She thought I was arrogant. Well, I didn’t need any of that now. I was shaky enough as it was.
    I could phone Joel, who at least would know what I was talking about. But he had walked out on the Comet Committee, and we had parted afterward on such a sour note! I had no business missing him, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t missing me at all.
    Besides, he had troubles of his own—his hands, his whole future in music. It wouldn’t be doing him a favor to complicate his life by dragging Bosanka into it.
    Mom was home, reading Manley’s latest enormous spy thriller and scribbling comments in the margins. She was also crying, on and off. I saw a box of tissues on the table next to the stack of manuscript pages, and a big paper shopping bag on the floor with lots of used tissues in it.
    I didn’t need to ask what was bothering her, of course. We were both pretty susceptible to tears since Gran’s stroke.
    She blew her nose hard and made pulling-yourself-together sounds (throat clearings, sniffs, and so on) while I fussed around with the mail on the hall table, giving her time to come out of it.
    â€œVal? Have you been at the hospital?” she said.
    I said I had.
    â€œYou’re a sweet kid, you know that?” she said. “For a ghastly teenager, that is. I’ll go over tomorrow, it’s my turn.”
    We did that, taking turns. It didn’t require a lot of scheduling or discussion. When you live alone with your mom, important things can run pretty smoothly if you’re both halfway reasonable people, which we were.
    This does not mean that we never argued, fought, or generally hated each other. I was sweet-and-sour Val, depending on my moods, which lately even I could see seemed to change from one moment to the next. And Mom had her own attacks of the crazies.
    I had done a neat essay about this in creative writing class the term before and had gotten an A on it, so I couldn’t really complain. I figured that I was storing up material for best-sellers I would write later on. Mom had said once, “Wait until you’re a writer yourself, you can write all about us and embarrass the hell out of your father.” We both had a good time playing around with that idea. But sometimes I wondered nervously what she really expected from me and my writing, and did I want to be tied up in that?
    We would probably never have to cross that bridge now. Leaf-takers, something told me, do not write books.
    Mom said, “Stick a couple of frozen dinners in the oven, will you, Val? All the pots are in the sink, and I’ve got to finish reading this before I talk to Manley.”
    After dinner, I lay on my bed with my earphones on listening to Balinese gamelan music that Lennie had lent me, instead of making my usual evening phone call to Barb. After a while Mom looked in on me and insisted that I get into my bed instead of lying on it. She had a theory that visiting Gran sapped my energy (which it did), and that if I didn’t get more rest I would get sick myself.
    I knew I could not afford that now.
    Mom also laid a shopping list on me for tomorrow afternoon, when she had to be in her office to take calls on a book auction she was running for one of her authors. I was too feeble and confused to point out the inconsistency of worrying about my rest on the one hand and loading me with chores on the other.
    Mom in love was not always Mom at her best. At the moment, Mom was definitely in love with Manley the author. Maybe that was what kept her from noticing that I was more or less expiring from exhaustion and extreme fear no matter how much sleep-time I did or did not get.
    I crawled under the bedspread and forced myself through three chapters of my history text until my head felt