The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle by Jennifer McMahon Page B

mess and by the fact that she’d remembered my old nickname.
    “Making pancakes! Strawberry pancakes!”
    They had once been my favorite—she had made them for me Saturday mornings in the tepee, cooking over an old Coleman camp stove. My mother’s memory, it seemed, had not been completely erased.
    I peered down into the bowl of batter she was about to attack with the wooden spoon held clumsily in her bandaged hands—the gauze filthy and beginning to unravel. In the bowl were about half a dozen eggs (complete with crushed shells), a pile of flour, a square of strawberries still frozen solid, all topped with what appeared to be maple syrup. Julia Child, move over.
    “Ran out of eggs,” she said as she began flailing at her mixture. “We’ll have to run down the street to the Griswolds’.”
    “Ma, the Griswolds don’t live there anymore.”
    “They don’t?”
    “No Ma, they haven’t for a long time.”
    Mr. Griswold died of heart failure twelve or thirteen years ago. The boys had all scattered to the wind.
    “We’re out of eggs,” my mother said.
    “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we get cleaned up and I’ll drive us to town for eggs? Then we’ll come back and cook pancakes.”
    “Have to go down to the Griswolds’,” she said again, reluctant to leave her bowl of batter.
    I looked down at the mess on the table and, to my horror, saw that among the spilled flour and strawberries lay a small, black-handled paring knife.
    “Where did this come from, Ma?”
    My mother smiled as I held up the sticky knife, dripping red juice down my wrist.
    “Needed to slice the berries,” she said.
    I rinsed the knife in the sink, then found my key and locked it in the sharps drawer, all the while wondering what other surprises my mother had stashed around the house—more knives, matches even?
    I helped my mother change out of her oil-and-flour-covered nightgown and into slacks and a sweater, then I set things up to change her bandages at the kitchen table. I soon discovered that it wasn’t only the mess from the kitchen that had dirtied my mother: her nightgown and socks were smeared with what looked like mud. And the gauze that was left on her hands was covered in dirt and bits of leaf debris. And was that dried blood under the fresh strawberry juice stains?
    I gave her a cursory exam, and began unwrapping the dirty bandages.
    “Ma? Did you go out last night? Did you hurt yourself somehow?”
    “We need eggs, Katydid.”
    I resolved that I would begin locking her door at night, as Raven had instructed me to. I counted myself lucky that my mother had found her way home and appeared, from my quick exam, to be unharmed. What a sight she must have been, wandering through the woods, white nightgown trailing, like the Ghost of New Hope Past, while I lay snoring in some drug-induced, nightmare-infested coma. I prayed Raven, Opal, and Gabriel hadn’t seen her. I wasn’t off to the best start as my mother’s keeper.
    I studied her unwrapped hands, gently turning them in my own. Her palms were bright red and badly blistered. Some of the pustules were open and weeping clear liquid. I cleaned them, applied fresh ointment, and began to rewrap her hands.
    “You’re a good doctor,” she said.
    “I’m not a doctor,” I told her. “Just a nurse. A school nurse. About the only doctoring I do is passing out Ritalin.”
    “You went to medical school.”
    “I dropped out.”
    “Why would you do that?”
    “To marry Jamie.”
    “Oh…Jamie. Such a nice boy. Where is Jamie?”
    “Back in Seattle.”
    “Why didn’t he come?”
    “We’re divorced, Ma. Remember? We’ve been divorced for years.”
    I suddenly wished I were the one with the Swiss cheese memory. It would be nice if you could have some control over it, deciding which memories would stay, which would be banished to the netherworld. Poof . Just like that.
    My mother stared at me, smiled.
    “I know you,” she said. I began taping the gauze in