Chapter 2

Ember's POV

When the bolt clicked down into its catch and the door settled back against the frame, I knew this day was going to be different from every other day in that house. My mother set her bag down on my desk, and she didn't sit.

First she turned and pulled the curtain halfway closed, as though the little smear of television light coming up from the living room downstairs might climb the floorboards and follow us in. The fan swung around to her side of the room, lifted the loose hair off her forehead, and let it drop again.

"Don't ask yet," she said. She put her hand down into the bag and felt around for something.

What she pulled out was a paper box, square, its corners gone soft where they'd been crushed from the outside. Red ribbon went around it twice, and the bow had been tied crooked.

The second she lifted the lid, sweetness pushed up out of it into the room — cream, paper, sugar shut up in its own warmth too long — and it sat there like something that had walked into the wrong house.

The cake wasn't big. White frosting, a few letters squeezed across the middle at a slant, and two cream flowers already caving in at the edge.

I stared at it with my hand still flat on the math book in front of me, and I didn't move.

Nobody in Black Creek did birthdays. Grandma hadn't even brought it up this year, and on my father's side of the family, sixteen wasn't sixty, so a kid's birthday around there meant one extra dish at supper and nothing more than that.

The last time I'd had cake I was eight, maybe nine — one of those cupcakes from the supermarket freezer case, sold by the single piece, bought with the change left over from her paycheck. We split it in half. Her half ended up in my mouth too.

"Where did the money come from?" I heard myself ask.

"Saved it out of the bus fare." She dug a red candle out from the bottom of the box, an old-fashioned one, no telling how many years it had been pressed flat in some drawer. "There's no bakery in town. I rode out to the county and bought it, and then I carried it back in my arms the whole way. Feel it. It's still cold."

I put my fingers against the side of the box. It was cold. She struck a match; the flame came up small, and she cupped both hands around it so that the light stood inside the shadow of her palms without moving at all. She shook the match out and looked up at me.

"Make a wish."

I closed my eyes. I wished the same thing I'd been wishing for two years — to get this woman out of this place and put as much road behind us as I could manage.

The breath sat in my chest until it started to ache somewhere under the ribs, and only then did I let it out, and I blew the candle down in one push. The smoke went straight up and came apart.

"What did you wish for?" she said. The way she looked at me had something bright in it, a little hopeful, like she was half-expecting me to say something she'd want to hear.

"If I say it, it won't work." I smiled a little and looked away.

She smiled, a small one, the kind that quits halfway through. She pushed the cake off to the side, folded her hands on her knees, and opened her knuckles one at a time and hooked them shut again, as though her fingers needed something to keep them occupied.

"Ember," she said. "There's something I have to make clear to you."

Something went through me, hard and sudden, the way a stone goes down a well. "Your father and I divorced three years ago."

The only sound left in the room was the fan. I looked at her bare finger — the ring had been gone a long while, she came home two days out of the week, and the two of them slept in separate rooms. This wasn't news I was getting today. Today was just the first day I was allowed to have it.

"I know," I said.

She stopped still. Then she lowered her head, and her eyes went red around the rims, but nothing came down. She has never once cried in front of me, and that's the piece of her I got.

"I dragged my feet about leaving because you weren't old enough yet to make the call for yourself." Her voice went very low, and that blinking strip of light from downstairs still lay along the seam of the door.

"Last year I met someone. It's been a year now. He treats me well, and there's a new position arranged for me at work. I'm moving this summer. To Oakhaven."

Oakhaven. I'd heard the name on television and nowhere else.

She lifted her eyes to me, and her hands tightened on her knees, and that movement was more careful than anything she'd said out loud.

"I'm not going to force you," she said. "You can stay here, with your father, with your grandmother. Or you can come with me. You tell me what you want to do."

Three knocks hit the door.

"What are you locking the door for? You not eating? Did you mix tomorrow's chicken feed?"

Grandma's voice came through the wood flat and hard, whatever she had in her hand rapping against the panel, knock after knock. My mother was on her feet at once. She smoothed the look off her face one layer at a time and wiped it down clean, until it read as though nothing at all had happened in that room.

I put the lid back on the cake, box and all, and shoved it under the bed.

When the door came open, Grandma's eyes rested on the candle for a second before they moved to my mother. "What are you two talking about? Work done?" she said. "The greens are still soaking downstairs, and the stove is waiting on somebody."

I went down. The vegetables in the basin had gone limp, a skin of oil and two worm holes floating on the surface, the water warm to the touch.

My father was still on the couch, the television on with no sound, three cigarette butts standing in the ashtray, the hand holding his cigarette resting on the arm of the sofa and not moving.

Ma went into the kitchen. The apron hung on its nail behind the door; she took it down and tied it on, and her shoulders dropped a notch — that was the posture she'd worn since she moved into this house, and it wouldn't take her an hour to grow it back.

I crouched at the sink and rubbed the leaves over one at a time. Grandma leaned in the doorway and ran the whole show from there, off the greens and onto the electric bill, off the bill and onto the girl at the east end of town who'd quit school long ago. I didn't answer her, so she kept going.

I was thinking about Oakhaven. A city where I couldn't read a single street sign, a house whose number I didn't even know, and a man who was supposed to be good to my mother — because when she said he treated her well, her eyes lit up, and I hadn't seen that light in three years.

But I was thinking about other things too. Her moving over there on her own, cooking by herself in a strange kitchen, sitting by herself on her side of a table listening to other people talk. She puts up with too much, always has. Hand her a cup of tea and she'll thank you before she takes it.

I was afraid of her being looked down on over there, being shouldered out of the way, while all I could do was sit on this stool and worry about her with nothing within reach of my hands.

I need to talk to my mother.