Page 165 of Tis the Season to be Bullied

She could. I’ve seen her last days between paychecks without a crumb passing her lips. Fuck knows how she looks after three kids and a fully grown man without passing out. I grab her bony shoulders and ease her into one of the rickety kitchen chairs, taking her place at the basin.

“How’s school?” Ma asks.

“Excellent.”

“Still managing with all those subjects you took?” She keeps her voice low so Pa won’t hear us from the living room. Although, when I crane to peek out the kitchen door, it looks like he’s passed out again.

“Of course, Ma.” I shrug, shoving my arms into the warm suds. “You know I’d have taken more if they let me.”

“Still don’t know how you got so damn smart,” Ma says. “Never even read to you when you were in my belly.”

Because she was too busy working at the shady motel in downtown Outbye. Thank God the doctor put her on bed rest, else she’d have worked herself to death.

“You let me go to the library whenever I wanted,” I tell her, rinsing a ladle before tossing it on the cracked plastic dry rack. “Ilivedin that place.”

We share a quiet chuckle, but we both know the public library was a sight better than the run-down trailer we lived in back then. Sometimes the librarians on duty would even give me some of their lunch.

These days, the Divine Radiance Church runs a soup kitchen just down the street from that library. Funded by Knox’s family, of course.

What would have happened if I’d met Knox sooner? Would Letty still be alive?

“Your friend’s brother still so sick?” Ma asks. She’s not dumb—not by a far shot—but she is forgetful. Anything that doesn’t involve the mine or her children, tends to slip her mind.

“Yeah, Ma, I told you. It’s chronic.”

“Like Letty.” Ma sighs deeply. “Sometimes I think I’ll go upstairs, and she’ll still be there. Reading in her chair, or?—”

A wet, hacking cough from the living room cuts her off. We’re both silent for a beat before I ask, “Has he been to the doctor?”

“Oh, you know how they are.” When I glance over my shoulder, Ma gives me a dismissive wave. She’s still eating that sandwich, like she’s making it last. “The waiting list?—”

“Not the mine’s doctor,” I snap. “The clinic in town.”

“Oh, pumpkin pie.” Ma slips the rest of the sandwich into her apron pocket. “You know your daddy doesn’t approve of those religious quacks.”

I slam a plate down on the dish rack too hard. It breaks clean in two, nearly slicing off my fucking finger. “Fuck,” I mutter, snatching a ratty dish towel from its peg near the basin and wrapping it around my spouting finger.

“Don’t youdarecurse in my house!” Ma sputters, shock and anger warring on her bony features. “You’re not too old to have your mouth washed out, young man!”

“The fuck is that racket?” a voice booms from the living room.

Despite the fact that I’m twenty-fucking-one years old, that voice still sends me into a momentary panic. I glare at Ma, and she glares at me—both of us blaming the other for rousing Mr. Miller.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done,” she hisses, pushing past me to grab a bottle of cheap whiskey from the top of the kitchen cabinet.

“Really, Ma? It’s not even noon.”

“It’s cheaper than his medicine and it does the same job.” She sloshes a measure of whiskey in one of Thomas’s old kiddie cups—the bears dancing on the outside have long since faded to indistinguishable blotches—and rushes from the kitchen like a fucking tornado.

I almost think she’s going to abandon our conversation—maybe try and clean one of the three upstairs bedrooms while everyone’s downstairs, or fold laundry—but she comes back a few minutes later with a strip of clean fabric in her hand.

“Give,” she says, grabbing my wrist and unwinding the blood-soaked dishcloth from my finger. “How you gonna hold all those books if you chop off your hand?” she mutters angrily. “Gotta be more careful, pumpkin pie.”

I let her tend to my wound. It’s that or fight her, and I don’t have the energy.She’s always been imbued with supernatural strength. She’s tall, sure—only an inch shorter than me—but she’s too spindly to account for such strength.

Do the kids on this street still think she’s a witch? That was all the rage when I was young. The Black Witch, they’d call her. She helped the local undertaker with arranging low-costfunerals for the miners, and there sure were a lot of deaths back then. She was almost always dressed in black. The fact that she’d chase my brothers and me out of the house with her broom when we annoyed her only made things worse.

She rinses my finger under the faucet, then splashes some of Pa’s cheap whiskey over the wound. I don’t say a word, watching her work in silence. I might be imagining it, but her knuckles seem larger. Redder. I hope she’s not becoming arthritic. Work is the only thing she knows. She’d rather be dead than an invalid.

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