I turned back to my mom and threw my arms around her neck, almost sending the tray of French toast flying. I kissed her cheek.
“I heard what you said,” she whispered into my ear. “When you came to see me a few days ago. You said you needed a mother. That you all did. I know I can’t try to be perfect anymore, but I’m trying my best to be what you need.” I noticed now that even though her hair was washed and cleaned, it hung straight and unstyled around her shoulders, and she wore wrinkled slacks and a blouse under Dad’s kiss the cook apron. Several slices of the French toast on the tray were browner than my mother would have usually deemed “acceptable” in the past, and that made my heart feel lighter.
She wasn’t perfect, but she was Mom.
“Now go eat,” Mom said, shooing us to our seats with an awesomely motherly tone. “Build up your strength.”
“So where’s Aunt Carol?” I asked as I headed for my seat. I realized I’d been gone all day and all night without calling her. I was expecting to get quite the earful about it.
“She left already,” Dad said. “Carol was a little … overwhelmed by our return. Miracles are harder for some people to process.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she started claiming you faked the accident just to get a couple days off,” Mom said. I’d never heard her talk so jovially about her sister.
“That’ll go over well with Grandma.” I sat at the table, and the others passed platter after platter of food in my direction. I shoveled chocolate-chip pancakes, eggs, bacon, and slice after slice of French toast into my mouth—filling up the empty pit that had been in my stomach for days.
In fact, the only one—at a table populated with almost all teenage boys—who ate more than me was Slade; he inhaled his food with the fervor of a death-row inmate granted his last supper.
Charity giggled next to me, and I was afraid it was directed at my lack of eating manners, but then I realized she’d locked eyes with Ryan, who sat directly across from her. A wide, goofy grin spread across his face. I picked up a banana-nut muffin and chucked it at him. It bounced off his forehead and landed in an almost-empty plate of bacon. But it had been just the trick to wipe that puppy-dog look off his face. He blinked at me.
“Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.” I picked up a second muffin and held it like a baseball about to be thrown.
“I wasn’t … I mean, I was … But, um … your sister is cute …,” Ryan sputtered, and wiped at the little particles of muffin that clung to his forehead like a bull’s-eye.
Charity turned as red as the raspberry jam on her pancakes.
The others broke into laughter. I acted like I was about to send the second muffin flying, making Ryan flinch. Instead, I took a huge bite and leaned my head against Daniel’s shoulder. He wrapped his arm around my back. We laughed with the others for a moment, but my sight lingered on the half-eaten chocolate-chip pancake on his plate. French toast might be my favorite, but Mom’s special pancakes were pretty much one of my older brother’s most favorite things in the world.
Daniel grew quiet next to me. He bent his head closer to mine. “He should be here, shouldn’t he?” Daniel asked quietly, as if he were tuned in to exactly what I was feeling. Which he probably was.
I nodded against his arm.
“Then I think that means you’re ready,” he whispered. “It’s time to make things right with Jude.”
Chapter Twenty-six
MOMENT OF TRUTH
STILL THURSDAY EVENING, AROUND SEVEN THIRTY P.M.
Daniel and I drove slowly to the parish. A very yellow, and almost full, moon rose between the hills of Rose Crest, sending its ghostly light reflecting off the clouds in the night’s sky. It was an oil painting waiting to happen, and I wondered just how long it would be until I’d ever have the time to pick up a paintbrush again.
Daniel parked the Corolla in the empty front parking lot. I realized now that, if everyone was at the house, Jude had probably been left alone all day.