#hcmf

I think I willfully ignored a lot of things in the early years. Sometimes it was easier not to wonder until the answer was right in my face and there was nowhere I could go to run from it. But that usually meant that when I did stumble into the truth it hurt a lot worse than if I’d been looking from the beginning.

It was like that with Andrew’s mother.

I knew that I wanted to pretend she was alright, after I found out. That was the first moment of my life that I recall wishing I could go back to before it had happened and smooth out the creases of the whole day so that I could arrange not to know about it.

Andrew and I were sitting on the floor of the sitting room when it happened. There were papers scattered around us, because we were trying to sort out the details of one of Andrew’s marvellous ideas, which this time was a jacks tournament that we hoped would last the whole summer. Andrew had been in Nanton almost a whole year by then, and I’d made the mistake of making him collect names of players, and now we had too many, because when Andrew was the one asking, everyone said yes.

Outside, snow drifted aimlessly against the window in an impressive late-March display of winter’s refusal to let go, and Mrs. Fletcher was in the kitchen. I think she was probably listening to us, because she liked to do that. We always pretended we didn’t know so that she wouldn’t feel as though she ought to stop.

The two of us were in the middle of arguing over the merits of two or three person teams when there was a terrible crash.

Andrew was up and on his feet in an instant. I was after him a half-second later, so I was right on his tail when we skidded into the kitchen.

Mrs. Fletcher was on the ground.

For a singular, terrible moment, I thought she was dead. There was a teapot—or, pieces of it—scattered across the kitchen floor and she was lying there like she’d just collapsed where she stood, head lolling to the side, one arm out like the wing of a broken baby bird. And she really did look dead, because I couldn’t see her chest moving.

But then the next moment she opened her eyes.

Beside me, I heard Andrew start to breathe again.

“Oh,” Mrs. Fletcher said from on the ground, and then she started to cry.

There was something terrible about seeing a grown up cry like that. I glanced wildly at Andrew, but he was already in action, darting to her side and helping get an arm around her.

Between the two of us, we managed to get her standing, and I realized that my hands were shaking even though it had turned out alright.

Mrs. Fletcher didn’t stop crying even after she could walk, and Andrew led her into the sitting room while I picked up pieces of the teapot just to have something to do so I wouldn’t have to think. I used the crocheted dishrag that Petra had made for Mrs. Fletcher that Christmas to wipe up as much of the tea as I could, and by that time, Andrew had come back.

He jerked his head toward the mudroom and so we slipped out carefully. Andrew shut the screen door but left the wooden door open.

I waited for him to speak first. The mudroom was bitterly cold, and I was in my sock feet, but I didn’t think the dread I was feeling in my chest had anything to do with temperature.

“She’s lying down,” Andrew said, voice low and quiet.

I glanced into the sitting room. I could see the corner of her foot hanging over the arm of the chesterfield, but the rest of her was hidden from view. “What happened?”

“She fell,” Andrew said.

There was an extended pause. The wind made a violent show of rattling the windowpanes behind him.

After a moment, Andrew said, “It happens a lot.”

“Well—” I stood there and shivered, hands wrapped around myself. “Why?”

“We don’t know,” Andrew said, and his voice was tiny and tremulous. “Father told me the doctors don’t know either.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t know she was sick.”

“I know you didn’t,” Andrew said, and he sounded miserable. “I didn’t tell you.”

I wanted to ask him why. I didn’t.

But I saw it all the time after that. I hadn’t known to look before then, but after I saw the way Mrs. Fletcher’s hands couldn’t quite stay still, and how she just kept on getting thinner and thinner until Mother started sending me over with extra food so Mrs. Fletcher wouldn’t have to worry about getting it ready. I saw the way she hugged Andrew longer, like she didn’t want to let go.