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into the house that way. Someone had left so quickly, he hadn’t even bothered to close the screen.
    When we went inside, it felt like one of those houses you see in films of disasters, how everything is always left exactly as it was at the moment when catastrophe struck. There was a bowl of strawberries on the counter, leaking red juice onto the wood, and a coffee cup left in pieces on the floor. Above the sink, the clock was ticking, too slowly, it seemed, for the time to be right. Through the window, I could see Mrs. Gage’s cherry tree, sprinkled with the last of its snowy white flowers. Collie went through the house, room after room, calling for his mother, but anyone could tell that no one was home.
    â€œThis is weird,” Collie said when he came back to the kitchen. His face was so good it made you want to cry “She always leaves a note when she goes somewhere.”
    Someone else might have called Collie a momma’s boy, but I didn’t make judgments like that. How could I when I had been such a daddy’s girl? I would have been nobody’s favorite if not for my father, who cared about people’s true selves, not what they looked like or how mean they might appear to be.
    â€œWell, she must have been in a hurry.” My heart was beating like crazy. I figured this was the way a criminal’s heart must start pounding whenever he told a lie or acted like he hadn’t been responsible for something he knew damn well he’d done.
    I suggested we go to my house, where my grandmother probably had her soap opera tuned in. Whenever we watched it with her, my grandmother would tell us what was going on in the story, which she'd been tuning in to for more than twenty-five years, and her narration was always much more interesting than what was actually happening. We had fun trying to figure things out before the truth was revealed—who would run away together, who’d come down with amnesia, who would find true and undying love but that day I felt sick just looking at the TV I wished I hadn’t been watching that night when Ethan Ford’s picture came on. I wished I lived in another town, someplace where nobody knew me and I didn’t have any obligations to do the right thing.
    Collie’s mother didn’t come for him until it was very nearly dark. She knocked on the door too hard, the way people do when they’re in a hurry, or frightened, or when their world has just fallen apart. When my grandmother went to let her in, she took one look at Collie’s mother and said, “Jorie, what happened?”
    Jorie Ford stood in our doorway and you could see how wrong something was from the expression on her face. Her hair was knotted and her clothes were wrinkled, and when my grandmother gave her a little hug, Mrs Ford started crying right there, half in and half out of our house. It happened fast, and then she pulled herself together just as fast. She was still upset, but she wouldn’t let any tears fall. Not in front of us. Not with Collie there.
    â€œWhat is it?” my grandmother asked.
    Collie and I were sitting on the floor in the front room, sharing a bag of potato chips my grandmother had told us would ruin our dinners. Right before his mother knocked on the door, Collie had turned to tell me something; his face was animated and it seemed as if he was going to say something funny, he always had dozens of jokes, but he never did speak. When he saw that his mother had arrived, Collie got up and went to her. As soon as she put her arms around him, Jorie Ford started crying again. You could tell she didn’t want to, she was trying with all her might to hold it back, but sometimes it’s impossible to do that. I know that from personal experience. You have to turn yourself cold as ice in order to stop yourself, and then if anything falls from your eyes it will only be blue ice crystals, hard and unbreakable as stone.
    I could tell from the way my