Read Second Fiddle for Free Online Page B

minutes of hot water and the girl soap Mom kept for just her and me worked wonders. The red spots went away completely, and the lavender smell covered up the river-water stench.
    I slipped into my room for pajama pants, socks, and an old army T-shirt of my dad’s. I dug my wet jeans and shirt out of my backpack, tossed them into the hamper, and dragged it to the laundry room. Then I put my stinky clothes in the wash with a load of my brothers’ jeans and joined Mom in the kitchen.
    “Hey, Jody,” Mom said. “What do you want with burgers?” Mom was standing with her back to me working a pound of ground beef into patties.
    “I don’t care. Salad? Peas and carrots? How was your day?”
    “Surprisingly quiet,” Mom said. She slid the skillet ontothe stove and turned on the heat. “They must have been expecting something that didn’t happen. They staffed up the emergency room today and even had the Life Flight helicopter ready to go.”
    “I wonder what’s up,” I said. When the base went on alert, Dad always worked a ton of overtime like he’d done last night, but they didn’t always put people on extra shifts at the hospital. I opened the fridge and set a head of lettuce and a cucumber on the counter.
    “Where’s the colander?” I said after I’d checked in all the usual places.
    “Sorry, honey. I packed it already.”
    Mom was an early packer. We weren’t moving for two and a half weeks, but she already had a stack of sealed and labeled boxes in the dining room. I could always tell when Dad got PCS orders, because the house smelled like moving boxes. I hated that smell.
    “Hey, Mom, some of these oranges are rotten. Do you want me to run them out to the garbage before the boys get into them?”
    “Thanks, honey.”
    I bagged up four perfectly good oranges and took them outside. I set them in a corner of the boot box Mom always kept on the right side of our front door so Dad wouldn’t track his muddy boots into the house. I thought about my soldier sitting alone in the dark eating our chocolate bars for dinner. I wondered what the officers who’d tried to kill himwere doing. Did they feel guilty? Were they afraid of being caught? They hadn’t even posted a lookout or acted very sneaky on the bridge. What made a person so hard-hearted that they just threw a human being away like he was garbage? I hugged my arms across my chest and headed back inside, making a mental list of the things my soldier would need.
    “So is it the usual no-Dad routine tonight?” I said when I got back to the kitchen.
    “You don’t mind, do you?” Mom turned away from the skillet to pop hamburger buns into the toaster.
    “Well, what kind of cake did you get?”
    “They were all out of chocolate Sachertortes and the kind with cherries, so I got the Mozartkuchen instead.”
    “With the hazelnuts?”
    “And whipped cream.” Mom smiled.
    She ate sweets when Dad was gone. It was her thing, sweets and reading grocery-store novels in bed. The boys got a story from me instead of Dad, and they got to fall asleep on the sofa. I got to stay up late and listen to any radio station I liked.
    Here’s the secret I never told anyone: I liked it better when Dad was gone.
    After supper, Mom ran a tub and tortured the boys with hot water and soap. I didn’t know exactly what went on in there, but it involved four towels, a bucket of toy whales, and a lot of yelling. But at least when I got them on the sofa,they smelled like toothpaste, and they were wearing clean pajamas.
    Kyle was first out of the bath, and he always picked
Green Eggs and Ham
. I hated Dr. Seuss! Would it kill the man to use a two-syllable word? But Kyle was the snuggler in the family, and I could put up with the doctor for ten minutes of babybrother snuggles. Kyle dragged along his old blanky from back when he loved bears more than anything. He was too big for a blanky now, but last Thanksgiving, Dad was in the field and Kyle was missing him really bad. So I sewed