Read Zero at the Bone for Free Online Page B

coffeemaker. She made a rattling noise with it, hitting it against the heel of her hand.
    The cat door crashed, a paw found its way through the flap, and then the whole cat was inside. In the light he looked thin and moth-eaten, a bald place in his head next to one ear.
    â€œIs he back again?” Mom said in a falsetto she uses only on cats. “Is he back again from being brave out in the world?” Talking to him directly. Mom found a can of Kitty Yummies in the back of a cupboard behind human food.
    â€œWhen Kyle called earlier tonight,” I said, “what did he want?”
    â€œHe wanted to speak to Anita,” she said in her normal, flat voice.
    â€œShe’ll be home soon,” I said.
    â€œShe’s late,” said Mom.
    I paused at the door to Anita’s room and let the door swing slowly open. When Dad and Anita had one of their fights, it could be about anything. Once she had written the entire U.S. Senate, every single senator, about not cutting down the world’s tallest sequoia, and she had used Ziff Furniture stationery, with the big green Z. She’d done it with a pen in longhand, no computer, so each senator would be impressed with the sincerity and effort.
    Dad had been furious, and said that if she wasn’t his daughter, he would have sued her for making the politicians believe Dad’s business supported Anita’s views. Actually, Dad didn’t think the really historically important redwoods should be cut down, either. He just took a more complicated view of issues than Anita did.
    Sometimes they argued about ordinary things, how the yogurt containers in her room would attract roaches. And at times like that Dad would say he didn’t know what was going to happen to her when she found out what life was really like.
    Bay laurels grow in the East Bay hills. They branch in the creek beds and smell like a spice cabinet—spreading, snaking trees with slender leaves. I had hiked up the trails with my mom a few times, and I always loved the way she would look out over the view when we reached a hilltop and tell me what was not there anymore.
    â€œThat used to be an inland sea,” she would say. “All the way to the foothills. Saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves hunted these slopes, in what is basically contemporary time, maybe fifty thousand years ago.”
    I carried my mother’s pack for her, and it gradually filled with rocks, Franciscan formation sandstone. Or maybe chert. Rocks the color of toasted bread the way I like it, light brown. I was there when she found it, chipping with her rock pick at the side of a cliff, breathing hard—this was before she lost all the weight.
    I had it there in my room. I could look at it when I got tired of her report on the taxonomic features of an extinct species of bay tree. Paragraph after paragraph told how this was a kind of tree that had died out, and our current bay trees were a different variety—a new species.
    The stone was sandwiched together, and as I sat on my bed, I opened the rock, and there it was, just as she had found it that day, so excited she jumped up and down. The fossil leaf was a stain in the rock, the size and color of a deer’s eye.
    Had Anita read the report all the way through? I wondered. Or had she started and quit right away? It was interesting up to a point, stem diameters, millimeters, and comparisons with bay trees in faraway places. But it was boring, too. Not boring and ridiculous, but dull the way the financial page is—important, but not to me.
    There was something a little worrisome about it, too. I could not see any difference between the ancient, sixty-five-thousand-year-old specimen and the leaves we had in the kitchen cupboard, next to the instant coffee.
    I wondered if Mother realized this: She might be wrong.
    The bed jumped, scaring me a little. Bronto stood in the middle of the bed, and because he was so stiff, he anchored himself like a cat