The blue composition notebook had a cracked cardboard spine held together by strips of clear packing tape that had yellowed around the edges. I found it tucked right up against the wooden slats under Chloe’s mattress on a Tuesday morning while I was stripping the bed to wash the linens. It smelled faintly of peppermint gum and old paper.
For three months my fourteen-year-old daughter had been pushing her pork chops around her plate until they looked like gray gravel.
She told me she had a sour stomach from the lunchroom pizza or the well water down at the parish high school. She was getting thin in that sharp-angled way that makes a mother’s chest tighten up whenever she watches her child walk across a room. I figured it was just fourteen-year-old nonsense. I figured girls get particular about how they look and I figured wrong.
I opened the front cover on the edge of the mattress. My thumb left a smudge on the first page.
The handwriting was small and tight, cramped into the blue lines like she was trying to take up as little room on the page as she possibly could. Day one of not eating. If I’m thin enough, maybe he’ll stop.
The words didn’t make sense to my brain at first. I read them three times while the bedroom ceiling fan clicked overhead in that slow, uneven rhythm it had since the hurricane two summers back.
Maybe he’ll stop. My vision blurred right there by the laundry basket, the white wicker basket looking like it was melting into the braided rug. I didn’t cry. You don’t cry when the floor drops out from under you; you just stand there waiting for the rest of the house to fall.
I put the notebook in my apron pocket and walked straight out to the truck. I didn’t change out of my house shoes. The old Dodge started up with that familiar rattle in the tailpipe that sounded like a tin can full of marbles, and I drove the four miles into town past the crawfish ponds where the egrets stood still as fence posts in the brown water.
The St. Jude Parish High School office smelled like floor wax and damp wool from the morning fog rolling in off the bayou. Principal Arthur Landry was sitting behind his mahogany desk with a cup of black coffee and a stack of district attendance reports.
Arthur had coached my brother in track back in seventy-nine, and he always looked at people like he was grading their tax returns.
Mrs. Torres, he said without looking up from his papers. The bell rang for second period and the hallway outside filled with the muffled thud of locker doors slamming shut. Chloe is our best sophomore in English. Nothing is wrong here.
I didn’t yell. Out in the parishes, yelling just makes folks lock their jaws tighter than a mudbug in a drought. I pulled the blue notebook out of my apron pocket and dropped it right on top of his attendance reports. The tape on the spine made a dry tearing sound against the polished wood.
He looked down at the cover. Then he looked up at me with those small, flat eyes that had seen forty years of other people’s children coming and going. This is private property, Martha. Students lose things all the time.
Read page four, I told him. My voice sounded thin, like dry grass scraping across concrete.
Arthur didn’t want to do it. You could see it in the way his thumb rubbed the rim of his coffee mug. But he reached out one thick finger and turned the cover over. He read the lines where Chloe had written about the after-school tutoring sessions in the back storage room behind the gymnasium. He read the part about the locker combination and the coach’s truck parked by the drainage ditch after dark.
Arthur’s face didn’t go white. It went gray, the color of wet cement before it sets in the form. The skin around his mouth tightened until the lines looked carved with a dull knife.
He picked up his desk phone with a hand that didn’t quite steady itself. He didn’t call the superintendent. He didn’t call the school board president down in Houma. He dialed three numbers that every person in this parish knows by heart before they learn their own address.
He spoke low into the receiver, keeping his eyes fixed on the ink blotter between us. His voice was flat and official, the way he used to talk when announcing the parish track meet winners over the loudspeaker.
Sheriff, he said. We need someone out here at the north annex right now. Bring the county car.
I stood there by the secretary’s empty desk and listened to the hum of the old soda machine against the wall. Outside, the school buses were idling in the gravel lot, their diesel engines rumbling through the floorboards.
Chloe didn’t come home for dinner that night either, but the house felt different with the sun going down behind the live oaks. I had a pot of chicken and sausage gumbo simmering on the back burner, the roux dark as walnut meat the way my mother taught me down in Mathews. It smelled good and rich, filling up the kitchen until the grease on the stove felt warm and familiar.
When the screen door finally clicked around six o’clock, I was standing at the counter stirring the pot with a wooden paddle that had worn smooth down to a pale yellow in the middle. Chloe came in quiet, her schoolbag dragging against her shins, and she stood by the doorway for a long second looking at the stove.
She didn’t say anything about the notebook or the sheriff’s car parked down by the parish road with its lights off. She just took off her denim jacket and hung it on the back of the pantry door where it belonged.
You hungry, sugar? I asked her, keeping my back turned so she wouldn’t see my hands shaking against the wooden handle.
Chloe stood there for a minute, smelling the sassafras and the bell peppers floating in the broth. She pulled out a chair at the old pine table and sat down slow, her fingers tracing the grain of the wood where her grandfather had carved his initials back when the house was new.
I think so, Mama, she said. Just a little bit.
I didn’t rush. I ladled out a bowl of the dark broth with a big piece of sausage and some rice, setting it down right in front of her where the light from the kitchen window hit the salt shaker. I sat down across from her and watched the steam rise up toward the ceiling, steady and slow in the quiet house.
