“Maybe,” she whispered.
She pulled her sleeves further down until only her fingertips showed.
“She seemed a little tired on Friday,” I said, waiting for Emily to offer more.
“She was just resting,” Emily said, her voice dropping even lower.
The silver-backed brush slid through the last section of hair, smooth and silent, but the quiet in the room felt heavy, like the air before a late-summer storm.
Six days later, the gravel in our driveway crunched. Linda’s blue sedan was idling outside, its tailpipe puffing a thin stream of gray smoke into the humid Saturday morning air.
Linda walked into my kitchen without knocking, her gray hair pinned back, her eyes fixed on the linoleum floor. She was sixty-two but walked with a heavy, deliberate stride that always made the floorboards groan.
“We are going to the mall in Newark,” Linda said, her gravelly voice flatter than usual. “Then ice cream.”
“Emily already had breakfast,” I said, wiping down the clean counter with a damp sponge. “But she will always find room for mint chocolate chip.”
