Dad got up to wash his hands as I made a squinty dash to the bathroom, where an unexpected discovery totally distracted me from my stinging eye. The pink plastic beauty box. I couldn’t believe Mom hadn’t taken it with her. And gut-wrenching as it was to find it there, in a weird way it was also kind of comforting to have a little box of momness left behind. So I immediately ran to my room to bury it under a stack of old stuffed animals at the bottom of my closet. Then, after the burial was complete, there was nothing left to do but flop onto my bed and lie there for hours, switching positions only when my hair started to hurt.

Every time I rolled onto on my side, I could see my dad standing on a chair in the backyard, his bottom half sticking out from under the hood of The Roast. To me, the motor home had become as unappealing as a milk jug left in the garbage too long, and I hoped hard that Dad was getting the useless old thing ready to be recycled. What if Dad hadn’t upset Mom with his bad plan? I would have had two whole weeks to change her mind about leaving.

All day long I lay there and wondered. Wondered if maybe she’d left behind a long red finger-string for me to follow. Or a trail of cotton balls. Or at least an unused wish or two.

I didn’t even remember getting the phone off my dresser, but I found myself holding it, smushing the MOM button again and again, like I needed to report to her that my head had fallen off my shoulders. The cracked phone just sat there dead in my hand, so I clicked it onto the charger just in case it could maybe be revived. In the shuffled stack of in-between pages Dad had salvaged and left on my dresser, I found the torn entry from the day before. I grabbed a pen, and for the first time ever, couldn’t come up with a single noodle.

At dinnertime, from the other side of the wall, I heard my dad searching for the Beefaroni pan as if he were juggling everything metal in the kitchen. My head throbbed with every clank. Minutes later, when the smoke alarm sounded, I rubbed my temples like grown-ups do when they’re plain old fed up.

“Hey! Pssssst! Cass!” All I could see of Syd were his eyes and nose above my windowsill.

“Syd, I’m really not in the mood.”

Truth is, I was a little glad to see Syd in the window, the scene being like a repeat of life as I knew it yesterday. I just didn’t want to have to tell him how the scene ended.

“What was all that fussing about last night?” he said.

“And what in the world is that noise?”

Syd’s bull’s-eye questions meant there was no putting it off. Jagged and painful as my words were going to be, they had to come on out.

“My mom is gone,” I said. “And burned Beefaroni.”

Syd raised up on his elbows. “Get out dot com!” he said. “What do you mean Aunt Toodi is gone?”

“I mean gone,” I said. “She went to live with another family for a while.”

Just saying it out loud made things more sickeningly real.

“You…don’t…mean…it,” he said.

“Yeah, well, my dad said sometimes compassion can take you down the wrong street,” I said, trying to sound like I remotely understood how doing good for people could turn so bad. Syd was silent so long, I thought he’d passed out standing up.

“That’s weird,” he said. “Compassion comes with a compass right there in it. Shouldn’t compassion always lead you in the right direction, then?”

Syd’s unwelcome opinion made my ears itch like crazy.

“Besides, can you already have a family and get another one?” he said.

“Can you be nosy and obnoxious?” I tugged hard at my earlobe.

“I mean, isn’t that like having a new heart installed and forgetting to take the old rotten one out?” he said.

“Are you calling me a rotten heart?”

“Sorry,” he said, and then got quiet again. “You staying in bed all day?”

“Maybe all week,” I said.

Syd looked like he was searching his mind top to bottom for something suitable to say.

“Hey, you know what, Cass? I heard about this guy in Miami that got all shark-bit,” he said. “They kept him asleep for a month until his body could handle the pain.”

“Sharks aren’t the worst thing in Florida,” I told him.

The smoke alarm went off a second time.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

Fighting back tears and befuddled by the alarm, I took a deep breath.

“Look, Syd,” I said. “Thank you for checking on me and all, but it’s real hard to talk about this right now, okay? I mean, let’s just say that there was a whole oceanful of wrength at my house last night.”

Syd got all squirmy with speechlessness. I could tell I’d pushed him beyond the level of tenderness that a twelveyear-old boy is comfortable with.

“Well, all I know is, you better not lay around all week while I’m sitting in summer school,” he fussed. “That would be big-time unfair.”

“Can it, Syd.” I rolled over and faced the dresser, trying to pretend I couldn’t see my cousin’s sun-speckled face in the mirror as he stood there and watched me like I might just fade away.

Just then, there came a buzzing that was so weak and so hard to hear over the blaring smoke alarm, I thought I was imagining it. That is, until Syd’s reflection said, “Well? Are you going to answer that?”

I didn’t have the time or the presence of mind to tell Syd how glad I was he’d stayed in the window. Instead, I bunched my bedspread and sheet into a pile on the floor, trying to get at the cell phone to answer it.

“Mom?”

“Cass? Baby?”

Crackly as it was, the sound of her voice gave me such a dizzying relief, I sank to the floor in the corner of my room. My thoughts raced. She’s sorry. She’s coming back. She’s turning around.

“Mom! I can barely hear you.”

Through the open window, Syd gave me a double okay sign, and I shooed him away.

“Mom, where are you?”

I shooed Syd again.

“Cass, baby, listen to me good, okay?” she began. “Your dad won’t let me talk to you on the other line, so I thought I’d try this one real quick.

“Listen, baby, there are things so hard to explain…like how some people need rescuing more than others,” she said with sobs filling in the gaps between the words. “But Cass, you can make a difference, and you will make a difference. Will you remember that? And someday I will visit your statue, okay?”

With all the figuring I could muster, I couldn’t make much sense of the things she said. They sounded more like pieces of a late-night TV movie you hear when you’re half asleep than a Mom thinking about coming home.

“But when—” I said, when a big schlak! came from the kitchen, followed by the sound of batteries rolling across the linoleum.

“What, Cass?” she said.

“When are you coming back?” I said, super loud. “And what do you mean I’ll make a difference?”

“Cass, you talking to me?” Dad hollered through the wall.

“No!” I yelled back.

“What?” he said.

“No! Sir!”

“Cass, I’m so sorry, baby, but I have to go,” Mom said, her voice trailing off.

Dad came stomping down the hall. Syd finally shooed.

“I love you,” she said. And when she hung up, there was total silence. No alarm, no Syd, no breathing. Just silence.

Dad opened my bedroom door to find me pressing the phone to my face, like maybe I could smell her through it.

“Was that your mom?”

“Yeah, and she said you wouldn’t let her talk to me.”

Dad didn’t even offer an excuse.

“Did she say where she was calling from?” he asked.

“How come?” I said. “Do you want to go get her?”

“What did she say?”

“That she loves…us.”

“Really? Was that it?”

“And that this is just an in-between.” I took the liberty of filling in a few of the blanks for Mom. Dad rubbed his face hard.

“So are we going to?” I asked.

“Going to what?”

“Go find her.”

Dad reached down and took the phone from my grip, like I was a baby who’d gotten hold of a chocolate bar and now he was going to go hide it from me.

“Try to get some sleep, Cass. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Soon as Dad’s footsteps faded, I ran to the open window and looked for Syd, but he was gone. I stood there alone and gazed at the part of the night that wasn’t hidden by a big nasty RV, and I tried again and again to begin my front-and-back-of-forever prayer, but not one person would show up for the parade in my head.