Upstairs

 

NO ONE WAS in the bakery. Upstairs, Odette found her family sitting at the spindle-legged wooden table in front of the fireplace, working on a puzzle. Rex had sorted out three piles of blues in different shades, and Dad was working on doing the edges. Mom just kept picking up random pieces and trying to fit them together, a strategy that should have been ineffectual. She was strangely lucky, though, finding more matches that way than Odette would have thought statistically possible.

Grandma Sissy sat in the soft armchair nearby, her feet on a leather footstool, a fuzzy soft blanket across her legs. Georgie seemed right at home on her lap, curled into her usual little ball.

They looked like a picture, the whole bunch of them. Right then, no one could have guessed at all the bad stuff—Dad being laid off, and Mom getting so irritated with Odette, and Rex’s furies, and Grandma Sissy dying. Odette stood in the doorway and watched them like she was looking at a painting hanging in a museum, standing extra still so no one would notice her.

Then she remembered afresh about the sunken phone and how Harris would probably be trying to get ahold of her, wondering why she wasn’t answering or returning his call, and the warmth she was feeling seeped away. Grandma Sissy looked up, as if she could sense the change in the atmosphere, and saw her.

“There you are, darling,” she said. “You are sopping wet.”

Odette shrugged. “I guess I’ll go take a bath.”

“That sounds nice,” Grandma Sissy said. “Use the purple bath salts in the medicine cabinet. They smell like violets.”