There’s a man with a ponytail and a fat chin walking into the grocery store but I can’t tell Polly and Tana about him because I still have thirty seconds to go. If I hold my breath for sixty seconds Mr. Gullick won’t kill the rabbits and nobody will get shot.
I hit Tana’s arm and point at the murderer but Tana just says, “Ow! Stop hitting me!”
“Oh good,” Mom says, “eggs are on sale.” She cracks our windows and locks our doors and says she’ll be back in a minute, even though she’s never back in a minute.
As soon as she’s gone, Tana unlocks her door. She pulls up hard on the lock so we all know how much she hates it when Mom treats her like a baby.
“The murderer,” I say when I get to sixty seconds. “He went into the store.”
“I seriously doubt it,” Tana says, but then why is she chewing on her thumb?
Mom’s in the store a long time. All she had to get was cake mix for Dad’s cake.
“She’s probably looking for candles,” Tana says.
Polly takes her hair out of her mouth and says, “And eggs. Eggs are on sale.”
I’m holding Polly’s hand because she put it on my lap. “Look, see all those people coming out? That means Mom’s okay.”
“Why?”
“Wouldn’t they be screaming if the murderer was shooting people?”
The man with the fat chin! He’s coming out of the store! He’s carrying a grocery bag. He’s carrying a jug of milk. “There he is!”
“His chin’s not fat,” Tana says. “The murderer’s chin is way fatter than that.”
“I think it’s fat,” Polly whispers.
We’re looking the other way when Mom opens the passenger door and drops the grocery bags on the seat, so I kind of scream a little.
“I hope you girls weren’t fighting,” Mom says while she’s buckling herself in. “Here, keep these away from me.”
A bag of corn chips comes flying over her seat and lands on my lap. “Thank you, Mom!”
“Thank you, Mom!”
“Thank you, Mom!”
I can’t get it open, it isn’t opening.
“That isn’t how you do it,” Tana says, “you have to pull it. Give it here—”
“I can do it,” I say even though I can’t. I have no idea how to open this thing.
“Maggie, give it to me.”
Tana opened it up, all right. She practically ripped the bag in half, and now we’re all covered in corn chips. We’re eating corn chips off our laps, eating corn chips off our seats, banging our heads against the front seats to get corn chips off the floor.
Mom turns up the radio to listen to the news. There was an accident on the highway. A semitruck flipped over. There were casualties.
“Dead people,” Tana whispers, but I already knew that. I was already thinking about the dead people, I could see all their dead feet sticking out from under the semitruck.
“Someone hand me up a few of those corn chips,” Mom says.
“That’s too many,” she says when we all three pile chips into her hand, but she doesn’t give any back and now she’s driving one-handed, and what if a truck flips over, how’s she going to turn the steering wheel with one hand? “Aren’t they good, Mom?” I say so she’ll eat faster, so a truck won’t turn over and land on us. Please don’t let a truck land on us, please don’t let a truck land on us.