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Show woodworth/ou yelled, "Mind your own damn business," and got into the car. It was all so different, to hear them both using language like that, when they had always been so careful not to, and had always told us not to. Mom cried most of the way home. Not sobbing. Just sitting there, looking straight in front of her, with tears coming out of her eyes as if they were coming from;some place very far away. I was afraid to touch her. No one talked the whole way back to Westfield, and I kept trying to make myself stop thinking over and over, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Marty hears someone coming up the stairs, and can tell by the way the banister creaks that it is her mother. At the top of the stairs, she says, "Marty?" and Marty can picture her, leaning into her bedroom, looking around. She can hear ice cubes in a glass. "Good night, Marty," her mother says, but Marty doesn't hear the footsteps pass the door to Jake's room. Instead, she hears the groan of the floor as her mother crosses into her room. Marty freezes. She can hear the footsteps going around her room, but no other noises. She can't tell why her mother is in there, or what she is doing. She gets up quietly, goes to the door of her room, looks in. Her mother is lying on her bed, her face turned from Marty. The glass is on the bedside table, between the frame with the pictures of Rachael, Megan, and one of Jake as a baby, and the water glass, left over from the night before, with bubble;* climbing the sides. One arm is straight out behind her, the other curled towards her face, away from Marty's view. She could almost be sucking her thumb. Marty decides then that she will use the money in her trust fund to find an apartment of her own. She goes back to Jake's room and sits there, reading his old paperbacks, until Ned comes upstairs and carries her mother to |