"Stop it." She put the recorder down on the table so hard the battery cover popped off and skittered under the toaster. "Just stop it, Libby. This isn't a—this isn't a school project. It's not a mystery. It's an old cat in a strange house doing something stupid and I don't want to hear about it every single day. I don't want to hear it at all." She pulled the headphones off her neck and tangled them in her fingers. "Do you understand me? I do not want to hear it."
She was crying. I had seen her cry before, at Grandma June's funeral, standing very straight in her navy dress by the grave in Grove Hill Cemetery with the wind blowing her hair, crying without making a sound. This was different. This was the kind of crying where your face stops belonging to you.
I didn't know what to do. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen with my hands at my sides. After a moment my mother turned away and pressed her fist against her mouth and leaned on the counter by the sink, and her shoulders shook, and I said "Mom" once, and she shook her head without turning around.
So I went to the living room, because I didn't know where else to go. Oliver was sitting on the piano bench in the gray afternoon light, the way he sometimes did in the daytime now, like a person waiting for an appointment. He looked at me. I sat down beside him, and he let me, and I put my hand on his back and felt how thin he was under all that orange fur, the bumps of his spine like a row of buttons.
From the kitchen I heard the water running in the sink.
* * *
My father came home at five-fifteen with snow on the shoulders of his Carhartt jacket and a look on his face I'd later come to recognize, the look of a man who has been doing arithmetic all the way home. He found me still on the piano bench with Oliver asleep against my leg. My mother was upstairs with the bedroom door shut. Sam was still at the Kaczmareks'.
"Where's your mom?"
"Upstairs. She's upset. It's my fault."
He set his lunch pail on the dining room table and sat down on the arm of the couch, still in his jacket. "What happened?"
I told him about the tape. I told him about Mr. Dombrowski and the E-flat and lullabies. I told him about my mother's face. He listened without interrupting, his big hands hanging between his knees, and when I was done he let out a long breath through his nose.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. It's not your fault, Lib."