Page 42 of The Hunting Moon
She just wishes she could have some memories to go with it.
CHAPTER24
After two hours at the Sunday library—and with a finished paper to show for it (thanks, Emma!)—Winnie drives straight home. At one point, she gets into third gear, andwhoa.She is so fast! A veritable unicorn galloping through the forest!
Winnie rolls to a stop beside the curb and shoves outside into the cool afternoon, where she discovers Mom in the midst of some hard-to-ignore handiwork: a long strip of green fabric with the Wednesday bear now dangles from the family’s front porch in all its ferocious, rampant glory. Curled in Latin script underneath is the wordFIDES.
Loyalty.
The flag billows in the afternoon breeze, staked into a newly installed flagpole holder while Mom stands on the porch beneath it, tightening a screw with a drill as orange as pumpkin.
Rmmmmm,the drill declares, followed by theck-ck-ck-ckof a screw that has reached its end. Mom is totally oblivious to Winnie’s arrival until Winnie calls out, “Mom?”
She whips around, orange drill in hand and cheeks flushed. “My favorite daughter!” She opens her arms to the flag. “What do you think?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before hopping down the porch steps to join Winnie on the sidewalk.
There, the two of them study the flag together: Mom with her head tiltedlike a hellion hearing potential prey, and Winnie with her jaw agog because it’s areally big flag.
“Huh,” Mom says. The delighted joy she’d first donned upon spotting Winnie now shifts to something embarrassed. “Do you think it’s too much?”
“Uh,” Winnie says, afraid honesty is not the best policy here, but also afraid that any lie she attempts will be spotted in an instant. “It’s… big.”
“But is ittoobig?” Mom taps the drill against her chin. “I’ve had it in the attic for forever and decided it was time to pull out the old thing.”
At the word “attic,” Winnie’s insides lock up.Atticis where all the cards from Dad were until this morning. Andatticis where Mom originally hid them instead of turning them over to the Council as she should have done.
Yet nothing in Mom’s current demeanor indicates that she has checked on whether the cards are still intact, and since Winnie would like to keep it that way, she is about to get wholeheartedly behind this ginormous flag.
“Is there such a thing as too big?” Winnie asks, tapping her chin much like Mom is doing with the drill. “I mean, loyalty can’t be too big, can it, Mom?”
A contemplative pause from Mom. Then a nod. “No. You’re right, Winnebago. Loyaltycan’tbe too big, and I want the Council to see that no matter what they decide, we are still Wednesdays.” She aims her drill toward the sky as she declares this, reminding Winnie of Dryden with his starter gun before the annual Hemlock Falls Fun Run—which Winnie now knows from her paper wasactuallyintroduced by Anthony Wednesday in 1984 for the Nightmare Masquerade.
“We are still Wednesdays,” Winnie repeats, hoping she sounds just as enthusiastic as Mom does. “Have you, uh… had any news on that front?”
Mom deflates slightly—though only slightly as she lowers the drill and sets off toward the back of the house. Winnie follows. “I havenothad any news, but I’m having dinner with Rachel tonight, so… I’m hopeful.”
“And that prompted you to pull out the bear?”
“It prompted me to pull out the bear.”
Mom and Winnie both aim for the shed, which has its door hanging wide. “I suspect,” Mom says as she returns the drill to a box of tools with her initials,FW,stamped in the side (a gift from her handy father, whotaught her everything she knows about maintaining the house), “that we will get good news at tomorrow night’s clan dinner. I just have a feeling.”
Winnie doesn’t point out that Mom frequentlyjust has a feeling,and it frequently turns out to bejust indigestion.In this instance, she might actually be right. Surely the Council can’t drag this out much longer. Then again, knowing Dryden… and knowing Erica’s mom Marcia…
Mom seems to sense something isn’t quite right with Winnie as they walk toward the kitchen door. “How about we make your favorite dinner?”
Winnie’s breath catches with salivary excitement. “Macaroni and cheese? The real kind?”
“The kind in a box is real too,” Mom says with a grin. “But yes, therealkind from scratch.”
“But I thought you had dinner plans tonight.”
“I do, but it doesn’t mean I can’t cook for you before I go. And I’ll even put onextracheddar and those bacon bits you like.”
And Winnie finds her breath is catching again, except this time, it’s more choked up, more pained. Dad left; Mom stayed. And not justremained-in-the-areastayed, but supported and loved and made non-box macaroni and cheese whenever she thought her daughter was down.
No one else but Darian did that.
No oneelse.
