Silence.

“Tell me or I tell the grown-ups.”

“I swiped them from my mom’s purse,” Damian confessed.

I rubbed my eyes. Sighed again. “You guys. Wow.”

“Please don’t tell,” pleaded Patrick, almost in tears. “My dad would be so mad.”

“You know why he would be mad?” I asked. “Because only morons smoke cigarettes.” I looked at Damian. “Sorry, Damian, but your mom’s a moron.”

He didn’t argue.

I held up the Virginia Slims pack. “These kill you. It’s slow so you don’t really notice, but they will kill you. They also make your breath smell bad and turn your teeth yellow and wreck your voice and stain your fingers and empty your wallet and about a hundred other terrible things.”

“We were trying it out once,” Ty said. “We weren’t going to start smoking or anything.”

“The girls at school think it’s cool,” Patrick said defensively.

“Right. The girls in your middle school. Whose center of the universe right now is the fricking Rainbow Loom. I’ll tell you what, I would never, ever kiss a guy who smoked. Uck.” Not that I would ever kiss a guy period, I thought wistfully. This was a few months before the infamous Nathan Thaddeus Dillinger II.

Damian and Patrick looked thoughtful.

“So are you going to tell Mom?” Ty asked.

I thought about it for like 2 seconds. “No. But only if you guys promise me you’ll never do something this moronic again.”

“We promise,” they said immediately.

I made them pinky swear. The most solemn oath.

“Lexie?” Mom yelled from the back porch. “Boys?”

I turned to the 3 amigos. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go straight into the house and say I told you to wash your disgusting boy hands. Which you will do. Then we have to do something about your breath.”

“We could use Dad’s mouthwash,” Ty suggested.

“Too obvious. I’ll bring by a box of Tic Tacs while you’re in there. You’ll come out and have dinner, yum yum yum, and then Damian, you’re going to go home and tell your mom you stole her cigarettes, and give them back.”

Damian’s face went pale. “What?”

“You’re going to tell her you stole her cigarettes because cigarettes kill people, and you don’t want her to die. She’ll forgive you if you put it like that. Okay? Got it? Do we understand the plan?”

3 nods.

I marched them down the ladder and out of the playhouse.

“You have like the best sister ever,” I heard Patrick say to Ty as we crossed the yard.

“She’s all right.”

And that’s the last thing I remember about Patrick. Saying I was the best sister.

Wishing that he had a big sister like me.

22.

MOM IS MAKING A GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE.

Her hands tremble slightly as she trims the beans with a sharp knife, but she doesn’t cut herself. She scoops the beans up and delivers them into a pot of rapidly boiling water. She waits until they’re tender but still slightly crunchy. She drains them over a sieve in the kitchen sink. The steam fogs her glasses. Then she leaves them hot in the sink to open a can of cream of mushroom soup, which she whips together with a cup of milk, a quarter cup of french fried onions, a dash of salt, an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper, and a tablespoon of melted butter. She pours the frothy mix into a glass baking dish. She adds the green beans, stirs them gently, then covers the dish with foil. She puts the dish in the oven. She sets the timer.

We wait.

Outside, a single chickadee is perched on a branch near the kitchen window, chirping. Clouds are moving across the sky. Snow is falling in slow motion.

The timer goes off. Mom dons a pair of mitts, reaches into the heat of the oven, and draws out the dish. She sets it on a hot pad on the counter and carefully rearranges another layer of french fried onions around the edges.

I’m reminded of Christmas. Mom used to make green bean casserole at Christmas. She was never a top chef or anything, but it was a good casserole. I would watch her, just this way, as she put it together.

This was the part where my hand would snake out and steal some onions.

This was the part where, if she caught me, Mom would smack me on the wrist with her wooden spoon. Then she’d take a handful of onions for herself, and she’d smile, and I’d smile, and we’d eat them like it was some kind of marvelous secret between us. They were salty and left a layer of grease on my tongue, and I loved them.

There was no green bean casserole this Christmas. For obvious reasons. We ate pity food for Christmas this year.

Mom finishes dispensing the onions and returns the dish to the oven, uncovered this time. She resets the timer.

We wait.

The timer rings again. Mom gets the mitts and takes the casserole out. The onions on top have baked to a lovely golden brown. The air smells savory and rich. She puts the dish on the counter to cool.

At the sink Mom scrubs her hands in a way that reminds me of a surgeon prepping. She dries her hands and removes her apron to reveal her simple black sheath dress. She smooths the fabric down her sides and pads off on bare feet with unpainted toes to retrieve her shoes, a pair of plain black pumps. She gracelessly leans against the table to slip them on one foot at a time. Then she goes to the counter and measures out a new layer of foil for the casserole. She takes a black marker out of a drawer and writes From Joan and Alexis Riggs across the top. She folds it over the casserole. She puts the dish into an insulated bag that will keep it warm.