What Happened That Night

5 ~ c i n d e r e l l a

Griffin smiled at me and then bent down, and I felt his moist lips pressing against my cheek. “Anything for you, Cinderella,” he whispered against my ear as he pulled away, and I had to bite down on my lip to stop myself from reacting as he nonchalantly reached down and grabbed a sugar cookie in the shape of a glass slipper and winked at me as he bit off the heel.

.

I was sitting in the living room, curled against the arm of the faux leather couch with my knees brought close to my chest and my grandmother’s knitted red, white, and blue afghan draped over my lower body with my toes poking out from under the hem, a flash of the purple material of my sock in the bottoms of my eyes, when I heard the sound of my mother’s car pulling into the driveway as she got home from work as a vegetarian. Occasionally, she would come home with her fingers crisscrossed with several little scratches from provoked cats or agitated dogs, and she had a horror story about a ferret that she examined once that she told at parties whenever she introduced herself as a vet, which would usually lead to the hosts or one of the guests mentioning an odd behavior that their pet was exhibiting, such peeing on their pillows or only eating after seven p.m. or something. Sometimes, to my embarrassment, she would leave her card in random places of their house if she noticed a plastic bowl of water on the ground in the kitchen or a particularly gnawed table leg in the dining room.  One time, I noticed her card—complete with a cartoon drawn image of with a bird on her shoulder, an orange cat in her arms, and a Dalmatian puppy sitting at her feet—sticking out as a makeshift bookmark in one of the novels on an end table in the living room, her strawberry blond hair and the green head of a bird peeking out of the pages.

She stopped doing it, though, after Emily was arrested, but that might have been because people stopped inviting us to their evening cocktail parties in fears that their other two daughters would attempt to murder their sons in their backyards, so she stopped finding odd little places she sneak her card in. Maybe it just wasn’t as fun self-promoting herself and her veterinary skills with only one daughter to whine about how embarrassing it was that she left her card in the coat pocket of Mr. Ford. Maybe if Emily couldn’t groan about it too then it wouldn’t matter at all.

 And besides, who was going to take their sick cockatoo to the mother of a murderer, anyway?

When she entered through the front door, there were green, environmentally-friendly bags made from fabric dangling from the crooks of her elbows with the edges of boxed pasta and the top of the wrapper to frozen garlic bread from Pepperidge Farm peeking out the top as she stopped the snow from her worn Nike shoes that she bought from a thrift store a few years ago, supergluing the soles down last summer just so she didn’t have to go shoe shopping again and buy new sneakers. Her bobbed strawberry blond hair was brushed behind the backs of her ears, gold hoop earrings hanging from her lobes, and her cheeks were pink as she exhaled past her lips as she pushed her elbow backward to close the front door.

“Goodness, its cold out there!” she exclaimed, her voice breathy and her eyes glassy from the wind. She set the green bags down on the ground, a few inches away from the wet doormat with a reindeer on it, a clump of dirty snow concealing his red nose—Dad had bought the festive doormat during an after Christmas sale last year and decided that doormats didn’t need to be seasonably correct. “Weatherman says that we might get a couple of inches tonight. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a snow day!”

I smiled at her, her face flushed and grinning as she looked at me and unzipped her parka, the material swishing as she shrugged it off of her shoulders and grabbed it by the fur-lined hood and hung it up on the coat rack. I watched her, silently, as she peeled off her knit mittens that Grandma had given her as a present last Christmas and stuffed the violet mittens into the pocket of her parka before grabbing the groceries while simultaneously kicking off her boots and using her toes to neatly align them against the wall beside the door. She was humming a song she probably heard on the radio playing in the waiting room of her practice today as she ambled down the hallway with the bags, the smell of garlic already infiltrating the room, and I just sighed, quietly. My mother liked to pretend things—when we were kids and learned that Santa Claus wasn’t real, she told us that we could still pretend that he was real, or whenever we got catalogs in the mail, she told we could take a highlighter and mark everything that we pretended to buy—and, apparently, that remained the same despite Emily’s imprisonment.  She pretended that, despite this, we were still a happy, normal family that ate meals together at the table and helped each other out with homework questions and had family game nights or whatever.