Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia Read Free Book Online Page B

to the floor and pulled her fingers away, which reminded me of the bartender she told me about from Gibbie’s Pub, a man she’d met recently with her friends on a girls’ night out.
    “I’m thankful for this food,” she said quickly, reaching for her glass. “And for Lemon,” she added when she put the wine back down. “For Lemon being safe and healthy, even if she is, you know.” She shrugged one shoulder, a new habit she saved for times when we talked about the baby.
    When it was my turn, I said something lame and predictable about being thankful for having a family and food to eat and a house to live in, which was fine because I was pretty grateful for those things, but when it was Emmy’s turn, she froze, silent and shell shocked and gaping into her heap of mashed potatoes like no one else was there.
    “You’re up, baby girl,” her mom prompted, nodding at her.
    I thought maybe it was the joint she’d smoked in the backyard before dinner, but when I kicked her under the table and she looked me in the face, I could tell she might puke or might cry, sitting there thinking about her dad in Afghanistan a million miles away, imagining him eating sand and drinking warm water on Thanksgiving day.
    “Emeline,” her mother said.
    “It’s okay, she doesn’t have to go,” I said, hoping we could just skip over the whole thing and start eating, but I guess she snapped out of it when she heard my voice, because she looked down at her plate and said she was thankful Stella and I had invited them over for dinner since her mom burnt the hell out of the turkey the year before.
    I thought that was pretty smart.
    Afterward, Margie left to meet her boyfriend at the bowling alley, and the grown-ups went to the living room with another bottle of wine, so Emmy and I headed out for a walk around the neighborhood. Emmy had knitted a beanie for Dylan that week in home ec class, and she wanted to slip it into his mailbox and leave it for him as a surprise. He lived about a mile from my neighborhood, so we planned to sneak over and drop it off that night.
    “It’s good for me to exercise,” I reminded Stella when she hesitated to let us leave the house together. “It’s good for the baby ,” I said, just so I could watch her squirm.
    “Just around the block,” she told me. “And make sure you wear your coat.”
    It had rained that afternoon, so it smelled like water and roasting turkeys and maybe even snow, which made me feel better about it being Thanksgiving and Emmy being sodepressed. Snow would be clean and fresh, and I wished for the sky to split open and cover everything in white.
    “I saw Tony Adams yesterday down at the grocery store with his wife,” Emmy said as we walked down the hill past the house with the yellow shutters, and I knew she was thinking of her dad because Tony had worked with Bobby Elder at Ervin’s Auto Repair.
    And Bobby Elder had just died in the same city Emmy’s dad was stationed in.
    “He’s in the reserves too, you know? But there he is the day before Thanksgiving picking up a can of cranberry sauce and a box of mashed potatoes with his wife like nothing’s changed. Like all his buddies didn’t just get sent away on a school bus.” She kicked a stick out of the road, and I watched it disappear into a neighbor’s overgrown lawn.
    We were in front of the house with all the ironweed then, so I picked one out of the yard, which made Emmy smile as she tucked it into her hair. She looked a little less angry with the purple flower peeking out from behind her ear.
    “How come he’s not there?” I asked.
    “I guess he enrolled in the motor pool unit, since he worked at Ervin’s and all,” she said, which didn’t mean much to me because while Emmy had been researching the military during our library period once a week, I’d been alternating between Tom Robbins and childhood development books.
    “Motor pool?” I asked.
    “They work on the war trucks. Bobby Elder and Tony Adams