The One Thing by Marci Lyn Curtis Read Free Book Online Page A

got...distant. Hardened. There was something haunting and sharp-edged about her facial features. She refused
to see her friends, sulked in her room, stayed in her pajamas the entire day. She was suddenly this person I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Dad assured me that she was going to be fine,
that she was just going through some sort of grief process. A big part of her—her dreams, her talents, and her strengths—had died.
    But all that changed when I turned six and started to play soccer. I wasn’t a natural, like she had been. I spent long, arduous hours outside, banging the ball against the garage door and
practicing footwork. “You’re doing it wrong,” she told me one day from the back porch while I worked on my finish into a makeshift goal. When I glanced up at her, hair every which
way and clothes rumpled, I noticed something different in her eyes—a hope or a yearning or a need.
    I scratched a mosquito bite on my collarbone. “Can you help me?” I asked.
    And that was all it took.
    My mother’s demeanor started to improve as soon as she walked down the porch steps that day, and so did my soccer skills. With Mom’s tireless coaching, I became unstoppable with the
soccer ball between my feet, scoring eight, nine, ten goals per game. I loved watching the expression on her face when I scored. It was the same face I used to adore: bright-eyed, explosive, and
full of energy. Even back then I knew—I was her second chance. I could picture myself, nothing but sweat and smile and ponytail, running across the field toward her after the last buzzer of
the World Cup finals. To celebrate with her. To give her what she’d been cheated out of. To give her back the life she had lost.
    But six months and five days ago, all that changed. And she lost her dream again.
    I didn’t remember much from that first week in the hospital, but I remembered what was important. I remembered the steady rhythms of the machines beeping behind me. I remembered the thick
odor of disease that hung in the air. I remembered the way my head had felt—like it had been cleaved in half with a rusty hatchet. But most of all, I remembered overhearing a conversation
that hadn’t been intended for my ears.
    “Do you think she knows yet?” a nurse said as she adjusted my sheets.
    Something that sounded like heavy machinery rolled across the floor. I could smell coffee breath in my face as another nurse said, “That she’s blind?”
    “No. About her mom leaving town.”
    Heavy sigh. “She doesn’t know much of anything right now.”
    “What sort of mother just takes off while her kid is in the hospital? What sort of mother
does
that?”
    I didn’t believe it at first, that my mom had gone. But for several days running, as I lay in a medication stupor, I listened for Mom, waited to smell her linen perfume or to feel her take
my hand and whisper that everything would be okay. But she didn’t.
    Dad was there, though, more often than not—a solid, protective presence at my side, pleading to God under his breath. This was so typical of him. The praying. He was so characteristically
down-to-earth and no-nonsense that most people never would guess he prayed all the time. But I remembered it so clearly from my time in the hospital—Dad’s pleading for me, for Mom.
    For the happily ever after.
    And he got it. Almost.
    When I finally started to pull through, Mom appeared out of nowhere, complaining to the doctors that I needed more pain medicine and grumbling about the room temperature and making me wonder
whether I’d imagined it all. And by the time I got released from the hospital, I wondered if maybe I did.

I was sitting in front of my computer when the doorbell rang the next morning. I ignored it completely. I’d grown to despise answering the
door. It was too much of a crapshoot. Could be the Pope. Could be a serial killer. I had no way of knowing, no peephole to peer through. And anyway, since I’d rolled out of bed