The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead. Of course, no one had bothered to clean up yet; there were mysterious pieces from deep in the engine scattered all over the road and the green field nearby was covered with smashed yellow cupcakes. Lorraine, still agile at sixty-eight, set her travel mug on a fence post, lifted the barbed wire, and climbed on through. The field would belong to the Grayson’s, she supposed. They still grazed a few cattle, despite the fact that their income came almost exclusively from the axle factory two towns over. Here and there, a cupcake had survived whole, its yellow face still decorated with two black eyes and a thin slice of smile. How did it happen? She remembered the wild flowers that seemed to blossom in her mama’s lawn all in the same day, remembered Sheree tumbling out of the car in that checked blue playsuit, the one Lorraine had cut and wrangled out of a scrap of white sale bed sheet. Sheree must’ve been seven at the time, her cheeks spotted with excitement, one of her long red-brown curls caught in a button and stretched out nearly straight, as she declared that Easter had come early this year, there was candy poking out all over the yard. How did some fail and some survive and how did He pick and choose between them?

Lorraine located a likely stick and scraped off a stray streak of frosting that had stuck to her shoe. It was suspiciously spreadable — probably the cheap kind made with shortening instead of real butter, if she knew Kris’ mom. She pictured the wiry bleached blonde pot-smoker working late in the cramped kitchen of her trailer frosting cupcakes for the Lady Rangers' bake sale, then sending poor Kris out at the last minute like that to drop them off at the high school while the gym door was still unlocked for the track team.

And just as others had blamed her, she blamed the mother — who else was there to blame? In the twenty-nine years since Sheree’s accident, Lorraine had tried every other possible angle. She blamed her husband for teaching the girl to drive before she was fifteen. She blamed her remaining children — Sally and Trev — for their good health and sound instincts. She blamed her sister’s girl for naming her baby daughter after Sheree before a proper generation had passed, thereby stirring up bad luck for Lorraine’s youngest. She blamed the WPA workers who had built the road, the French trappers and traders who had settled the county, the glaciers that had formed the ridge. She got as far back as God, and then she blamed the Rock of Ages too — dirty old man with clay-stained fingers and halitosis, who didn’t let anyone know the breath of life stank like rotted egg salad at the end of a long late summer family reunion in the sun.

Reprinted from Meridian 11 (2003)
Copyright © 2003 by Trudy Lewis

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