"Are you chewing something?" he asked.
"My teeth hurt," Mom said, but she was getting all shifty-eyed, glancing
around the room and avoiding our stares. "It's my bad gums. I'm working
my jaw to increase the circulation."
Brian yanked the covers back. Lying on the mattress next to Mom was
one of those huge family-sized Hershey chocolate bars, the shiny silver
wrapper pulled back and torn away. She'd already eaten half of it.
Mom started crying. "I can't help it," she sobbed. "I'm a sugar addict, just
like your father is an alcoholic."
She told us we should forgive her the same way we always forgave Dad
for his drinking. None of us said a thing. Brian snatched up the chocolate
bar and divided it into four pieces. While Mom watched, we wolfed them
down.
WINTER CAME HARD that year. Just after Thanksgiving, the first big
snow started with fat wet flakes the size of butterflies. They floated
down lazily but were followed by smaller, drier flakes that kept coming
for days. At first I loved winter in Welch. The blanket of snow hid the
soot and made the entire town seem clean and cozy. Our house looked
almost like all the others along Little Hobart Street.
It was so cold that the youngest, most fragile branches snapped in the
frigid air, and very quickly, I started feeling it. I still had only my thin
wool coat with the buttons missing. I felt almost as cold in the house;
while we had the coal stove, we had no coal. There were forty-two coal
retailers listed in the Welch phone book. A ton of coal, which would last
most of the winter, cost about fifty dollars—including delivery—or even
as little as thirty dollars for the lower-grade stuff. Mom said she was