When Mom got home that evening, she looked in the refrigerator. "What
happened to the stick of margarine?" she asked.
"We ate it," I said.
Mom got angry. She was saving it, she said, to butter the bread. We
already ate all the bread, I said. Mom said she was thinking of baking
some bread if a neighbor would loan us some flour. I pointed out that the
gas company had turned off our gas.
"Well," Mom said. "We should have saved the margarine just in case the
gas gets turned back on. Miracles happen, you know." It was because of
my and Lori's selfishness, she said, that if we had any bread, we'd have
to eat it without butter.
Mom wasn't making any sense to me. I wondered if she had been looking
forward to eating the margarine herself. And that made me wonder if she
was the one who'd stolen the can of corn the night before, which got me a
little mad. "It was the only thing to eat in the whole house," I said.
Raising my voice, I added. "I was hungry."
Mom gave me a startled look. I'd broken one of our unspoken rules: We
were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly
fun adventure. She raised her hand, and I thought she was going to hit
me, but then she sat down at the spool table and rested her head on her
arms. Her shoulders started shaking. I went over and touched her arm.
"Mom?" I said.
She shook off my hand, and when she raised her head, her face was
swollen and red. "It's not my fault if you're hungry!" she shouted. "Don't
blame me. Do you think I like living like this? Do you?"
That night when Dad came home, he and Mom got into a big fight. Mom
was screaming that she was tired of getting all the blame for everything