"Me, too," Flip said.
She kneaded her feet against her hot water bottle and pulled her
blankets up under her chin and the moonlight came in the window and the
snowlight and the room seemed very bright and cold. She burrowed into
the pillows and Paul wrapped his eiderdown tightly about him so that
only his face and a lock of dark hair showed, and they giggled with
pleasure at being there together, warm and comfortable and awake, with
all the days and nights of the holidays stretching out before them.
"I'm hungry _again_," Paul whispered.
"I am, too," Flip whispered back.
"Are you hungry enough to do anything about it?"
"No."
"Me either." Then, after a moment, Paul whispered, "Flip--"
"What?"
"You remember your mother, don't you?"
"Yes," Flip said. She had started to say 'of course' but stopped
herself because Paul didn't remember his mother.
"Tell me about your mother," Paul asked in a low voice.
"Well--" Flip paused. She still found it difficult to speak about
her mother because it seemed to make an ache in her chest and she
remembered how engulfing that ache had been when she got out of the
hospital and came home, her knee still in a cast. When she was able to
walk again she would go into her mother's closet and shut the door and
lean against her mother's clothes and hold them to her and bury her
face in them because they seemed to retain the lovely fragrance she
always associated with her mother. And one day she went to the closet
and all her mothers clothes were gone and the closet was empty and her
grandmother came in and said,
"What are you doing there, honey?"