The Inner Circle

4

Seventeen years ago

Sagamore, Wisconsin

Running up the snowy front path, young Clementine Kaye bounced up the wooden staircase toward the small house with the dangling green shutter. She made sure her left foot was always the first one to touch the steps. Her mom told her most people lead with their right foot. “But hear me on this, Clemmi,” Mom used to say, “what’s the fun in being most people?”

Even now, at thirteen years old, Clementine knew the answer.

Reaching the front door, she didn’t ring the doorbell that went ding, but never dong. She didn’t need to ring the doorbell.

She was prepared. She had a key and let herself inside.

As the door swung open and the whiff of rosewater perfume washed over her, she didn’t call out or ask if anybody was home. She knew no one would answer. Her mom was still traveling-three shows in St. Louis-which meant she’d be gone until next week.

Clementine didn’t even worry about getting help with homework, or what she’d eat for dinner. She’d grown accustomed to figuring things out. Plus, she knew how to cook. Maybe tonight she’d make her sausage stew.

In fact, as Clementine twisted out of her winter coat and let it drop to the linoleum floor, where it deflated and sagged like a body with no bones, she was all smiles. Giving quick chin-tickles to two of the three ginger cats her mom had brought back from various trips, Clementine was still moving quickly as she burst into the overcluttered living room, turned on the CD player that teetered so precariously off the edge of the bookshelf, and inserted the disc labeled Penny Maxwell’s Greatest Hits.

Penny wasn’t just Clementine’s favorite singer. Penny was Clementine’s mother-who still had nearly three hundred copies of her Greatest Hits CD stacked in the closets, under the bed, and in the trunk and backseat of the car. It was yet another of Mom’s brainstorms that brought more storm than brain. (“If you do a Greatest Hits first, it’ll sell faster because people will think they’re missing something.”) Clementine didn’t notice. For her, this was life.

Indeed, as the music began and the sly hook from the trumpet seized the air, Clementine closed her eyes, soaking in the familiar husky voice that’d been singing her to bed-with this same song, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”-since she was a baby.

Mama may have, Papa may have

But God bless the child that’s got her own

Clementine had no idea that her mom had changed the words so it was about a little girl. And had no idea that Billie Holiday had written the song after a particularly brutal argument with her own mother, over money-which is what that’s got his own really refers to. But right there, as she stood there in the living room, swaying back and forth in the pretend dance she always did with her mom after school, thirteen-year-old Clementine Kaye wasn’t sad about being alone… or having to cook dinner… or even having to fend for herself.

She was prepared. She was always prepared.

But more than prepared, she was just happy to hear her mom’s voice.