Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

vegetables.
    “Then you have to sign here. And here.”
    Melissa scribbled her signature.
    “Okay, then why don’t you start from the beginning.”
    “You see,” Melissa said, “instead of going shopping first, Mom decided to visit me. She’d do that once in a while, just drop by without calling or anything. She’d say, ‘What, a mother can’t pop in and visit her daughter?’ She comes in and I’m in the kitchen, cutting up some celery and carrot sticks to put in a salad because I’m actually trying to eat the right things so the baby will be healthy, you know, even though I’d rather just be eating pizza and burgers, but I’m
trying
, okay? I’m really trying.”
    “Sure,” Wedmore said.
    “It’s like she was checking up on me all the time. She was always asking me these questions, like what’s happening with Lester and would I marry him and let him take care of us or was I going to move back in with her and Dad, like I really wanted to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d gotten any more information about the veterinarian school I’ve been thinking about going to one day because I like animals, like especially dogs and cats.”
    “I like dogs and cats, too,” Wedmore said.
    “Yeah. And so she was asking me about that and I said not yet, but I was thinking about it and she said what’s the holdup? Why don’t I see if I could register now, even though that makes no sense because I have to finish all my high school stuff first, you know, and she knows all that, right? But she’s saying if I applied early it would show them that I’m really interested and I said Jesus, will you just give me some room to breathe, you know? I got a baby coming in a few weeks and I got a lot on my mind and okay, maybe I’m thinking about my future, but do I have to do something about it right this very fucking second? And she said, it’ll take you like two minutes so why don’t you do it and I’ll cut up your celery and your carrots and she says I’m not cutting them up small enough anyway and she tries to take the knife from me and I don’t know what happened but I kind of snapped or something, you know?”
    “Sure,” Rona Wedmore said, nodding sympathetically.
    “So, like, I don’t know how exactly it happened, but the knife sort of went into her, and then I guess I must have put it into her a second time, and then she looks at me and she’s all like, what have you done? And then she falls down and she doesn’t move or anything.”
    “So what did you do then? Did you think about calling for an ambulance?”
    “I guess I went all crazy for a while, you know? But I managed to call my dad.”
    “Okay.”
    “I said something’s happened to Mom, you have to get over here, and he said, is it a heart attack or something, and I said no, and he said I should call 911, and then I said that I’d kind of stabbed her, and that she wasn’t breathing or moving or anything and then he was all ‘What?’ And he said I shouldn’t do anything and he’d be right over.”
    “To help you?”
    Melissa nodded. “So he got over real soon, and he was kind of all freaked out, and he took one look at Mom and could see that she was dead, and he said he had to think. I asked him, was I going to go to jail? Was I going to have my baby in jail, and he kept telling me to shut up, that he was thinking, and then he had this idea. He got Mom out of the apartment the back way and into her car, and then he told me I was going to have to follow in his car, drive along after him. And I followed him up to this lake, and he put the car on the ice and it went through and I guess I already told you about that part.”
    “And then what happened?”
    “Dad came back to my place and cleaned up. There was blood all over the place. It was horrible. It took hours to clean it all up. It’s a good thing my roommate was away or she’d have seen everything that happened and that would have been bad. I couldn’t help my dad with cleaning up. My head had really kind of exploded by this point, and I was super tired. All that had happened, and then having to drive up to the lake. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. When he was finished, he told me everything was going to be okay. He said I wasn’t going to have to go to jail.” She smiled sadly. “He said he loved me very much and he wanted everything to be okay for me. He said I’d done a bad thing but sometimes people made mistakes and he didn’t want my whole