CHAPTER 5

The next morning I zapped down the hall and rang Al’s bell. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. I put my ear to the door. Nothing but silence. Maybe she’d overslept. Her mother usually left for work about a quarter to nine. Maybe Al was packing and unpacking her suitcase one more time.

I rang again. The door opened. Slowly, reluctantly. Al stood there, looking at me. She still had on her pajamas.

“My mother’s just leaving,” she said. She made a face at me. Her mouth was thin and sort of pinched looking, the way it gets when she’s tense or nervous.

“I’ll come back after she goes,” I said.

“No, that’s O.K. Come on in,” Al said. Her mother was leaning toward the mirror, putting on her lipstick.

“Hello, dear,” she said. She always calls me “dear.” I used to think it was because she didn’t know my name. But once when Al was away I visited her mother and we became friends. She calls me “dear” because she likes me. I know because Al told me. I like her too. It’s easy to like someone when you know they like you. As a matter of fact, it’s hard not to.

Al stood and watched her mother, her arms folded on her chest, a frown furrowing her forehead. I stayed near the door.

“You come straight home tonight,” Al told her mother. “I’ll get dinner and you can go to bed early.” Al’s mother did look tired. And thin. But she’s always been thin. She says thin people look better in clothes than fat ones. When I first knew Al, she talked about wearing Chubbies, which are clothes for fat kids. She was always eating fattening things, as if she wanted to get fatter. Then Mr. Richards began feeding us carrot sticks and stuff like that, and Al lost a lot of weight. Right now she’s sort of in between. I’m skinny.

Al’s mother kissed her and then she kissed me. She kisses people more than my mother does. My mother is not a kissing person. She only kisses people if she’s known them practically her entire life. Or if she really likes them. Really likes them, I mean. She’s just not a kisser.

“You smell good,” I told Al’s mother. She always did, due to the fact she put so much gunk in her bath water (she called it a “tub”).

After she’d gone, Al said, “She doesn’t feel so hot. I tried to get her to stay home from work today. But she wouldn’t. She thinks if she stays home one lousy day, that store will collapse. But she has this cough that won’t go away. I’m worried about her.”

“I didn’t hear her cough,” I said.

“Stick around at night. She coughs practically all night.” Al began to pace. “Last night,” she said in a dark voice, “last night she went out with Mr. Wright and got home late. Very late.”

Mr. Wright is Al’s mother’s new beau. She gave Ole Henry Lynch the mitten and now she’s going out with Mr. Wright. When Al first told me about him, she said she thought he might be “Mr. Right.” In the olden days, Al said, girls used to sit on the front porch knitting and waiting for Mr. Right to come along. That was back in the days when girls got married a lot. They got out of school and then they sat and waited for Mr. Right. Bizarre. What I want to know is how did they know he was Mr. Right. He could just as easily be Mr. Wrong. Or Mr. Rong.

When I had asked Al to come for potluck last night with me and my father, she’d said she was sticking around every night until she left for the farm. I guess maybe her mother didn’t know Al was going to do that. Stick around, I mean. She must not have known.

“You want a croissant?” Al asked me. “Vi brought some home from this really classy pastry shop where everything is so expensive it makes your hair stand on end. But delicious.” The stuff is so delicious it practically makes tears come to my eyes. Vi is Al’s mother’s name. Short for Virginia. Al only calls her mother by her first name behind her back. She says she doesn’t think her mother is ready to be called Vi to her face. She’s probably right.

We each had half a croissant and a cup of tea.

“She ought to know better at her age,” Al said in a severe voice. “I told her she should know better. Especially when she’s not feeling so hot.”

Al suffers a lot from role reversal. I think having no father around or any kind of sibling, she sometimes feels as if she’s her mother’s mother and has to take care of her. I guess a lot of kids who live with just their mothers get into that habit. Sometimes, when Teddy is being more of a pain than usual, or when my mother and father have a fight and my mother has to lie down with one of her migraine headaches, I think it would be wonderful if it were just me and my mother. It would simplify life, I figure. This only happens to me once in a while, though.

Now I could see Al was worried about her mother. And from what she’d said, her mother had stood her up last night. I felt bad about that, but I didn’t say anything. We took our dirty dishes out to the kitchen. There was a pot on top of the stove.

“What’s that?” I said, bending down to sniff.

In a flash Al whipped the pot out from under my nose. She hurled it into the sink and filled it with water.

“Oh, that’s just something I tried out,” she said. “For last night’s dinner. For laughs. It didn’t turn out too well. As a matter of fact, it was a bomb. I could hardly get it out of the pan. I guess I had the heat too high. Either that or I didn’t add enough liquid.”

She bent over, scrubbing out the pot. Her hair hung down into the sink, almost touching the dirty water.

“Why don’t you let it soak?” I said.

She kept on scrubbing.

“It didn’t matter anyway,” she said in a muffled voice. “It was only me. I had eggs.”