CHAPTER 14

“I hear them!” I cried, and ran to open the door. My mother was standing there, smiling at me. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her.

“Mom! Welcome home!” I hugged her, she hugged me. Then she spied Al behind me and gave her a big hug too. My father came out to greet her, and they went into a clinch that lasted for about sixty seconds. We stood and watched. They didn’t even know we were there.

“Wow,” I heard Al say under her breath. Teddy scuttled in, bowed down by the weight of his rucksack that made him look as if he were about to scale Mount Rainier.

“Hey, wimp,” I said, “you look as if you’d shrunk.”

“How’d it go, Ted?” Al asked. “You catch any rattlers or pythons up there in darkest Connecticut?”

Teddy shot us a dark look. “Lots of stuff going on up there I can’t talk about,” he said. “Lots,” and he trudged off to his room, bent almost double.

“What’s he got in that thing—rocks?” Al said.

“I wonder if Teddy’s mixed up with the Mafia or the C.I.A.?” I said. We went into the kitchen to see to dinner so my mother wouldn’t have to lift a finger her first night home. She looked great—rested, tan. “You look cute, Mom,” I told her. She’d had her hair cut while she was away. It was very short and curled around her face. My mother is a very attractive woman, if I do say so.

“That haircut makes you look about fifteen,” my father told her, smiling.

“She doesn’t look any fifteen to me,” Teddy said, chewing with his mouth open. I always think I should miss Teddy more. I try to. I try to imagine what life would be without him. Once I read a story about two brothers, and one of them died, and how bad the other one felt. It brought tears to my eyes. I made a promise then and there to never be mean to Teddy again. To cherish him and love him. But every time I saw him chewing with his mouth open, all my promises were broken. I felt bad about those broken promises but figured they were Teddy’s fault, not mine. If he hadn’t been so repulsive, he would’ve been a lot easier to cherish.

My mother asked Al a little about her mother, how she was, what the doctor had said. “We’re going to the hospital tomorrow to see her,” I told my mother. “I’m going too.”

We cleared the dishes off while my mother and father had coffee. I made Teddy help load the dishwasher. He likes to stand and hurl plates and glasses into it from as far away as possible. He figures if he smashes enough stuff, he won’t be asked to load it again. I told him to clean up his act or I’d break both his legs. He shaped up a little but not much.

“Bath time,” my mother said, yawning. “I’m tired,” she said. So she and my father excused themselves and went into their bedroom to watch TV. I told Teddy to take a bath and that I’d call Dad if he gave me any trouble. Then he was in there for so long, not making a sound, I thought maybe he’d drowned. All he was doing was making surface dives to explore the bottom of the bathtub.

“Look at this place!” I hollered. “I just cleaned it yesterday! Now look at it.” I made him dry himself and scrub out the tub and mop up the floor. By the time he’d finished, he was glassy-eyed with fatigue and didn’t even fight me when I told him to go to bed.

Then Al and I went to bed too and read for a while.

“Maybe tomorrow we can write a joint letter to Polly,” I said. “First you write a paragraph, then me. How about it?”

“O.K.,” Al agreed. She turned on her side and pulled up the sheet.

“You going to sleep already?” I said.

“No, I’m just thinking,” she said.

“What about?” I asked. She didn’t answer so I read another chapter. Then she said in a slow and dreamy way, “If I marry Brian, maybe we could live right down the road from my father and Louise and visit them every Sunday. And they’d ask us to stay for dinner. We’d probably have roast chicken or roast beef with lots of gravy and farm-fresh vegetables. And pie à la mode.”

“Boy, if Mr. Richards could hear you planning to pig out like that,” I said, “he’d hand you a mess of carrot sticks and tell you to go to it.”

“I’d get to know the boys really well,” Al went on in the same slow and dreamy voice, “and we’d be a big family. Closely knit, as they say. And if my father and Louise wanted to go to the movies or anything, we could sit with the boys. Then, when we had a family, our own kids, my father and Louise could sit with them.”

I put down my book. There was no sense in trying to read when Al was on a life plan kick.

“This wouldn’t happen for a long time,” she said, turning around to look at me. “Not until I made sure my mother was taken care of. If she marries Mr. Wright or whoever she marries, then she could come visit us too. But I would never just go off and leave my mother. I’d see she was settled down first. She’d have her husband, I’d have Brian.” Al lay on her back and smiled up at the ceiling, imagining how it would be.

Boy. One minute we’re best friends, my father takes her out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and everything, the next minute she’s practically wiping me off the face of the map.

What about living down the hall from each other? What about all the times she was in the pits and I cheered her up? What about knowing Mr. Richards? Now she was getting her mother married off and planning her life with Brian. Just as if I were some wimpy kid whose last name she didn’t even know who sat behind her in history and copied her notes.

Just as if I were a casual acquaintance.

Boy.