The Poores were unaware, of course, that their absent father had mailed a package to his daughter the day before, or that Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby had made their way back from Switzerland and would soon arrive in the same neighborhood where they lived. The Willoughby house, an old-fashioned four-story residence that had been their home before they left on their ill-fated vacation, was just a few blocks away.
No one called it the Willoughby house, though. Everyone had forgotten who had once lived there—that it had been an ill-tempered banker and his equally ill-tempered wife, along with their four children. Tim Willoughby, on his way to and from the confectionary factory, always had his chauffeur take a different route so that he didn’t have to glimpse the house and remember his boyhood years. When they became adults, he and his siblings had created a fund that memorialized Henry and Frances Willoughby by supporting good causes of various kinds. But the sad truth is they had never really missed the ill-tempered couple who had gone on a vacation without them and been turned into human popsicles on an Alp thirty years before.
And the Poores? They had never heard of the Willoughbys. The only neighbors that interested the Poore children were the people who lived next door, Richie and his parents—and his grandfather—in the mansion. Winifred and Winston were fascinated by the sprawling giant of a house with its turrets and balconies and even gargoyles.1
Winifred Poore had counted the mansion’s windows several times. The number was always the same: thirty-seven.
“We only have six windows,” she had sighed one afternoon. “And they have thirty-seven.”
“Think of it as an opportunity for reviewing math,” her brother had suggested. “Thirty-seven minus six equals . . .”
“I don’t have enough fingers for that.”
“You’re not supposed to count on your fingers,” Winston pointed out. “What if you didn’t have fingers? A lot of poor people don’t.”
“Why not?” asked Winifred. “Why don’t they? Fingers don’t cost anything. You don’t have to buy fingers.”
“Of course you don’t. But poor people have to work in factories with dangerous machinery. So their fingers get chopped off.” Her brother, with a grin, held up one hand with two fingers folded it over so it looked as if they were missing.
Winifred shuddered. But she picked up her pencil and did the math problem on the back of a torn piece of newspaper. “Thirty-one,” she said. “They have thirty-one more windows than we do. It isn’t fair.”
“Of course it isn’t fair,” Winston agreed. “But we should—” He hesitated, looking at his mother and sister meaningfully until they both chimed in.
“Make the best of it.” It was something the family often said. When Father had come home looking gloomy and said, “I didn’t sell a single set of encyclopedias, and I stepped in a mud puddle and ruined my only pair of shoes,” they said it. When dinner was nothing more than a thin beige stew with a few limp carrots and a bruised potato, they said it. And now, when Winifred sulked about the comparison of windows, they said it again.
“What exactly does that mean, to make the best of it?” Winifred asked.
“I don’t know,” her brother replied.
Mrs. Poore smiled as she stood at the sink wiping the cereal bowls with a ragged dishtowel. “It means, dear, that some people, like us, live in tidy little houses and count our pennies and eat gruel for breakfast. But we don’t complain. And we don’t envy others.”
“You’re Marming, Mother,” Winston pointed out.
“Sorry.”
“You mean don’t envy Richie next door? Who has thirty-seven windows? And probably Belgian waffles with real maple syrup for breakfast?” Winifred asked gloomily.
“Exactly. We must feel happy for Richie.”
“Oh, Mother,” Winifred sighed, “you are such a Marmee.”
Wandering into their yard after breakfast, Winifred and Winston watched through the fence as Richie bounced his basketball a few times, then set it carefully on the porch. He went inside and returned after a moment with a large toy car. Winston glanced down at the chipped, three-wheeled toy car in his own hand. His father had carved it for him. Winston was fond of his little car, but now he deposited it on the ground and moved closer to the fence to see the amazing device that Richie had just set on the lawn.
“Wow! Is that yours, Richie?” he called.
“Yes. It’s a remote-controlled replica of the exclusive Lamborghini Veneno Roadster,” Richie replied.
“Did you have a birthday?” Winifred asked, coming closer to the fence herself, though she wasn’t terribly interested in cars.
Richie looked surprised. “No,” he said. “I just saw it online, and so I ordered it.” Then he added, “I’m not allowed to do that anymore. Because of dentists.”
“What did dentists do?” Winifred asked.
“I’m not sure. Something. And now we’re destitute.”
“What does that mean?” Winifred asked.
“It means ruined.”
“Ruined how?” asked Winston.
“I don’t know,” Richie replied.
“Well, you still have this fabulous car,” Winston reminded him.
“Yeah,” Richie said, and looked down at it. “The steering wheel controller’s on the porch. It has a forty-nine-foot range, plays revving motor sounds through its integrated speaker, and guides the model in all directions, accelerating it to a maximum five point six miles per hour.” He leaned down, checked the positioning of the car, then went to the porch and activated the controls. The car moved across the neatly trimmed grass, then made a U-turn, came back to its original starting point, and stopped. “The iconic Lamborghini bull adorns the hubcaps and hood, the LED head- and taillights illuminate, and the exterior is painted the same shade as the full-size version,” Richie recited.
He sent the vehicle around the yard again. Then he came down from the porch, picked up the car, and went back into his mansion.
The Poore children turned away from the fence and sat side by side in their unkempt yard. Winston picked up his little toy car and maneuvered it in and out among some weeds, carefully avoiding a line of ants moving in meticulous order toward their anthill.
“If we had a computer, we could order things,” he grumbled.
“If we had money, we could get a computer,” Winifred replied.
“If Father had a real job, we’d have money,” Winston pointed out.
There was a long silence while they felt a little guilty for criticizing Father. He was a kind man and it wasn’t his fault that no one wanted outdated encyclopedias.
Finally Winifred said, “If we had jobs, we’d have money.”
“But who would hire us? Who needs us? We’re useless.” Winston poked at the ants with a twig and forced them to rearrange their tidy marching line.
Winifred considered that. Then she nodded toward the mansion on the other side of the fence. “I think maybe he needs us,” she said.
“Who?”
“Richie. He’s lonely.”