r. Holden made cauliflower cheese for an early dinner. It tasted better than it should have, all warm and bubbly. My mother’s contribution: a sickly and cold wild rice salad. Me, I made orange juice from a can I’d found in the back of the freezer (it must have been the previous tenants’ since we never bought juice in a can, or juice in a carton, or, actually, ever juice). After adding water and mixing, it still tasted like waxed cardboard; I added a cup of brown sugar to disguise the fact.

“Our first dinner as a family,” Dr. Holden said. “Cheers.” He held up his plastic cup of saccharine, reconstituted orange juice. We all knocked glasses. “Now to business: Enid, we should discuss what you’d like to call me.”

“Not dad,” I said quickly.

Dr. Holden laughed. “No. Not even my own kids —” He stopped and looked at my mother. I busied myself with a crunchable ice cube. “That is to say, my other children have always called me by my first name.”

My mother clicked her tongue then used it to try and push out an errant piece of rice stuck between her back teeth.

“So, why don’t we do that,” Dr. Holden said.

“I don’t know your first name.”

“Thomas.”

“Thomas.” I ran the two syllables around in my mouth. “Not Tom?”

“Tom is fine, too.”

“And I guess I’ll be calling you Margery now?” I asked my mother.

“Good gracious no,” she said. “Mother is fine. Names should establish relationships.”

“Even with Tom? You’re going to call him your boyfriend? How about your husband?”

Dr. Holden smiled. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Is there a reason everything must revolve around you, Enid?” my mother snapped. “We are eating dinner.”

“He brought it up.”

At which Dr. Holden jumped up, the side of his pants dancing.

“Phone,” he explained, fishing it from his pocket. “I’ve got to take this,” he said to the screen on his phone. “It’s Sivi.”

“Sivi?” I asked, but Dr. Holden had gone outside to answer his call.

“Dr. Sivaloganathan,” my mother explained.

“Her first name is Sivi?”

“No. It’s a nickname from Sivaloganathan.”

“So, his children call him by his first name, he calls his wife by her last name. What does he call you?”

“Nurse Strange, mainly.” The creases on my mother’s forehead came out. “I guess Margery, too.”

“Maybe he’ll figure out something sweet to call you based on your last name.”

“It’s hard to make Strange into something cute.” My mother grabbed a toothpick to keep working at the stuck grain of rice. “Since you’re now one of Dr. Holden’s acknowledged offspring, things will get easier. Perhaps we’ll go to Europe in a few years. Not this summer.”

“Is this what all this is about? Money for holidays?”

“I know you think that I’m your adversary, Enid, but I am trying my best.”

I doubted that.

My mother cleared her throat and stared at me expectantly. Right: dinner and banter, my mother expecting me to perform my half of the dance.

“I want to discuss you reading my notebook,” I said.

“I won’t read your notebook again without written permission in triplicate.”

“Actually, let’s discuss some of your comments.” This I would segue into her defacement of my notebook. “On the phone, we were discussing the nature of truth and causation.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Specifically, that if I wrote stuff down, it would come true.”

“Now, that —”

“So I can make the faeries do things, although I tried yesterday without success. Is there some trick or wait time before my commands are enacted? Or does it only work in specific magical, or non-magical, areas?” Might as well see if there was any information I could get out of mother to use against the faerie that had allowed Dr. Holden in here.

My mother sighed; the brush of air rippled through my eyelashes. “You’ve misunderstood, as usual, what I was trying to tell you.”

“Well, whose fault is —”

“I will give you an example, since, clearly, abstracts give you fits of imagination. I once overheard a teacher say that I was bad at math.”

“But you’re amazing at math.”

“Yes, but for a long time I thought I wasn’t because I couldn’t believe that something someone else noticed about me could be untrue. Thus, a truth was constructed, yes?”

“Yes?” I repeated haltingly.

“What I was trying to impart to you is that your book will become truthful if those reading it believe it to be truthful.”

I thought about this. “I don’t think that’s any different than what I said.”

“Mmm.”

“Now I just need to write that I am their god, and when the faeries read it, they’ll do everything I command.” I flung my arms out triumphantly, still holding on to my fork. Cauliflower splattered the wall. “Yes, I know.” I stood up. “I’ll clean it. And speaking of someone making messes in someone else’s property —”

“Done.” Dr. Holden popped back into the dining room. “I’ve done it. I’ve told Sivi that it is conclusively over between us.”

“You broke up with your wife —” my mother began.

“Over the telephone?” I finished. “And I was talking with my mother when you cut me —”

“That’s extraordinarily crass,” my mother interrupted. “Even for you.”

“There’s hardly a non-crass way to tell your wife of thirty-one years her doctor husband is leaving her for a nurse like we’re all characters on a soap opera.” Dr. Holden thunked himself back in his chair and picked up his fork.

“Even so.” My mother put her head in her hands. “I’d have thought we would do everything in person.”

“The cauliflower was good,” I said, wiping some more from the wall. “Cleans up good.”

My mother winced at the grammar, but kept quiet.

“Enid,” Dr. Holden said. “Perhaps there is someplace you can go so your mother and I can talk privately.”

“Not really. It’s my house too, you know. You can’t just make me leave.”

“You rent this house, so it isn’t yours. It belongs to the landlord.” Dr. Holden poked a finger to his chest. “Me. And I’m asking you to leave.”

“What? How?” I burbled. “You own this house? When did he buy this house?” I asked my mother. “Recently?”

“I’ve owned it for about six years now, as an investment, not that this past year I’ve been making much return on it. My tenants,” Dr. Holden said, gazing adoringly at my mother, “aren’t always prompt with the rent.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I told Dr. Holden. “And here’s more you never bothered to tell me,” I said to my mother.

“Enid, please,” sighed my mother. “You are not the only person for whom this adjustment is difficult.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dr. Holden asked.

“Well, I’m sure this isn’t particularly pleasant for Dr. Sivaloganathan,” I suggested.

“Enough, Enid,” Dr. Holden shouted. I’d never seen him rattled before. His cartoony cheeks puffed in and out as he stood, hands on hips.

“So, that’s where you get that from,” my mother said.

“I don’t look like that when I’m angry,” I told her.

“Eh.” My mother wiggled her palm in a so-so gesture.

“Maybe the hands part,” I conceded.

“Stop it, both of you. Enid, out,” Dr. Holden said.

“I’m still eating.”

“Fine, you stay. Margery, we’ll talk in the yard.”

Never in a million years would my mother agree to have a private conversation out where just anyone, including faeries, could hear it.

But she was taking her plate into the kitchen, rinsing it off in the sink.

Putting on her sensible shoes.

Grabbing a sweater in case it got chilly.

“Eat your dinner, Enid. I’ll be back soon.”

Between mouthfuls, I made sure to seethe.

Direct conversation with faeries is unlikely. I assume time passes differently for faeries, creating an insurmountable barrier to spoken communication. I suppose you could record your voice and speed up/slow down the recording, depending on whether time goes faster or slower for faeries relative to us. However, since recording oneself is a relatively recent phenomenon, there is little to say whether faeries would react favorably to a recording. They may be frightened, insulted, amused, or all at such an attempt. For best results, you should probably stick with written communiqués, especially when asking (or telling) faeries to do something. However, in my experience, unless it’s something the faeries want to do anyway, they probably won’t do it.

It felt good to have my notebook back.

“Any mail for me?” I called out when they returned. I’d seen them out the window at the community mailbox.

“No, Enid, there was not.”

“Why are you still getting an electric bill from your old house?” Dr. Holden whispered to my mother in the hallway. “You don’t live there anymore. That’s like throwing your money away.”

“It’s shut off at the breaker switch. We don’t pay anything.”

“Still —”

“And if the realtor shows the house, she can flip the switch and then show prospective buyers around with the lights on, rather than off.”

Into the front room they came.

“We’ve been talking,” Dr. Holden began.

“We would like to include you,” my mother added.

“But we all need a cooling-off period,” Dr. Holden interjected.

My mother frowned. “That’s not —”

“Margery, this is my fifth time through raising a child. I think you should defer to my judgment in this matter.”

“And at least his second time leaving his wife,” I mumbled.

From the glimmer of amusement on my mother’s face, I was pretty sure she’d heard me. Dr. Holden, not so much.

“Tonight, as your mother and I have so many details to discuss, I suggest you spend the night at Mrs. Delavecchio’s again.”

“I’m not sure excluding Enid —”

“No. This is an adult matter —”

“Enid can be very mature for her age —”

“It’s all right,” I jumped in. “I don’t mind. In fact, I think I’d prefer to go to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house.”

“Really?” my mother asked. Her frown deepened.

“Really.” Not really, but their conversation about the farmhouse electric bill had given me an idea.