Sato called. It’s the first time that boy ever picked up the phone and dialed my number. I am so happy. Momma’s working out back in the garden. We haven’t seen Miracle for two whole weeks and things are going pretty good. So him calling makes this week extra special.

“I was thinking ’bout you,” he says. “And I didn’t have nothing else to do, so I called.”

“Good.”

Sato says he’s on his front porch watching two little girls jumping double Dutch.

I walk outside. Look up and down the street for Miracle. She ain’t there.

“You get your money back from the class trip?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

Not enough people signed up for the trip, so they canceled it. I gave Dr. Mitchell’s money to Zora, so she would know I’m not a thief.

Sato covers the phone and talks to somebody else for a minute. “I wasn’t going nohow. Here.”

He hands the phone to somebody. It’s a boy. A little one. His brother, I guess. He is so small, all he says in the phone is “Hi. Hi.”

“That’s my baby brother. He’s three. A twin.”

I walk over to the snapdragons and pull three out the dirt. Hold ’em under my nose and smile at how sweet they are. Sato asks about Momma. How she’s doing. I tell him about the letters.

“I wouldn’t write to somebody that smashed me in the head,” he says.

I walk down the steps and over to the back fence. Momma’s carrying a big plant with its roots hanging out like thin, white veins. “I don’t think she mails ’em.”

Sato says that’s worse. “To write letters you know you ain’t sending. So what she writing ’em for?”

I go back to my seat and look at Miz Evelyn waving at me. I turn around and go inside. “They shoulda let us go on the class trip. I wanted to go someplace different. Not be around here all the time.”

It turns out that Sato didn’t have enough money to go. He says he was gonna have a party all by hisself when we took off for Canada. “I already started stashing things. Chips. Cookies. Pop.”

I ask Sato how it feels to have other people in the house besides grown-ups. To not be the only child. He says it ain’t bad. But he’s the oldest, so it feels like he’s the only one sometimes. “My ten-year-old brother shares a room with me. He’s too young for me to talk to about guy stuff. But if my mom gets on my nerves, or my dad is gone too long, me and him talk about that.”

Usually I talk to my girls about everything, but since I took Zora’s money, I don’t feel right calling Ja’nae and Mai up. Or telling ’em that I’m scared something else bad is gonna happen to Momma and me. They might ask me about the money. And I don’t want to talk about that.

“When I’m grown, I’m gonna have two kids. A boy and a girl,” Sato says.

“I’m having six.”

“And I’m gonna live in a big house, with four bathrooms, eight fireplaces, and a refrigerator so big it’ll have four doors on it.”

I go to my bedroom, lay across my bed, and put my feet up on the wall. “My house is gonna be all by itself. Not attached to the next house, like this one. And it’s gonna be in the woods.”

“In the woods? Don’t ask me to visit you.”

“Well. Maybe not in the woods. But surrounded by trees. Bad things don’t happen to people in houses with lots of trees nearby.”

Sato says I’m nuts. “In the movies, it’s the houses in the woods where people end up cut to pieces and—”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot. Then I want to live in the city, in a house not connected to another house. I want lots of flowers and lots of children . . .”

“And a husband, right?”

“Right. And Momma, too. She’s gotta be there.”

Sato’s back to talking ’bout his house. How his wife ain’t gonna work, like his mother. “She’s gonna stay home.”

“What if she don’t want to? What if she wants to be a lawyer, like Zora’s mom? Or have two jobs, like my mother?”

“Your mother likes working all them jobs?”

I have to think a minute. “No. But if she had one good job, not two that don’t pay all that well, she would like it, I bet.”

Sato’s mind is made up. His wife’s gonna stay home and take care of the kids. “Not work and cook and clean and care for a million kids, like my mom.”

I tell Sato that I’m gonna do both. “Work, take time off and have kids. Then go back to work when they’re ten.”

Sato says he could be down with something like that. But he ain’t sure. I lay on my stomach and quarters fall out my pocket. For a minute, I want to tell Sato everything about the money I stole off Zora and Miz Evelyn. How sometimes I really do wish my father was here living with us. Taking care of us.

Momma calls me. She needs help in the garden. “I gotta go.”

“Me too, Raspberry Curl.”

I bite down on my lip. “You gonna call me back sometime?”

Sato’s quiet. “Sometime,” he says, laughing. “Sometime I just might call you again, Raspberry Swirl.”

I don’t hang up when he does. ’Cause I can still hear him, saying my name.