When Amy got home after school on Monday afternoon, her mother was there. Because she worked so many Saturdays and Sundays, she usually had a day off during the week. She must have gone grocery shopping, because the house smelled wonderful—like hot, bubbly apples and cinnamon and brown sugar baked together.
“Apple pie?” Amy asked her mother.
“Apple crisp. The first cool day of the fall always makes me want to bake a pan of apple crisp. It’s ready now, if you want some. Todd can have his when he gets home from Isaiah’s.”
Wiggy padded over to greet Amy, as Amy shrugged off her backpack and headed to the kitchen. Maybe she should bring Violet over someday, just so Wiggy could make a big, wet, slobbery, tail-thumping fuss over her. Violet wouldn’t cry so much if she had a dog like Wiggy to love her. Amy couldn’t imagine a dog, or cat, or bird, or guinea pig in Violet’s bare and gleaming house, where Violet’s mother hovered over her every single minute as if she were a breakable doll—or one of those dolls that cries real tears.
“How was school?” Amy’s mother asked.
“Good. Ms. Ives read one of my poems to the class.”
“Which one?”
“A new one. It’s called ‘Autumn Afternoon.’ It starts out, ‘The sky is gray like billowing smoke. The leaves glow red and gold like flames.’ Todd said he didn’t understand some of it, but Ms. Ives said it had beautiful imagery.”
Amy didn’t tell her mother that Ms. Ives had said she was going to submit one of Amy’s poems to a contest. She wanted to savor it by herself for a while.
“That Todd,” her mother said fondly. “He’s an engineer, through and through. But I’m glad I got one poet.”
The house felt too quiet. “Where’s Dad?”
“He has a job interview.” Amy could tell that her mother was trying to keep her tone even, casual, unexcited. “It doesn’t sound like the perfect job—he’d be doing even more traveling than he used to—but …” Her mother’s voice trailed off.
“But if he got it, you could quit your job,” Amy finished for her.
“It’s not that. It would just be so wonderful for him. My job isn’t that bad, really.”
“It isn’t?” This was the first time Amy had heard her mother say anything good about her job. She still remembered the tears in her mother’s eyes when the rest of them had headed out to Todd’s first game together, and she had had to miss it because of work.
“I had an interesting conversation with Max yesterday. He’s thinking of offering some crafts classes, to bring more people into the store on Saturday mornings, and he asked me if I’d like to teach one of them.”
Amy tried to imagine her mother as a teacher. She was certainly a wonderful quilter, and knitter, and there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do with a glue gun. “What did you say?”
“Well, it might be fun. You know, I majored in home ec. Home economics. I had planned to teach high school—sewing, cooking, all of it. But I married your father right after graduation, and then you and Todd came along, and I loved being home with you so much that I never got around to teaching. And now—well, maybe I’ll do some teaching, after all.”
“So if Daddy got a job, you wouldn’t quit yours?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said it might be fun to teach a crafts class now and then, that’s all.”
Amy heard her father’s car, purring into the garage. She and her mother both froze. Please oh please oh please let the interview have gone well. She heard the car door slam. An angry slam? A joyful slam? You had to slam the Bug’s door pretty hard or it didn’t shut all the way.
Her father’s footsteps, in the hall, sounded slow and discouraged, but they always sounded that way now. Probably they’d sound the same no matter how the interview had gone.
Then Amy saw her father’s face. One Christmas, years ago, Todd had wanted a construction toy, and he had torn the wrapping off the biggest box under the tree, and it had turned out to be a dumb toy fire engine from Aunt Anne. His face then had looked the way her father’s face looked now.
“So?” her mother asked, and Amy could hear the bitter disappointment in the apparently neutral syllable.
“It was a sales job, dressed up as an engineering job. I’m an engineer, not a salesman. I’ve never sold anything to anybody in my life.”
“What do you think I do all day long at my job?” Amy’s mother asked in a dangerously quiet voice. “The Crafts Cottage is a store. We sell things. I sell things. What’s wrong with being in sales?”
“Nothing’s wrong with being in sales. But I’m not a salesman, I’m an engineer.”
“An unemployed engineer. An unemployed engineer who till today hadn’t had a job interview in two months.”
Amy couldn’t bear it anymore. She whispered to Wiggy, and even though Wiggy was half-deaf now, the old dog turned and followed Amy out of the room.
“Isn’t a sales job better than nothing?” Amy could hear her mother’s voice, growing higher with anger.
“Not this one,” her father replied, his voice painfully penetrating despite its defeated tone.
Amy went into her room and shut the door behind her. It slammed, but she knew her parents were too busy fighting to analyze the quality of the slam. She didn’t know why they had to fight. It was bad enough that the interview had come to nothing. Fighting about it only made it worse.
“Here, Wiggy.” Amy patted the place beside her on the bed.
Wiggy tried to jump up, but couldn’t make it. Amy got
off the bed and gave her a boost. And then she cried into Wiggy’s thick, soft fur.
“Tell us what your project is,” Julia coaxed Amy as Julia, Kelsey, and Amy were walking home together the next day after school. Amy had invited them over to her house, for a change. She could serve them leftover apple crisp. It felt so good to be part of the old threesome.
“It’s a secret,” Amy said lamely.
“Best friends don’t have secrets from each other,” Kelsey said.
Amy looked away. Was she still best friends with Julia and Kelsey, or were they just best friends with each other?
“It’s dumb, anyway,” she finally said.
“How dumb is it? Did Violet think of it?” Julia asked.
Kelsey didn’t give Amy time to answer. “Did you really go to Violet’s house? What was it like? Was everything there, like, all tearstained from Violet crying on it?”
“It was just a house.”
“If you don’t tell us what your project is, we won’t tell you anything else about Frizzy Fred,” Julia threatened.
If Amy never heard another word about Frizzy Fred, it would be fine with her.
“I told Violet I wouldn’t tell.” That wasn’t true; she hadn’t told Violet anything of the sort. But she felt a sudden, odd burst of loyalty toward her weepy partner. It was bad enough just being Violet LaFarge without having popular girls like Julia and Kelsey laughing at you all day long.
“You told Violet?” Julia sounded angry now. “Who are you best friends with, Violet or us?”
Neither, Amy wanted to say.
“I’m not friends with Violet. It’s just that—if you had a project as dumb as mine, you wouldn’t want to tell anyone, either.”
Julia and Kelsey exchanged superior glances.
“We understand,” Julia said.
“We really do,” Kelsey said.
Amy had a moment’s misgiving as she fumbled for her key. She hadn’t told her father that she was bringing Julia and Kelsey home with her. But she and Todd had never had to ask permission to have friends stop by to visit. Their friends were always welcome.
She managed to get the door open. “Hello?” she called out tentatively. “I’m home!”
There was no answer. Maybe her father had gone out on errands. Maybe he even had another job interview, but hadn’t wanted to say anything about it so as not to get their hopes up.
“Do you want some apple crisp?” Amy asked Julia and Kelsey eagerly. She’d heat it up in the microwave, then put vanilla ice cream on it.
“Sure.” Julia gave a shrug.
“Maybe a little bit,” Kelsey said. “I’m not that big on apples.”
Amy’s mother had vacuumed yesterday, on her day off, but the kitchen was a disaster area. The breakfast dishes were still sitting on the counter, and her father’s lunch
dishes, too, and an open can of Wiggy’s dog food, and a heap of newspapers her father must have been reading. Amy didn’t know if it was better to whisk the dishes into the dishwasher and the papers into the recycling bin, or to carry on as if the mess were invisible. Lots of people had messy kitchens—but not Julia, or Kelsey, or Amy herself, back before her mother had started working.
Amy decided to pretend the mess was invisible. The sooner she could serve her friends some tempting, warm apple crisp, the better. She scooped the apple crisp into three bowls—“Not too much for me, remember,” Kelsey said—and popped the first one into the microwave.
“Do you want ice cream with it?” Amy asked.
Julia and Kelsey nodded, but when Amy checked the freezer, there wasn’t any ice cream. Her father must have forgotten to add ice cream to the grocery list when he finished the carton, so her mother hadn’t bought any yesterday.
“I guess we don’t have any ice cream,” Amy said.
Julia gave another shrug.
“It’s not like I really like apple crisp, anyway,” Kelsey said.
Finally, all three bowls of apple crisp—a big one for Amy, a medium one for Julia, and a small one for Kelsey—were heated. Amy glanced at the cluttered kitchen table and said, “Let’s go sit in the family room.”
“I thought your mother didn’t let you eat in the family room,” Julia said.
That was the trouble when your friends knew your house rules almost as well as you did.
“Well, she’s not here now,” Amy said. “I don’t think my father’s here now, either.”
Amy settled herself in the rocking chair, letting her friends have the couch, and took her first big bite. The apple crisp wasn’t as good as it had been the day before. The topping had sort of stuck together in a gummy mass over the limp, soggy apples.
“So!” Amy said. “How are things coming with good old Fred?”
There was a strange, strangled look on Julia’s and Kelsey’s faces. Were they really not going to tell her anything more about Fred if she didn’t tell them about the sticky, glittery pinecones? But then Amy turned to see what they were looking at.
Her father was standing in the family room doorway. He was wearing his faded pajamas and ratty old bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved. His hair, grayer than Amy had ever seen it before, was standing up every which way.
“Hi, Mr. Davidson,” Julia said awkwardly.
Kelsey looked too horrified to say anything.
“I’m sorry,” Amy’s dad said without meeting Amy’s eyes. “I didn’t realize you had company. You girls were so quiet, I didn’t hear any voices …” His own voice trailed off.
Amy waited. There was another long, uncomfortable moment, and then her father turned and shuffled back upstairs in his old, favorite, broken-backed slippers.
The girls ate their apple crisp in silence. When they had finished, Amy noticed that there was still plenty left in Julia’s
bowl, and even in Kelsey’s, although she’d only had a few spoonfuls to begin with.
“I guess we’d better go,” Julia said.
“We have all that math homework,” Kelsey said.
Amy didn’t try to talk them into staying. She wanted them gone more than anything in the world.
If only her father would leave, too. No, that wasn’t right. If only her real, true father would come back again.