We’re eating our Cocoa Puffs, Mom’s making herself a slim shake.
Wait. “What about Dad?”
“He’s fine,” Mom says, “he’s just at work.”
“Are you sure? How do you know? Did he call you?”
“Oh great.”
I wish Tana wouldn’t say Oh great after every single thing I say! It’s not like I want to be worried about Dad!
Mom says yes, even though I know it’s not true, Dad didn’t call her, Dad never calls her.
“Did they catch the guy?” Tana asks.
I didn’t think about that! What if they didn’t catch him! What if he’s still running around shooting people! And why does Tana get to ask about the murderer and I don’t get to ask about Dad? Oh great, I say, but only in my head. Next time I’m going to yell it!
“Maybe he’s hiding in the bushes,” Polly whispers. She’s twisting her hair how she does before she puts it in her mouth.
“I guarantee you he is not hiding in our bushes,” Mom says. “We’d have heard him hollering.” She means from all the branches scratching him up. She means me last year when I went into the bushes looking for Polly’s yellow pony.
“SlimFast should be called SlimSlow,” Mom says. “But I did read somewhere that muscle weighs more than fat so maybe I’m just getting stronger.” She winks at us so we know it’s okay to laugh. Mom doesn’t always think fat’s funny.
“Can I have some?” Tana says.
It’s the pink flavor, the Strawberry Supreme.
“Me too?”
“Me too?”
“You girls eat your breakfast,” Mom says, so we do, but we want the SlimSlow, we want to lick the Strawberry Supreme off our lips.
There are only seven puffs left in my bowl. I need one more puff to make it even.
“You can’t have the prize!” Tana yells. She tries to grab the box away but I make my hand big inside so she can’t get it off my arm.
“I’m not getting the prize! I’m getting a puff!”
“Maggie,” Mom says, “don’t stick your hand in there, pour them out,” so I pour and hope for even.
Mom sits down with us and we watch the pink go up and down her straw. Polly watches with her tongue out. Polly’s tongue is always out. Unless she’s eating. Unless she’s talking.
“I want to lose weight too,” Tana says.
“Oh no you don’t. Don’t you even say that. You girls are perfect just the way you are.”
“So are you!” I say.
“So are you!” Polly says.
“Well,” Mom says. She holds her hair clip between her lips and pulls her hair back behind her neck, getting it all neat and straight, but she always leaves some out, I feel bad for the hairs that get left out. It’s the clip with the green stones, the one she got in Mexico before we were born.
“Tell us the story,” Polly says. Probably it’s the clip that made her think of it. Sometimes it’s watermelon and sometimes it’s driftwood. Sometimes it’s the hungry for your touch song. They’re all part of the story of Mom meeting Dad, and Mom and Dad falling in love and making us. Then came you three, that’s how the story ends. Of course, we were too young to know anything is somewhere in the middle. I don’t really know what that means but she says it every time.
“Let’s see,” Mom says with her lips still holding the clip. Her lips didn’t move at all, not even a little bit. “Let’s see,” I whisper, trying to keep my lips still too. “Let’s see,” I whisper again.
When her hair’s ready, she holds it together with one hand and takes her clip out of her mouth with the other. Polly and I get out of our chairs and stand behind her so we can see how she does it. She does it without looking, her fingers know how to do it all on their own. Polly pretends she has a clip and gathers her hair together. I do it too, even though I have short hair so it takes more pretending.
“Your dad was walking up the beach with his friends.”
“And there you were,” Polly says.
“There I was.”
“Pretty as a piece of driftwood,” I say.
“Well, that’s what your dad said. Didn’t sound like much of a compliment to me, but that was before I knew about your dad and his whittling.”
“Carving,” Tana says, because Dad doesn’t like whittling. Dad says whittling is like thumb twiddling.
“Carving.” The way Mom says it, we know the story’s over. Mom doesn’t always finish the story.
I don’t want to go outside because of the murderer but Mom says it’s going to rain later so we should get out there and run around. Also it’s the last day of summer, which I wish she wouldn’t have reminded me because tomorrow I have to go to middle school and I really really really don’t want to.
“That man is long gone,” Mom says. “He’s probably halfway to Arkansas by now.”
I see Ms. Olsen’s map of America. I see the pork chop with the colored squares. The murderer is running over the squares on his way to Arkansas. He runs over Arkansas and Tennessee and I can’t remember what comes next, and over Alabama and Florida and right into the ocean. “Help me! Help me!” he yells, so a sailor throws him a rope and pulls him onto the boat. Then the murderer gets his gun out of his pocket and shoots the sailor in the heart.
Tana won’t let us hold on to her so Polly and I hold on to each other. The murderer is everywhere. He’s behind the garage, he’s behind that tree. He’s up on the roof aiming his gun at our heads. Please don’t let the murderer shoot our heads, please don’t let the murderer shoot our heads.
When Gordy Morgan’s dog barks, Polly and I scream, we say that dog gave us heart attacks. I don’t like that dog. He has one blue eye and one white eye, he looks like a wolf, and one time when Gordy was taking him for a walk he started barking at us and Gordy said, “Good dog.” He said, “Should I let you off your leash so you can eat up those girls?” and all the time we were running home, Gordy’s dog was eating me up, eating up my arms and my legs, chewing up my ears.
At first I thought that was Gordy coughing but it was only Mr. Gullick. Mr. Gullick lives on the other side of the fence, behind our house, and right next to Mr. Gullick is where Gordy and his dog live. I like when Mr. Gullick’s outside because he can protect us from Gordy and now he can protect us from the murderer too.
There’s a hole in the fence between our yards and if we hold our eyes real still we can see Mr. Gullick’s rabbits. If you push your face against the wood you can see inside two of the cages, but we know there are more because one time Dad left the wheelbarrow out, the one he used to push us around the yard in before we got too big, and we stood on top of it. I could only get my nose up on the fence so all I saw was grass, and all Polly could see was sky, but Tana told us Mr. Gullick has like six cages, all in a row, and a table with a knife on it, probably for chopping up food for his rabbits. I wish we had a ladder in the garage. I wish there were more holes in Mr. Gullick’s fence! I don’t know why he needs such a tall fence anyway. Tana said it’s for keeping dogs out, but you don’t need a fence that high to keep out dogs.
Sometimes when we look through the hole we see Mr. Gullick’s big old belly. He wears these tight white undershirts that are kind of see-through so you can see his belly hair underneath, all smashed into swirls like how Polly draws smoke blowing out a chimney. One time Tana said that he looked pregnant, like he could have a baby any second now, which is kind of true and kind of funny, especially when she said a hairy baby, but kind of mean too.
Tana’s hogging the hole again, she’s always hogging the hole. “Awww,” she says, “they’re snuggling.”
“Let me see!”
“Stop pushing! You’re going to give me splinters!”
Polly says, “I want to see too.”
It’s all true, all our yelling and pushing, but it’s also part of us making the girl sounds that sometimes make Mr. Gullick say, You girls want to hold one?
“Awwwwww,” I say when Tana finally lets me have a turn at looking.
“This one here’s about three months old.” When I look up, Mr. Gullick’s big hairy hand is hanging over the fence and there’s fur sticking out between his fingers.
I get to hold her first. She’s a little white bunny, the sweetest little bunny, the softest little bunny. “Aw, she’s so cute!”
Polly’s petting bunny’s head with her finger and Tana keeps saying, “My turn! My turn!” and trying to grab her away.
“I just got her! She’s shaking, she’s scared.” I can feel her heart thumping under my finger. More like humming than thumping. Like how your throat feels when you hum, when you put your fingers on your throat and hum.
“You girls keep her over there a minute while I get this cage cleaned.”
In the grass, we sit shoe to shoe. We make our legs into fences. I pick some grass and hold it out for bunny. Tana makes kissing sounds and Polly whispers, “Come here little rabbit, come here little bunny bunny.”
“What’s her name, Mr. Gullick?” Tana hollers at the fence.
Mr. Gullick never names his rabbits but we keep asking anyway because one time his grandkid named one of them Jesus and we thought that was so funny. Jesus the rabbit!
“Doesn’t have a name,” Mr. Gullick hollers back.
I name her Snow Cone and Tana names her Cloudy and Polly names her Cloudy too, so Tana changes her name to Sugar and we all say, “Sugar! Sweet sugar, sweet sweet sugar. Here Sugar, here girl.”
We play with Sugar until Mr. Gullick says, “Okay now, let’s have her back,” then we all three pick her up, we all three carry her back over to the fence. We are six hands holding her up in the sky for Mr. Gullick.
When our hands are empty we count how many hairs stuck onto our skin. Tana has four and Polly has three and I have five. I look in the grass for another hair so I’ll have six but I don’t see any.
“What are you doing?” Tana says. “Maggie’s looking for rabbit poop!”
“Here,” Polly says, “you can have one of mine.” She picks a hair off one of her fingers and sticks it onto the back of my hand so now I have even.