Ivy cruised up to her house on her bike one muggy afternoon, her book bag pulling at her shoulder, and frowned when she saw the Mustang in the drive. She jiggled the key in the lock and slipped inside. There was a sound of chopping from the kitchen. Water ran and a pot banged on a stove burner. Something crashed to the floor and her mom said dang softly, the way you said things to yourself when you thought you were alone. Ivy tugged on her braid and headed for the kitchen.

She opened her eyes wide when she got there, like she hadn’t noticed the car outside. “Mom! I thought you had to work.” Her mom’s boss had kept her on even after she’d had the police come. She’d said she knew Ivy’s mom had a child to support, and that she’d let it go as long as it never happened again. That had made her mom mad because nothing had happened as far as she was concerned. She’d only done what Lindsey told her was okay to do.

“Yeah, well. Not today.”

Her mother stood looking down into a pot; the room smelled of boiling potatoes. Ivy poured herself a glass of tea, added ice cubes, and took a tentative sip as if the amount of ice compared to tea was the only thing on her mind. “How come?”

Her mom didn’t answer and Ivy went back to the chair where she’d dropped her bag. She began stacking books on the table: Making Movies, Filmmaking for Teens, The Hero’s Journey.

“What’s all that?”

“Books.” Ivy had spent the afternoon at the library. Mrs. Grizzby was right. It wasn’t so easy to figure out how to make a movie.

“It’s summer vacation and you still can’t get enough of books?”

“Nope.” Ivy smiled to take the shortness out of her answer.

Her mom leafed through The Hero’s Journey, then went back to the first page. “‘There are only two or three human stories,’” she read. Ivy took a sip of her tea as her mom finished the quote: “‘and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.’”

Ivy studied her mom from behind the safety of her tea glass. If there were only a few human stories, she wondered why her mom had to star in such a sad one. And whether her own had to be the same. Ms. Mackenzie had said no. Ivy hoped she was right.

Her mother put her finger on the line of text. “Willa Cather. Sounds like catheter.”

“She’s a famous writer, Mom.”

“Famous, huh? Is that what you want to be? Famous?”

Ivy ran her thumb up and down the sweaty outside of her tea glass. Nothing she said would be right, but the answer was no. Famous wasn’t the point.

Her mother picked up Making Movies and riffled the pages so fast that Ivy was afraid she’d tear them. “Pretty swanky stuff there, Ives. Isn’t it too old for you?”

“It’s just a book, Mom.”

Her mother took Filmmaking for Teens off the stack. She flipped through a few pages and then let it fall closed too. “You’re not exactly a teen yet.”

Ivy shrugged one shoulder. She pretty often felt a hundred years older than she was. That was part of the reason she loved Prairie so much. With Prairie, she felt like a regular eleven-year-old kid. Or maybe it was that with Prairie, it seemed okay to be whatever she was. Ivy missed her with a sudden hard pang.

“So how come you haven’t been on the phone with the great girlfriend since she got back from down south?”

Ivy glanced up sharply at her mom. She could go for ages without seeming like she was paying any attention to Ivy at all, and then zip in like a hawk on her exact thoughts. “I don’t know.”

“What about the farmers’ market? I notice you didn’t go last Saturday.”

Ivy shrugged. The phone had rung on Friday while her mom was at work, and for reasons Ivy didn’t completely understand, she’d let the answering machine get it. It had been Prairie. Ivy hadn’t picked up, and Prairie hadn’t called back. Yet.

“She dump you, that what it is?”

“No!”

“You get tired of her?”

“No. She’s my best friend.”

“You don’t act like it lately.”

“Well, she is.” Ivy thought of the postcards tucked into her sketchbook, mountain scenes from North Carolina, all of them a little faded. They’d been coming in the mail all week; every one had been the best part of Ivy’s day. Ivy could imagine Prairie taking them out of a dusty rack in a far corner of the Vine’s Cove General Store, and grinning to herself as she wrote the messages.

The first two had come on the same day. SO MAD, was written in Prairie’s firm printing on one. In the bottom right corner, in small letters, she’d written 3/6. The other card said, LOVE, PRAIRIE. The numbers on that one were 6/6. The next day a card that said, I GOT arrived, with a 2/6 in the corner, and the day after that the message read, WERE HERE (5/6). Then there was nothing until yesterday when there’d been one more. WISH YOU, it said, and 4/6.

Ivy wished too. She wished everything was simpler. She wished she didn’t have so much to hide and that she wasn’t so mad deep inside over what she’d heard the Everses say. That they were sad for her. That she needed to be cut some slack.

On the stove, the potato water boiled high and lifted the pot lid. Foam cascaded over the edge of the kettle and hissed onto the burner. Her mom whipped around and yanked the lid off. She yelped as the steam burned her wrist.

“Are you all right?”

Her mom held her wrist under the tap. She looked exhausted suddenly and Ivy’s heart went soft. Her mom turned the tap off and studied her wrist, then peered into the kettle and shook it slightly. “I was going to make mashed potatoes for supper, but not now I guess. They’re all stuck to the bottom.”

“It’s all right. We can use the good parts.”

Her mom made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Scraping off the burnt parts. That’s about as good as it gets for people like us.”

Ivy began scooping unburned potatoes into a bowl. “How come you’re not at work?”

Her mother’s shoulders sagged. “I got fired today. The boss still thinks I’m stealing, which is bull. I never stole anything.”

Ivy nodded. Her mom was a lot of things, but a thief had never been one of them. She probably hadn’t taken the batteries. They probably had been on sale. They were almost expired, after all.

“I worked hard at that station. I was never late, I never took off early, I never slacked around like Lindsey does.”

Ivy gave her mom a sympathetic look. Her mom did always take pride in being a good employee even when she hated her jobs. It was one of those surprising things about her, like making her bed.

“I think Lindsey set me up.”

Ivy’s eyes went wide. “How?”

“Telling me to take the popcorn and jam—Lindsey said it was okay, but it wasn’t okay with the boss and it made me look bad. That was small potatoes, because now it’s liquor and cigarettes that’re missing. There’s money in that. I think Lindsey’s reselling them, but she told the boss it’s me doing it. Plus she’s mad because Dave’s always flirting with me. Not that I asked him to.”

“Dave? Yuck.”

Her mom smiled for the first time. “I know. Not my type.”

• • •

Ivy woke up late that night to hear her mom talking to someone. She tiptoed out of her room and stood in the hall.

“Yeah, you were right about her,” her mother said sadly.

There was a pause. Then she said, “I’m sorry too, George. I just—I have a temper, I always have. It’s the way I am, I can’t help it.”

Another silence.

Her mom laughed softly. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe we could.”

Ivy went back to bed and put her pillow over her head.