When Fancy Zing was eleven years old, her father went to Ireland for a year. The day that he was due to return she sat at the kitchen table to write a poem:
Today! Today! My Daddy’s Coming Home!
At last! At last! Fetch the Cheese and Honeycomb!
The thick black lead of the HB pencil slipped when the table wobbled, and the “Cheese” spilled its “s” across “Coming.”
Fancy examined the table. It was cracked, and scribbled with words such as MARBIE ZING and cow! She laid her hands flat and rocked the table to pinpoint the wobble, tore a corner from her poem paper, and crouched next to the table leg. As she crouched, she stopped and swirled her skirt, making it touch the floor in a parachute circle. It was a brand-new secondhand skirt, to Welcome Daddy Home.
Her mother had said, “New jeans?”
And Fancy had said, “I think I’d like a skirt.”
“A skirt!” cried Mummy. “Aren’t we growing up!”
Then she took most of the money from the St. Vincent de Paul box on top of the fridge, took Fancy’s little sister, Marbie, by the hand, and all three walked to the bus stop. Only, Mummy realized she didn’t have exact change for the bus fare, so they walked into Castle Hill.
At Pre-Loved Fashion, Fancy’s mother bought herself a pale green scarf, which floated in the air when she tossed it about, making up her mind whether to buy it (and she leaned toward Fancy and explained, “A little pink lipstick and a pale green scarf, and you’ll find you win any man’s heart!” “Will you?” said Fancy, surprised.) They also bought a purple T-shirt for Marbie, and for Fancy, a skirt in the colors of a rainbow lorikeet.
Now Fancy stood up from the floor, graceful, a flamingo, and felt the skirt rest against her legs.
The wobble was gone when she sat back down, and she took up her pencil again. But here was the problem. She could not write the poem too fast, because she had to be there, writing it, when her father arrived. She had to be sitting at the table, her pencil chatting poetry, frowning as she worked on the last few words.
He would walk through the door and say, “Fancy! Hi! Doing homework?”
And she would say, “Writing a poem to welcome you home.”
She would stand, her skirt would fall against her legs in a great spray of color, and he would say, “You’re all grown up!”
And she would say, gracefully, “Welcome home, Daddy.” And present him with the poem.
So she sat at the table and drew tiny flowers in the space between the lines of her poem. Then she wrote the heading WELCOME DADDY in bubble letters, and made a 3-D effect by shading around the edges.
The telephone rang, and Mummy shouted from the laundry, “Get that, would you, Fancy?” But Marbie came skidding through the back door, and grabbed it from just beneath her fingers. “Hello?”
Fancy whispered sternly, “Good afternoon, Marbie Zing speaking.”
Marbie shivered her muddy face and turned toward the wall. “Yes,” she said to the receiver. Then, “Ye-e-e-s! Of course!” Then, “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Bye.”
Fancy said, “You’re all muddy, Marbie. Who was that?”
“Nobody.” Marbie squirmed past and ran down the hallway.
“It can’t have been nobody,” Fancy murmured to herself. She followed Marbie at a more stately pace.
“Who was it?” Mummy asked.
“Guess.”
Mummy stood up slowly from the laundry basket, carrying a pair of Marbie’s shorts. She put her hands in both shorts pockets, one at a time, and took out crumpled tissues and dirty handkerchiefs. “Look at you, Marbie,” she said, shaking her head. “Look at your lovely new T-shirt.”
Marbie looked down and said “Oops!” seeing the purple T-shirt splattered with mud specks.
“Oops is right, young lady.” Mummy took an apple core from Marbie’s shorts pockets.
“Who was it?” Fancy demanded. “On the phone?”
“But it already had that mark on it when we bought it, remember, Mum?” Marbie licked her fingers and began scraping at the mud.
“Stop that,” said Mummy. “You’ll only make it worse. Here, take it off right away, and I’ll put it in with this lot. Marbie, who was on the phone, darling?”
Marbie lifted her T-shirt up over her face and from behind the purple she said, “Daddy.”
“Daddy?” Fancy cried.
“Hang on,” said Mummy. She had noticed something deep in the washing machine. Being quite fat, she had to reach over her stomach before she could get into the machine. Marbie and Fancy waited. “Hmm,” she said, coming back out and holding up a sock. She tossed it into the basket and turned around to reach for Marbie’s shirt.
“Yeah,” said Marbie. “Daddy. And he says he’s still at the airport now because the plane was late, and he’ll come home soon, okay?”
“Right,” said Mummy, bending to the basket once again. “We may as well get dinner started. No sense in us starving, is there?”
“I’ll start dinner, Mummy,” offered Fancy.
The chicken and chips were sitting on the counter, wrapped in a great white bundle. Fancy took the aluminum tray with its burned biscuit stains, and let the food tumble from the paper onto the tray. She switched on the oven and placed the tray on the center shelf.
Ceremoniously, she moved to the table, took her HB pencil, and crinkled her forehead at the poem.