Chapter 7

“Ami, what’s the cross street?” Dad peered out the car window. He’s really nearsighted.

“Willow Road.”

“We’re looking for Danvers.”

“I know.” I touched the little pearl studs in my ears. Mom had given them to me for my twelfth birthday. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to find the street where Ms. Linsley lived. We’d drive right by without seeing it. By the time we realized our mistake, it would be too late to go over there.

Just as I was thinking that, the engine started huffing and choking. “What’s going on?” Dad rapped on the dashboard with his knuckles.

I held on to the seat. The engine sounded like it wasn’t long for this world. For a moment I was hopeful. I saw the whole thing—Steinbeck breaking down. The tow truck. Too late to go to Ms. Linsley’s. Dad would call her and—no, even better, he’d forget to call. Then Ms. Linsley would get mad, tell him he was thoughtless and had ruined her dinner. Next, a big fight. And that would be that. The quick end of a short friendship.

Steinbeck bucked again. “White gas,” I said. “The last time, all it needed was a can of carburetor cleaner.”

“Probably right,” Dad said. He pulled into a gas station. I poured the white gas into the tank while he went inside to check our directions. Danvers was just around the corner, a long, steep hill with houses way up above street level on both sides.

Once, when I was really little, I was walking up a hill with my mother and I started to cry, because I was sure we were both going to fall off the top and get smashed. She picked me up and carried me. I remembered how she smelled, like cold air and tangerines.

“Dad?” I said. “Dad, don’t—” I didn’t know how to say what I felt. I pressed my head against the car window.

He looked over at me. “Ami, are you okay? What’s the matter, honey? What is it?”

“I don’t think we should go there,” I said to the window. “You’re still married to Mom. Can’t you make up? Let her come home. Talk about your problems.”

“Ami, I’m not keeping Pat from coming back.”

The way he said Pat—“If she came home tomorrow, would you be glad?”

He didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Truthfully? I don’t know, honey. It’s just not that simple, anymore.…” That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring.

After that, it didn’t seem like there was anything else to say.

Ms. Linsley lived in a tall old building at the very end of the street. We went up a steep flight of crumbling cement steps. “Hello, Pelter people.” She was waiting at the top of the steps. “Don’t you look nice, Ami. And you, Martin!”

She put her hand on Dad’s arm. She was wearing jeans, little blue ballet slippers, and a white blouse with a cat embroidered on each sleeve. “Isn’t that neat, Ami? My mother made it for me. She knows I love cats. You do, too, don’t you?” She held the door open. “Ami, by the way, call me Forrest, please. We’re not in school now.”

I walked by her into the room. There were three cats sitting on a window seat. One was all gray, one was black with white ears, and one was white with orange spots. I started toward them; then I saw that there was somebody else in the room, too, a boy with short, curly hair and really big ears.

“Ami, this is Jones,” Ms. Linsley said. “My nephew. You two should like each other.”

“Hi,” Jones said, looking bored.

“Hi.” I went over to pet the cats. Did she invite Jones for me? So she could concentrate on Dad?

We sat down at the table and Ms. Linsley poured wine for her and Dad, and soda for me and her nephew. “Let’s see, have we got anything to toast? Martin?”

“Hmm.” Dad put his chin in his hand and thought. “Okay.” He raised his glass, then waited until we all raised our glasses. “I propose a toast to friendship and friends, without which a difficult world would be a much more difficult and unkind place.”

“Oh, how nice!” Ms. Linsley clinked her glass against Dad’s, then I had to clink my glass against Jones’s, and we all drank to Dad’s toast. I liked his toast, too. I thought of Mia, and it seemed really true. But I didn’t like the way Ms. Linsley kept giving him glowing looks while they sipped the wine.

I was thirsty and drank the soda too fast. What was I going to talk about to Jones?

Ms. Linsley and Dad didn’t have any trouble talking. First they talked about school, then about cars, then about hiking in the Adirondacks. She talked fast and laughed a lot. Dad laughed a lot, too—more, in fact, than I’d seen him laugh in ages.

“I go to JVS Middle,” Jones said to me.

“Oh.”

“Where do you go?”

“Drumlins Middle.”

“Your name is Ami?”

I nodded.

“I’m in eighth grade.”

“Seventh.”

“You have nice hair. I always see at least one nice thing in every girl. Last year, my class voted me Biggest Flirt.”

“Really.” I looked over at the cats. They were still in the same place. Maybe Ms. Linsley fed them before we came, so they’d be well behaved and make a good impression on us. I wished I could go sit with them.

“More steak à l’Allemande, Ami?” Ms. Linsley said.

“No, thank you.” It was really just hamburger with a fancy name.

“How is my steak à l’Allemande, folks?”

“Well—” Dad began.

“No, Martin, I can’t trust you. You’re too sweet and tactful. I’m asking Jones. He’ll tell me the truth, won’t you, Jones?” She was talking to Jones, but laughing and glancing at my father. “Jones always tells the truth, don’t you, Jones?”

“Except when I’m lying.” He looked at me. “Do you think I’m lying or telling the truth when I say that?”

I hate riddles like that. Maybe he thought I was dumb because I hadn’t said anything.

Dessert was strawberry shortcake. Usually that’s my favorite dessert. Ms. Linsley cut big triangular slices for everyone. “It looks luscious, doesn’t it?” she said. Jones scooped up a big spoonful of cream and shoved it in his mouth. Everybody was chewing and swallowing.

“We had a class newspaper last year, sort of like a yearbook,” Jones said. “Everyone who got voted something got their picture in it. You know what my picture said? Biggest Flirt.”

“You told me.”

“I made a mistake. I was really voted Most Handsome.”

Ms. Linsley looked over, “Ami, he’s putting you on.”

She didn’t have to tell me that.

Dad reached across Ms. Linsley for the coffeepot. His arm brushed against her arm. All of a sudden, I just couldn’t sit there any longer. I got up and left. I knew they all thought I was going to the bathroom, but instead I went out the door. “Ami?” Dad called. “Where’re you going?”

“I’ll be right back.” I think I said it. Maybe I didn’t. I ran down the stairs.

And then outside, I ran straight down the hill, as if somebody were pushing me. I could almost feel a hand at my back. Go! Go! I didn’t know where I was going, I just had to run. At the bottom of the hill, I stopped to shake a pebble out of my sneaker, and saw a telephone booth on the corner. I went in and called Mia.

“This is Ami, Mrs. Jenson.”

“Oh, okay, dear, hang on, Mia’s right here.”

“Ami?” Mia said, “I thought you were at Forrest Lake’s house.”

“I am. I mean, I’m not. I’m in a phone booth. I couldn’t stand it another second. You know what she said to us? Hello, Pelter people. Pelter people! I bet she thought that was adorable.”

“What’d your father say?”

“He likes everything she says. Then she said to me, ‘Ami, call me Forrest.’”

“Did you?”

“No. I wouldn’t.” On the wall of a market across the street, someone had spray painted in big red letters, I’M SERIOUSLY SEARCHING. My eyes kept going back to it. Seaching for what? Searching where? What was serious searching?

“She has three cats,” I said.

“So she can’t be aaaall bad,” Mia said.

“Her nephew is there. He goes to JVS. Eighth grade.”

“Is he cute?”

“He’s got big ears.”

“You-know-who has big ears, too.”

“This guy’s ears are much bigger and so is his ego. You know what he said? Last year when he was in seventh grade, they voted him Biggest Flirt. I wish you were here, Mia.”

“I’ll come right over.”

“Come on, then.”

“Wouldn’t that be something? I’d say, ‘Hi, you all, I just got lonely for Ami.’” She lowered her voice. “I looked up you-know-who’s phone number. And you’ll never believe this. It’s incredible, but his number is six-six-three, six-three-nine-three.”

I knew she wanted me to say something. “We never had one with so many threes in it.”

“I know! This is a first, Ami. It has to mean something special. Maybe we should call him three times right away. We could do it the first day we call him. Or maybe three times the first week. We have to figure this out.”

We talked a while more, then I went back to Ms. Linsley’s.

They all looked up when I walked in. Dad was sitting on the couch with one leg stretched out in front of him. There was a pan of ice on the floor, and Ms. Linsley was kneeling in front of him, wrapping an Ace bandage around his ankle.

“Ami,” Dad said, half rising, then sitting down fast. “Where were you?”

“What happened?”

Dad grimaced. “I started to go after you and tripped and—”

“He fell down the stairs,” Jones said.

“Not all the stairs,” Ms. Linsley said quickly. “Just four or five.”

“More like forty or fifty,” Dad said. “What a klutz.”

“No, Martin, it’s those awful steep steps. I think you should sue my landlord.” Ms. Linsley finished wrapping Dad’s ankle with tape. “Anyway, my Red Cross training finally paid off. Ice a sprain, decrease the pain.” She picked up the pan of ice and went into the kitchen.

“Does it hurt?” I said.

“It did. It’s not too bad now. So where were you?”

“Yeah, Ami, where were you?” Jones said.

I sat down on the couch next to Dad and stared at his bandaged ankle. “I just—I went out for a walk. I’m sorry, Dad.”

Ms. Linsley came back. “Martin? Think you can make it into the kitchen and keep me company while I clean up the dishes?”

“Sure thing.” Dad limped into the kitchen, leaning on her, his hand on her shoulder, right next to her neck.

Jones turned on the TV. “That was cute the way you ran out.”

I could hear Dad and Ms. Linsley talking in the kitchen.

“Real cute little attention-getter. Do you do things like that a lot?”

“All the time,” I said. I reached past him and turned up the sound on the TV.