Ever since the day I found out Adam was coming home I have been busier than usual. Today I finally have time to chat with my friends downtown. I sit beside Mr. Shucard in the Meat Wagon for a while, and he lets me ring up two customers. Mr. Hulit is very busy in the shoe store, so I don’t stay long, but Miss Conroy is having a slow day. “Can I help you with anything?” I ask her, and she gives me a whole box of china animals that need price stickers on their bottoms. When I leave Stuff ’n’ Nonsense I see Jack at his usual corner. I buy a strawberry shortcake ice-cream bar and tell him about my new uncle. “He might be here all summer,” I say, “so you’ll probably get to meet him.” Jack has heard about Adam, of course. There’s not a soul in Millerton who hasn’t heard this piece of gossip.

I set off down the street again. Fred Carmel’s Funtime Carnival signs are everywhere now, advertising cotton candy and bearded ladies and rides and prizes and more, always more, I absolutely cannot wait for Saturday.

There is a no-food-or-drink rule at the library, which makes sense, so I wait until I have finished my ice cream before I visit Mrs. Moore. When I leave the library, my arms are full of books about Betsy and Eddie, and also Betsy and Tacey, and briefly I think how lucky Betsy McGruder is with her name. I can’t think of many book characters named Hattie.

I am hurrying along Grant with my books when I see someone on our front porch, waving frantically.

Adam.

“Hattie! Ho, ho!” he shouts.

“Hi, Adam,” I call. “What —” I almost say, “What are you doing here?” but realize that sounds rude, so instead I say, “Where’s Nana? Is she here too?”

“Nana, Nana, no, no, no. I came here by myself, by myself, yes indeed. I came for a little walk, and to see the lovely Miss Angel Valentine, is she here?”

“Angel?” I repeat. “No, she’s at work. She works at the bank, remember?”

“Yes, oh yes, like the teller in I Love Lucy. What do you have there, Hattie? What’s all that?”

“I went to the library.” I am showing Adam my books when I hear the phone ring. “I’ll get it!” I cry. Although I don’t know why I bother to feel excited since unless Betsy is around, the phone is never for me. “Be right back,” I say to Adam.

I run inside and pick up the phone in the hallway. “Hattie?” says Nana’s voice when I answer. “Is Adam there?” She sounds breathless.

“Yes. He’s —”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

“Didn’t you know he was coming here?” I ask.

“No! He left without telling me. I wasn’t even sure he remembered the way to your house.”

“Well, he’s here. I don’t know how long he’s been here. I just got back from downtown and found him standing on our porch.”

“May I speak to him, please?”

Uh-oh. Nana’s tone of voice makes me picture Adam with his hand in his drink.

I call Adam to the phone and listen to his end of the conversation: “Yes? … Yes.… Okay … but I know the way like the back of my hand, the back of my hand.” All very calm. And then, “I don’t have to tell you everything.… No, I am not coming home! Not now, not when Hattie is showing me her books.… I am not a baby, Mother!” Adam tries to throw the phone to the floor, but the cord won’t reach. He leaves it dangling and slams his way onto the front porch.

I pick up the receiver. “Nana? I was thinking. Could Adam stay here for a little while? We’re going to have lunch soon. I could walk him home after that.”

“All right.” A big resigned sigh. But I hear something else in that sigh. Relief, maybe.

So Adam stays for lunch that day. He is disappointed to find out that Angel Valentine does not come back to the boardinghouse for lunch, but he recovers, and seems to enjoy spending time with Mom and Dad and Miss Hagerty and Mr. Penny and me.

After lunch Adam and I sit on the porch, and now he’s serious and thoughtful. Adam’s moods are like a deck of playing cards with someone riffling through them — dozens of cards, one after the other, in a blur.

“The whole world passes by your house, Hattie,” Adam says after a moment. He’s looking toward Grant Avenue.

“I know. That’s why sometimes I hate our porch.” When Adam looks at me sharply, I hasten to add, “I mean, I don’t really hate our porch —”

“You can hate your porch,” says Adam.

“Good. Because sometimes I do.”

Adam is still just looking at me, waiting.

“Some days,” I say, “I feel like I don’t belong anywhere in that world. That world out there.” I point to Grant. “People walk down our street and people drive down it and people ride their bicycles down it and all of them, even the ones I know, could be from another planet. And I’m a visiting alien.”

“And aliens don’t belong anywhere,” Adam finishes for me, except in their own little corners of the universe.”

“Right,” I say.

Later, Adam seems happy to let me walk him home. He loops his arm through mine and sings, “Oh, mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.” He stops singing before we reach his front door. “You’ve told me one of your secrets, Hattie, and soon I’ll tell you one of mine,” he says. Then he opens the door and disappears into the cool darkness of Nana and Papa’s house.