“Ask Al,” said Lester. “She sent it to a banker’s daughter.”
15
CHANGES
ON WEDNESDAY WHEN I GOT HOME FROM school, I went in my bedroom and found the box I had mailed to Lisa. She must have given it to Lester at school. He left a note on top of the box: You ever do something like this again, I’ll wring your neck.
I felt a tear slip out of my eye and slide down one cheek. This is what happens when you try to help someone! I thought angrily. No wonder there’s so much trouble in the world!
What I was really crying about, though, was knowing that I had to tell the Secret Six. I had to say that Lisa Shane was the daughter of a banker and her parents loved her very much and she wasn’t going to China after all.
I figured it would be easier telling them one at a time. Both Megan and Rosalind live on my street. So I carried the box down to Megan’s house first and said I had to talk to her in private.
“What do you want to tell her?” asked Marlene, her little sister, who opened the door.
“None of your business,” I said, and made a terrible face at her. Sometimes when you pass a baby in a stroller, you can make him cry if you put on a terrible face. I only do that when I’m feeling mean and grumpy, but Marlene was too old to be scared.
Megan saw me standing at the door, though, and told me to come on up to her room. She was looking at the box in my arms and closed the door behind us. I gulped out the story.
“Lisa didn’t even have bruises?” Megan asked.
“Soccer practice,” I said.
“She’s not going to work in a rice paddy?”
“No.”
“Well, I think it’s all Lester’s fault for telling you that,” said Megan. She took back the sweatshirt and the money she had given. “I think I’ll use this money to do something nice for someone else.”
Megan will go to heaven for sure. I was thinking I could use mine to go to the movies! And then she said something even nicer. “Do you want me to call Jody and Dawn for you and tell them what happened?”
I nodded. “Except that I’ve got something to say to Jody myself!” I said, thinking how it was Jody’s mom who’d called the high school about Lisa’s bruises.
Next I went up the street to Rosalind’s. When she answered the door, she was holding a bag of potato chips. She held it out toward me. “Want some?”
I shook my head.
“Come on in,” she said.
From somewhere in the house I could hear Rosalind’s brother Billy playing his guitar. Her oldest brother goes to college, but he was there too, watching television. He was eating crackers and cheese on the sofa, and I just waved hi to him, because I’ve met him before.
“You want to make milk shakes?” Rosalind asked.
I shook my head. Then she saw the box. “What happened?” she asked.
“Let’s go in your room,” I told her, and we went down the hall. I had to tell the story all over again.
“So Lisa wasn’t adopted?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Anyway, her parents love her.”
“And they don’t just give her scraps from the table?”
“No.”
Rosalind took back the money and the box of Pop-Tarts she had given and opened the top. “Want one?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Megan says she’s going to do something nice for someone with her money.”
“Yeah!” said Rosalind. “Or the Secret Six could all go to Pizza Hut!”
“I guess we’re not so secret anymore,” I said. I looked around Rosalind’s room. There are pictures and posters all over her walls, and they’re all of animals. Monkeys and giraffes and hippos and otters. Elephants, too, of course. Rosalind is serious about working in a zoo.
Her stepmom came to the bedroom door just then. It’s amazing—even though Rosalind wasn’t born to her, they look so much alike! Their cheeks are round and their arms are round—everything about them is round. Rosalind’s stepmom smiles more than Rosalind does, though.
“Hello, Alice. Would you like to stay for dinner?” she asked.
I would have loved to stay for dinner. I would have loved to stay all night, just so I wouldn’t have to look at Lester being angry at me all the time. But I couldn’t.
“Lester and I have to cook dinner tonight. Maybe some other time,” I said.
“Sure. Just tell me what you like best, and I’ll make it,” she said, smiling.
I would have to write that down on my list of what a good mother would do: cook anything you wanted.
I kept remembering that Dad had told us there were going to be changes. I wondered if he had forgotten, because he hadn’t said anything more. Maybe he figured that Lester and I could get along better and keep each other alive after all.
But Lester and I hardly spoke as we made dinner. I think Lisa was still mad at him and he was mad at me. We served canned chop suey over canned chow mein noodles, with canned peas for a vegetable. And suddenly, right in the middle of dinner, Dad put down his fork and said, “I thought you should know that I’ve hired a woman named Mrs. Nolinstock to be here three afternoons a week and all day on Saturdays. She will look after things and cook and clean for us too. And when Mrs. Nolinstock is here, she’s completely in charge. I want that understood.”
Lester and I stared at him. He was hiring someone to take care of us? Lester too?
“Dad!” said Lester. “Three afternoons a week plus Saturdays? It will cost you a fortune, and besides, Al and I can cook!”
“Well, it might be nice to have some meals occasionally that don’t come out of a can. It might be nice to have a vegetable once in a while besides peas,” said Dad.
“But we can take care of ourselves!” I told him.
“Apparently not,” said Dad. “When I get a call that you were rescued out of a snowbank, and Lester doesn’t come home when he’s supposed to, and lately, it seems, you two aren’t even talking to each other, I think maybe we ought to make other arrangements. As I said, when Mrs. Nolinstock is here, I expect you to do as she says.”
I just went on staring at Dad. He never looked more serious in his life. Lester got up and left the kitchen.
The next day at school I walked up to Jody and said, “How could you do that? How could you tell your mother about Lisa Shane when we promised we wouldn’t tell anyone?”
Jody was ready for me: “Because when you think someone’s getting beaten by her father, it’s not the kind of secret anyone should keep,” she said.
“Then you shouldn’t have promised!” I told her.
“I didn’t think about it at the time. It was only that night, when I wondered if right that minute her dad was beating her with a baseball bat, that I figured I ought to tell my mom about it. And that’s when she said that you should never keep that kind of secret.”
“Well, you got me and Lester and Lisa in a lot of trouble,” I said.
“Tough,” said Jody. “Lester shouldn’t have lied in the first place. Megan told me all about it.”
“Well, now Lester’s mad at me. And Lisa sent the box back.” I pointed to my backpack. “I don’t know what you gave her, but you can have it back.”
Mr. Dooley asked us to be quiet then while he started our math lesson. I would have been quiet anyway. I didn’t want to talk to Jody anymore, and she didn’t want to talk to me.
16
NOLINSTOCK
IT WAS A MISERABLE AFTERNOON. I FELT even more miserable the next day when I remembered that Mrs. Nolinstock would be at my house after school, waiting to take care of me. I told Donald, and he said he’d like to see what a Nolinstock looked like. We went up the front steps. The door was locked. I had to ring the bell.
For a minute we didn’t think anyone would answer. Then the door opened, and there stood a tall, thin woman with gray-brown hair pulled back from her forehead and tied with a rubber band in back. She was wrinkled around the eyes, but her face was bright pink and her mouth was as s
traight across as a ruler. She was wearing a brown sweater and a brown skirt and low-heeled brown shoes that were so wide, they looked like duck feet. I’ll bet if she had smiled, which she didn’t, even her teeth would be brown.
“Are you Mrs. Nolinstock?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t.
“Yes,” she said. “Are you Alice?”
I nodded. “And this is Donald,” I said. “He lives next door.”
“Then Donald should go next door,” said Mrs. Nolinstock, giving him a quick nod. “All children should go directly home after school so their mothers know where they are.”
She opened the door wider for me and closed the door on Donald.
I stared at her. “That was rude!” I said.
“That was necessary,” she answered. “I like to make my rules plain from the very first day. We will all get along better if we know what they are. And how was your day at school, Alice?”
“Crummy,” I said, and I wasn’t smiling.
Something was cooking in the kitchen—chicken, I guess—and it probably smelled good, but right then everything about Mrs. Nolinstock seemed awful. When she went back out to the kitchen, I even saw her lift Oatmeal out of the way with her foot.
I sat down in the living room beside the coffee table and opened my school notebook. I tried to see how many words I could make out of Nolinstock by mixing the letters up: tin, sin, lost, ink, oink, stink, snoot, snot… .
Mrs. Nolinstock went on working out in the kitchen, but after a while she came to the doorway and looked in on me. “Do you have any homework to do this afternoon, Alice?” she asked.
“A little,” I said, trying not to look at the way her thin lips hardly opened when she talked.
“And have you finished it all?” she asked.
“Not quite,” I said. “Almost.”
“Almost and not quite won’t do,” she said. “You wouldn’t want a pilot who almost got the plane to fly but not quite, would you?”
How did we get talking about airplanes all of a sudden? I wondered. How did we get talking about pilots? How did my dad find this woman, anyway?
“I can easily do it over the weekend,” I told her.
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” she said.
After she went back in the kitchen, I took a piece of notebook paper and in big black letters I printed: DANGER: NOLINSTOCK INSIDE! I taped it to the outside of the front door. Lester’s school gets out first, so he’s usually home before me, but this time, I figured, he’d be hiding out.
After a while I heard his footsteps, then a key in the lock, and finally the front door opened a crack. Lester peeked inside. I put one finger to my lips.
“Where is she?” he whispered.
I pointed to the kitchen. The basement door was just this side of the kitchen, and I knew he wanted to sneak down there before she saw him, but it was too late.
“Are you Lester?” she asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway, and Lester stopped in his tracks. “I’m Mrs. Nolinstock. Glad to meet you. How’s your homework?”
Lester didn’t miss a beat. “Fine,” he said. “How’s yours?”
Mrs. Nolinstock was not amused. She just stared back at Lester with her lips in their fine straight line and said, “Dinner’s at six thirty,” and went back out to the kitchen.
I followed Lester down to the basement. I tried to imagine coming home three days a week to find Mrs. Nolinstock there. I tried to imagine waking up on Saturday mornings after Dad went to work and knowing that she was in our kitchen.
“Isn’t she awful?” I said. “She was so rude to Donald.”
“Has she smiled even once since you got home?” Lester asked.
I shook my head. “How long is she going to be working here, Lester? Till we’re grown? Till we’re married?”
“Dad can’t afford this!” said Lester. “We’ve got to think of a way to get rid of her.”
I wasn’t sure what Lester had in mind, because I remembered how he’d got rid of my Barbie doll by sticking her head in a vise. “How?” I asked.
“We just have to make her not want to work here anymore,” he told me.
“Lester, I think we are going to get ourselves in big, big trouble if we make her quit,” I said.
“And what do you think will happen if Mrs. Nolinstock stays?” asked Lester.
I thought about it a moment. “Big, big trouble,” I said.
The problem was that the dinner Mrs. Nolinstock made for us was pretty good. There was roast chicken and real mashed potatoes and gravy, not the kind you mix. There were cooked beets and green beans with onions.
Dad ate second helpings of everything. So did Lester. Score: Mrs. Nolinstock, one; Lester and me, zero.
The next time she came, her cooking was even better: pot roast with carrots and potatoes and a big green salad. She made a chocolate pie for dessert. How could she cook so good and sound so sour? I wondered.
She never said, You look as though you could use a cookie or Beautiful day, isn’t it? She’d just give me a nod and say something like, “Be sure to hang up your jacket” or—if I got down the peanut butter and crackers—“You don’t want to ruin your appetite.”
When Lester came home, she didn’t seem able to walk into a room without saying, “Feet off the coffee table” or “Do I see a soda can on the arm of the couch?” Once, when Mickey called, he took the phone into the closet to talk. After he had been in there for thirty minutes, Mrs. Nolinstock knocked on the door and told him his time was up, that someone might be trying to reach us.
“Where did you find Mrs. Nolinstock, Dad? Some company called Rent-a-Nazi?” he asked one night after she’d gone home. “Is she a retired warden from a state prison?”
“A customer gave me her name,” Dad told us. “He said she was good at running a household with an iron hand. And I have to say that I enjoy finding clean clothes in my drawers, and a nutritious meal on the table, and having the peace of mind of knowing that the house won’t burn down while I’m at work.”
“But she’s got to be expensive, Dad! She’ll bankrupt us. There goes my college tuition.”
“Well, it’s nice to know you’re concerned, Les,” Dad said. “Every time I’ve tried to talk to you about college, you say you don’t know.”
Lester sighed. “Well, I’ve made up my mind to go to Montgomery College, then transfer to a university after I decide on a major.”
“Good decision!” said Dad. “So you have been doing some thinking.”
I liked the thought that Lester would be going to college around here, even if he was mad at me a lot. Besides Dad and Oatmeal, he’s the only family I’ve got.
Dad helped himself to another spoonful of creamed corn. “I take it you two don’t care much for Mrs. Nolinstock?”
Lester and I both made gagging noises.
“If you like living with an army general, she’s great,” said Lester. “If you like being ordered to wipe your feet, pick up your towel, and do your homework, she’s tremendous. If you like being in the same house with a commander in chief who times you when you make a phone call, she’s the best.”
“I’m glad you appreciate her finer qualities,” Dad said, and took another pork chop.
While Lester and I were doing the dishes later, he said, “If she just came to do the cooking and left, I could stand it.”
“Yeah, her pies are great, but I can’t think of anything to make her leave,” I said. Dad and I could make only three kinds of pies. Mrs. Nolinstock made a different pie every time she came over.
If only I could think of a way to get rid of Mrs. Nolinstock, Lester wouldn’t be mad at me anymore and Dad would save a lot of money. Dawn told me she prays when she wants God to help her with something, but I didn’t think God would want to help me with this.
17
GOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, WORSE NEWS
WHEN APRIL CAME, WE TURNED OVER A new page on the school calendar. Then we tried to play tricks on each other, just so we could say
“April fool!” But Mr. Dooley wasn’t there to play tricks with us. There was a substitute teacher named Miss Beck. She told us she got a phone call that morning saying Mr. Dooley wouldn’t be in. She didn’t know why.
“I’ll bet Mrs. Dooley had her baby,” said Sara.
“The baby’s not due till April twelfth,” said Rosalind.
“Sometimes they come early,” said Sara, and she should know because she’s got a whole bunch of brothers and sisters.
When lunchtime came, though, and there still wasn’t any news about Mr. Dooley’s baby, I began to worry. Maybe something bad happened. Maybe the baby died. Maybe it was alive but something was terribly wrong with it. Aunt Sally told me once about a baby who had been born with water on the brain and its head was too big for its body. Maybe the little cap I’d given Mr. Dooley’s baby didn’t fit. Maybe it would never fit.
“How long does it take to have a baby?” I asked Sara at recess that afternoon.
“Sometimes it takes all day,” she said. Her mother had had her last baby at home, so she knew, she told us.
“Did you watch it come out?” asked Jody.
“No. It was the middle of the night,” Sara said. “Besides, it’s messy.”
I wondered then if babies were born in the bathtub and if you could just rinse them off and wash the rest down the drain.
That afternoon we were having our geography lesson when Mr. Serio came in our room. He said he had some news for us, and his face was very serious. It was about Mr. Dooley’s baby, he said. I think I stopped breathing.
But then the principal started to smile. “It’s a boy,” he said, “and the baby and his mother are doing just fine.”
We all started to clap.
“What’s the baby’s name?” Megan asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll let Mr. Dooley tell you when he comes back next week,” Mr. Serio said.
I didn’t stop smiling the rest of the day.
I thought of a way I might be able to make Mrs. Nolinstock quit. When I got home that afternoon, Mrs. Nolinstock asked if I had any homework.
“No, ma’am,” I said.