Staying Together

  Nikki nodded. She felt like crying but didn’t want to do that in front of Harriet. If you worked in a shelter you had to develop a thick skin. She brightened. “So the next time I come here we’ll have more kittens!”

  Harriet smiled at her. “Yes. And maybe you can help us work with the mother. It will take a long time to win her trust after what she’s been through.”

  At the end of the afternoon, Harriet dropped Nikki off at her house. “See you next week,” she called as she turned her car around.

  Nikki gave her an over-the-shoulder wave and let Paw-Paw out into the yard. “You’re lucky, boy,” she told him. “You don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from or whether you’ll find a safe place to sleep.”

  Paw-Paw gave Nikki a doggie grin and followed her back into the house.

  Nikki checked her watch. Her mother and Mae wouldn’t be home for another half hour and they were bringing dinner with them, which meant that Nikki had time to start her homework. She sat at the kitchen table with her books stacked in front of her, stared at them for a while, and then picked up the phone.

  “Olivia?” she said. “Hi, it’s me. Listen, I’ve been thinking. We have to come up with a plan to end the fight between Flora and Ruby.” She heard a muffled groan. “What, you don’t want it to end?”

  “Of course I want it to end,” replied Olivia. “I just don’t want to interfere. And I thought you didn’t, either. You said so yourself.”

  “Yeah, but that was on Saturday. I thought maybe the fight would be over by now.”

  “I did, too. But look, if we get caught in the middle, that’s just going to make things worse. They might get mad at us. Then they’d be mad at us, mad at each other …”

  “Huh,” said Nikki. “Maybe. But I think we can fix things without getting caught in the middle. For one thing, we still don’t know what the fight is about, so it’s impossible for us to take sides.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” said Olivia.

  “Well, just go along with me for a minute. What if … what if you and I plan another Saturday adventure, only we don’t call it that. And then we invite Flora and Ruby — separately — to wherever our adventure is going to take place.” Nikki paused, thinking.

  “You mean so neither of them knows the other one has been invited?” asked Olivia.

  “Exactly. And since they aren’t talking to each other,” Nikki continued, feeling inspired, “they won’t find out that they’ve both been invited.”

  “I could call Flora and ask her to meet us at College Pizza,” said Olivia slowly.

  “And I’d call Ruby and invite her. I guess I’d have to tell her to come fifteen minutes later or something so that they wouldn’t leave their house at the same time. That would make them suspicious.”

  “Yeah.…”

  “But then eventually we would all be together and we would have a great time and Flora and Ruby would see how silly their fight is.”

  “If it is over something silly.”

  “Yeah.…”

  “What?” asked Olivia.

  “Well, suddenly I don’t know if this is such a good idea after all. You’re right. They could both get mad at us for interfering.”

  “As I said.”

  “I know. I just want the fight to end.”

  “Me, too.”

  “This is starting to make me a little mad,” Nikki admitted. “It’s their fight, but it’s affecting all of us.”

  “Yeah!” Now Olivia sounded angry.

  “I have to go,” said Nikki. “Mom and Mae just got home. I’ll see you in school tomorrow.”

  Mae burst through the door then and exclaimed, “Mommy has good news, but she won’t tell me what it is!”

  Nikki tried to put Flora and Ruby out of her head. “What’s your news, Mom?” she asked, smiling.

  Mrs. Sherman set down her briefcase and a shopping bag from Bistro-to-Go. Mae tossed her school bag on the couch in the living room, turned three somersaults in a row, announced, “I want to take gymnastics,” and threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “Please tell us your news?”

  “Over dinner,” replied Mrs. Sherman.

  When Nikki had cleared her books away and the table had been set rather sloppily by Mae and everyone had been served the fancy takeout food that Mrs. Sherman only bought on special occasions, Mae said, “Mom, please, please, please?”

  Her mother smiled. “All right. Girls, you are looking at the new coordinator of dining services at Three Oaks.”

  “What?” said Mae.

  “I’ll oversee everything to do with dining and events.”

  “You mean now you’re the Big Boss,” Mae said with satisfaction.

  Nikki leaped out of her chair and ran around the table to hug her mother. “You got a promotion!”

  “A pretty nice one, too, I have to admit. It comes with a bigger paycheck, and I won’t have to work on weekends so often.”

  “A bigger paycheck?” repeated Mae.

  “Mom, that’s great!” cried Nikki. “We have to call Tobias and tell him.”

  When dinner was over, Mae said she was going to make a special dessert and served up dishes of ice cream. She tried to spell out CONGRATULATIONS in chocolate chips on her mother’s scoop, but only had room for the C, the O, and part of the N.

  Nikki seized upon her mother’s news as an opportunity to call Flora and Ruby. “I need to talk to both of you together!” she exclaimed when Flora answered the phone. “Something really exciting happened.”

  “Tell me, tell me!”

  “Put Ruby on the phone, too.”

  There was a little silence. “I’m not speaking to her.”

  “You’re right,” said Nikki, already feeling exasperated. “I want to speak to her. I’m the one with the news.”

  But Flora refused to call Ruby to the phone.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you in school tomorrow,” Nikki said abruptly, then hung up. She dialed Olivia instead.

  One afternoon, when Willow Hamilton had been lying lazily on the floor of Flora’s bedroom, Olivia, who’d been sitting at the desk, had asked, “How far back can you guys remember?”

  “What?” Willow had replied.

  But Flora had said, “You mean, what’s our earliest memory?”

  Olivia had nodded.

  Flora had frowned. “Well, I can’t remember anything from when I was, like, a baby. But I remember playing in the wading pool in the backyard at our old house one day. I think I was three. And Ruby had just learned to walk and she fell in the pool and my father screamed. It was the only time I ever heard him scream.”

  “What happened to Ruby?” Willow had asked.

  “Nothing. My father had just panicked, even though he was only about four feet away. What’s your earliest memory?” Flora had asked Olivia.

  And while Olivia had told a story about getting her hand stuck in a jar of olives that her mother had specifically told her not to eat because they were for company, Willow had sat hunched on the floor, trying to invent an answer to the question. She certainly couldn’t have told her friends her actual earliest memory. Even people who understood about her mother, which her friends didn’t — not entirely — wouldn’t have believed what Willow had to say. So when Olivia and Flora had looked expectantly at Willow, she had laughed and said, “My earliest memory is sitting on Santa’s lap in a department store and telling him I wanted a credit card for Christmas. I didn’t even understand what a credit card was, but I knew my parents bought all kinds of stuff with theirs, so I figured instead of asking for the stuff I’d just ask for the card.”

  Olivia and Flora had laughed, and Willow had not told them that the story was entirely made up and that her earliest memory was of hiding in her closet while her mother rampaged around Willow’s room, yelling, “If you can’t take care of your toys, then I’m going to give them to children who can take care of them.” She had angrily stuffed things — Willow’s teddy, her dolls, her princess wa
nd, and other toys Willow didn’t care to remember — into a garbage bag, which she took not to needy children but to the dump before Mr. Hamilton came home from work that evening. When her father had looked around her room and asked where everything was, her mother had said tersely, “We decided to have a cleaning-out.”

  Willow had grown up tiptoeing around her house — literally — unsure of what her mother might object to or what new rules she might suddenly put in place. Some of the rules made sense — like, take off your shoes before you come in the house. Others made no sense at all — inside doors must be left open at a ninety-degree angle, for example. Some rules stayed in place; others were eventually forgotten by Mrs. Hamilton, although not by Willow or Cole. Doors open or closed? Set the table with the dishes right side up or upside down? They never knew what might cause a burst of shouting or crying or a 5:00 a.m. phone call to neighbors.

  Plenty of labels had been attached to Mrs. Hamilton’s state of mind over the years as she had checked in and out of hospitals, but Willow hadn’t paid much attention to the diagnoses. She’d just wanted to get through each day. She had enjoyed the calm, even days when her mother was gone, and she hadn’t been sure what to think when her father had finally told her the exact date her mother would be returning from her most recent stay in the hospital, although she had been reassured by her father’s insistence that things were going to be different from then on.

  “I promise I’ll be at home more,” he had said, “and we’re going to work much more closely with your mother’s doctors.” Willow had believed him. But as the day of her mother’s return drew closer, she became more anxious.

  And now today was the day.

  “When you come home from school,” Mr. Hamilton told Willow and Cole over breakfast that morning, “your mother will be back. I’ll be picking her up in a couple of hours.”

  Willow glanced at her brother, who pointedly would not look back at her. “Want me to meet you on the corner after school?” she asked him. “We could walk the rest of the way home together.”

  “Okay.”

  When Willow turned off of Main Street that afternoon, she saw the small figure of Cole ahead. He was sitting on the curb on the corner of Dodds and Aiken, trailing a stick back and forth in the sand and dead leaves that had accumulated in the gutter over the winter.

  “Hi!” Willow called when she spotted her brother.

  He glanced up and waved at her but said nothing.

  Willow was alone. Olivia and Flora had walked as far as Needle and Thread with her but then had gone into the store to visit their grandmothers. Willow was glad. She didn’t feel like talking about her mother, and she certainly didn’t want any worried glances when she and Cole stepped into their house to greet her after her long absence.

  “Come on,” she said to her brother, offering him her hand.

  He stood up and brushed off his jeans but didn’t take her hand.

  “It’s going to be all right,” said Willow.

  “How do you know?”

  “Dad said things will be different.”

  “Maybe Dad will be different, but I bet Mom won’t.”

  Willow began to feel annoyed. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “She’s home and that’s that.”

  She marched ahead and had gone six paces when she felt Cole’s hand slip into hers. They walked the rest of the way to their house in silence, but Willow smiled at her brother as they opened the front door. “Ready?” she said.

  “I guess.”

  “Hello!” called Willow. “We’re home!”

  Cole closed the door behind them, and an instant later, Willow heard footsteps. Her parents hurried into the front hall.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Hamilton said, and put her hand to her mouth. “You’ve grown.”

  Willow could see tears in her mother’s eyes. “Mom,” she said, “you just saw us in March. We couldn’t have grown since March.”

  “But you did!” Mrs. Hamilton pulled Willow and Cole to her and hugged them both.

  “Welcome home,” said Cole in a small voice.

  Willow stepped back and took a good look at her mother, who seemed calmer than when Willow had last visited her in the hospital. And her attention was solidly on Willow and Cole. Not once did her eyes stray to the closet door, which was closed, or to the pair of sneakers Cole had left by the bottom of the staircase that morning.

  “Come in the living room. Tell me everything,” she said.

  Willow glanced at her father, who smiled, and the Hamiltons sat down in their living room as self-consciously as if they were entertaining an unexpected visitor.

  “Um,” said Willow after a few moments, “I got an A on a math quiz.”

  “Good for you!” exclaimed her mother. “Bravo! We’ll have to celebrate tonight.”

  “It was just a quiz, Mom.”

  “Nevertheless. And you, Cole. How is school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t you have any details?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about your friends, what you’re studying.”

  Cole and Willow had spoken with their mother on the phone frequently in the past month, and she always asked about their friends and what they were studying.

  “You know,” said Cole, and Willow nudged him, but he shrugged and looked away.

  “Cole has to give a book report on James and the Giant Peach,” she told their mother. “And over the weekend he and Jack and Henry did something really cool. Tell her, Cole.”

  “We decided to have a drive at school. We’re going to collect pet food for the dogs and cats at Sheltering Arms.”

  “You thought that up all by yourselves?” said Mrs. Hamilton. “Darling, that’s wonderful!”

  Cole dared to smile at his mother. And then he brought out his work folder from school and showed her his last month’s compositions and drawings and book reports and quizzes.

  At six o’clock, Willow’s mother said, “What shall we have for dinner tonight? I’ll cook.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mr. Hamilton. “I’ll fix something. This is your first night home.”

  “But I want to cook. I haven’t cooked in ages.”

  “During the blizzard,” spoke up Cole, “Dad let us make popcorn in the fireplace.”

  “In the fireplace?” exclaimed Mrs. Hamilton.

  “We didn’t have any power,” Cole told her. “It was exciting.”

  “But in the fireplace? That isn’t —” Mrs. Hamilton stopped abruptly. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “We were like pioneers in the olden days,” said Cole, but Willow watched her brother’s spirits fade.

  She put a smile on her face. “Can I help you cook?” she asked her mother. “It would be fun.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Hamilton, and the popcorn incident seemed to be forgotten.

  Willow’s family ate dinner together, and then it was time for homework and baths. Mrs. Hamilton seemed to be everywhere at once. She tidied up the kitchen with Mr. Hamilton. She sat with Willow, who was working on an essay and a math assignment.

  “The rest of my homework is reading,” Willow finally told her mother. Mrs. Hamilton didn’t move, so Willow added, “I can read faster when I’m alone.”

  Her mother accompanied Cole to the bathroom. “Mom!” he cried. “I can take a bath by myself. I need my privacy.”

  “I’m just happy to be home.”

  Two hours later, Cole asleep in his room, Willow crawled under her covers. Her mother sat on the bed beside her.

  “I’m so proud of you,” said Mrs. Hamilton, and she smoothed Willow’s hair back from her forehead. “Proud of you and Cole both. You’ve turned out just fine.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  Mrs. Hamilton kissed Willow’s cheek, switched off her reading light, and moved quietly across the room. As she passed the closet she hesitated. Then she turned the knob, swung the door open, and left it at an exact ninety-degree angle to the wall.
br />   “Good night, darling,” she said.

  Flora’s alarm went off shrilly and she lay in her bed, trying to keep her eyes open. If she closed them, she knew she would fall asleep again, even with the alarm blaring in her ear. She opened her eyes wide, actually held them apart with her fingers for a few moments, and then raised the window shade. Only then did she turn off the alarm. She sat on the edge of her bed before finally getting to her feet and stepping into the hall. The door to Ruby’s room was open and she heard her sister say, “Rabbit, rabbit.”

  Flora frowned. “It isn’t May first,” she whispered loudly. “There’s, like, eight more days of April.”

  Ruby rolled over in her bed. “I know. I just wanted to see if I could get you to talk to me. You really are terrible at the silent treatment.”

  Flora blushed and was glad Ruby couldn’t see her face in the semidarkness. “Well, at least I’m not a liar.”

  “What? I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said, ‘At least I’m not a liar.’”

  “What?”

  “I’m not a liar!”

  “You’re going to have to speak up,” said Ruby.

  Flora stomped off to the bathroom.

  A few minutes later, on her way back to her room, she passed Ruby in the hallway and whipped her head around so that she was facing the wall.

  Ruby whipped her head in the other direction.

  “Liar,” whispered Flora to the wall.

  “I heard that.”

  At breakfast that morning, Flora sat next to Ruby instead of across from her. It was easier not to look at her that way. She speared her scrambled eggs ferociously, causing them to skid across her plate and onto the table.

  Ruby giggled.

  Flora scooped them into her napkin and emptied the napkin onto Ruby’s plate.

  “Flora!” exclaimed Min.

  “Well, would you want someone to laugh at you if you made a mistake?”

  Min looked thoughtful. “I might try to have a sense of humor about it. Flora, please get Ruby another plate and give her some more eggs.”