Thomas wasn’t as excited as his sister. When my mother and Ben hugged, he wrinkled up his nose and said, “Mushy.” Then he looked back at his plate and tried to score a goal with his meatball.
It rolled onto the floor and landed near my foot. I picked it up, put it in the sink, and quietly left the room.
I went upstairs and called my father.
“Come get me” was all I said.
I walked outside and waited on the porch. First I sat, then I stood, then I started pacing up and down. I didn’t cry, though. It surprised me, but I didn’t.
By the time my mother spotted me, I was shivering like crazy. She brought me my jacket. As she helped me with the sleeves she stopped and gave me a long, warm hug.
“I’m really sorry, honey. Ben’s sorry, too,” she said gently. “He didn’t know about the promise.”
I shrugged. It seemed shrugging was becoming my major method of communication lately.
“Dad coming?”
I nodded.
She held me a minute longer. “We’ll talk when you get home.”
Just then my father pulled into the driveway. He and Mom waved. They didn’t end up as best friends, but at least they’ve been able to maintain a waving relationship.
We drove to the apartment in silence. I know it was hard for Dad not to bombard me with a million questions. Unlike Ben, my father is not a nodder and a listener. My father is an insurance salesman.
As soon as we got there he pulled out the sleeper sofa and got some pillows. It was only seven thirty, but if you’re acting weird, parents like to put you to bed anyway. I gave him a funny look.
“You don’t have to go to sleep. Just thought you might want to get comfortable while you’re watching TV,” he explained.
I plopped down and covered my head with a pillow. Then Dad brought out some popcorn and turned on the television. I stared blankly at the screen. I still don’t know what was on that night.
Finally he just couldn’t stand it anymore. He turned down the volume on the set.
“Is this about Ben? Did something happen over there tonight?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. There was no sense keeping it inside. It didn’t feel good in there.
“They’re going to get married,” I managed. “They told us tonight at dinner. Ben pulled out a ring and put it on Mom’s finger and—”
I stopped for a second. The lump in my throat made it hurt to talk. My eyes started filling up with tears.
“Geez, Dad. Why couldn’t they just stay friends? What’s so great about Ben Russo anyway?”
I looked up. My father had an odd expression on his face. Like he had just had the wind knocked out of him or something. It took me a second to realize that he was almost as upset by the news as I was. I guess it’s weird finding out that your wife is marrying another man. Even if she’s not your wife anymore.
He sat there a minute staring down at the floor. Like he was trying to sort out his feelings. It gave me hope. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
“Maybe it’s not too late, Dad,” I blurted out suddenly. “Maybe you and Mom could still …”
But my father didn’t let me get any further. He shook his head. “No, Charlie,” he said firmly. “That’s over and done with. You know that.”
Then he took a deep breath. “I’m afraid this is one of those things you’re just going to have to accept.”
It made me mad, the way he said it. Like having a whole new family move into my life was just a minor inconvenience that I’d have to get used to, like a chipped tooth or a bad haircut.
I threw my hands in the air. “Sure, Dad. No problem. Just one more little adjustment in my life, right? First I start out with two parents. Then all of a sudden they get divorced and I lose my father. Then my mother backs into some guy’s truck and what d’ya know, I’ve got a dad again. Only this one comes with a teenage sister who calls my mother Janet and a goofball little brother. And what d’ya know, all I have to do is accept it. Hey, that sounds easy enough.”
Dad looked hurt. “I’ve never stopped being your father, Charlie. Not for one minute. Don’t put that on me. It’s not fair.”
I turned away from him and covered my face with my hands. “Tell me about fair, Dad. It seems like nothing in my whole life is fair anymore.”
He didn’t answer. There was nothing more to say. Not even for an insurance salesman.
STEP—A DEFINITION
Sometimes I look up words in the dictionary. Divorce, psychology—words that affect my life, you know? And I wonder how they do it. The people who write the dictionaries, I mean. How do they take complicated stuff like divorce and psychology and make them sound so simple?
I looked up step. Not the kind of step like in a stair step or putting one foot in front of the other. I looked up the kind of step you get when your mother remarries. Like when you get a stepfather or stepbrother or stepsister. And the dictionary said: step- , a prefix meaning related by remarriage.
And I wondered how the dictionary could make it all sound so easy.
Why didn’t they talk about what step really means? About how it means stepping aside so that a man who’s not your father can hold your mother’s hand. And how it means stepping out of the way to let a little kid scoot into the booth next to your mother so she can fold his pirate hat. And how it means stepping over a teenage girl who has taken your favorite spot on the floor and now you have to watch TV from the uncomfortable chair in the corner.
It’s not that I hated the Russos. In another situation, even Thomas might have grown on me. But I never put out the welcome mat and invited them into my life.
Let’s face it. A welcome mat’s just one more thing for someone to step on.
(four)
I
N THE weeks before the wedding, my mother tried hard to be extra nice to me. Parents do this sort of thing when they feel guilty about something.
One week we went to the movies three times. Each time I got to have a box of Dots plus Junior Mints, plus popcorn, plus a soda. If that’s not guilt, what is?
One Sunday afternoon she packed a couple of sandwiches in a backpack and we went to the park to eat them. We sat under my favorite tree. The one with branches so low, it practically begs to be climbed.
“I love you, Charlie,” she said out of the clear blue as she handed over an egg salad sandwich. She’d been saying stuff like that a lot lately.
“The important things will never change between us. You know that, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say,” I answered weakly.
Mom stopped rummaging through the backpack and sighed.
“I wish you wouldn’t keep acting like this.”
“Like what? I’m not acting like anything,” I argued.
She took me by the shoulders. “You’re acting like you don’t believe me. I’ve told you at least a hundred times that nothing is ever going to come between you and me, and I mean it. Not Ben, not Lydia, not Thomas … not nothin’ or nobody, no how, no way.”
She laughed and she reached over and tousled my hair. “Got that?”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. “Yeah … I got that.”
We hugged. It was sort of nice.
THERE WERE only about twenty people at the wedding. My mother wore a suit. I didn’t know women were allowed to wear suits to weddings, but I guess it’s legal.
The ceremony only took fifteen minutes. Mom and Ben repeated the usual junk and the minister told Ben to kiss the bride. Then my mother puckered up right there in public and everybody started clapping. Everybody but me. I only clap when I like something.
Afterward, there was a reception at a nearby restaurant. They had a band and everything. Thomas asked me to dance.
“Shh!” I said, checking to make sure no one had heard. “Boys don’t dance with boys, Thomas.”
Thomas frowned. “We’re not boys anymore, Charrulls. We’re brothers,” he declared. Then he circled his fork over m
y plate like an airplane and stabbed my last bite of wedding cake. The one with all the icing.
I shoved my chair away from the table and stood up. I’d get another piece of cake. Only this time I’d sit in the men’s room and eat it by myself.
Suddenly I felt someone grab my arm. I turned around. It was Aunt Harriet. The one who’s married to Uncle Bunkie. The Aunt Harriet who weighs two hundred pounds.
“Come on, kiddo. Polka with your old aunt.”
My eyes opened wide in fear. No, God, please, I thought. Please don’t make me do this. Please make Aunt Harriet disappear. Zap her or something. But God must have left town right after the wedding. Because the next thing I knew, the two of us were running all over the dance floor. That’s what the polka is—running all around the room while some guy named Fritz plays the accordion. We didn’t stop until Aunt Harriet started getting sweaty.
After the reception, my mom and Ben drove to New England for a weekend honeymoon. Thomas begged to go with them, but my mother said that taking children on your honeymoon was something only the Brady Bunch would do.
I stayed at Dad’s. I didn’t see Mom and Ben again until Monday morning, when my father dropped me off at the house before school. As I headed down the hall to the kitchen I could hear the two of them eating breakfast.
When I walked in, Ben was wearing a plaid robe and slippers. He was sitting in my dad’s chair.
As soon as he saw me he put down his coffee cup. “Charlie,” he said, smiling warmly. I’m not sure if I smiled back. I don’t think so.
My mother ran to greet me with a hug. I think I was supposed to say “Welcome home,” but I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ben.
“Miss me?” Mom asked, squeezing me tightly. Meanwhile, Ben reached back to the counter and grabbed a paper bag. “We brought you something,” he added eagerly.
I took the bag and looked inside. It was a paperweight shaped like Plymouth Rock.
“It’s a paperweight shaped like Plymouth Rock,” he said.
I stared at it a minute, turning it over and over in my hands. “Oh,” I muttered.
SCHOOL WAS a waste that day. I couldn’t concentrate at all. During science Mrs. Berkie strolled over to my desk and pretended to knock on my head. “Anyone home?” she said jokingly.
Yeah, I thought. And he’s wearing a plaid robe and sitting in my father’s chair.
After school his pickup truck was in the driveway. It was filled with stuff. Their stuff. Mattresses, a grandfather clock, a big white desk. Furniture that would look like strangers in our house.
I guess I should have been glad they were moving into our house instead of the other way around. After all, our house was bigger, and at least I got to stay in my own room. But unfortunately there was one small problem. And it was a problem I hadn’t counted on.
“You understand that you and Thomas will have to share your room for a while,” my mother told me at lunch one day. “You knew that, right?”
The fork dropped straight out of my mouth. “No!” I yelled. “No! Not my room. It’s not fair. My room is the only thing I’m going to have left. They’re the brother and sister! Make them share a bedroom.”
My mother’s expression turned angry. “Thank you, Charles, for your wonderful generosity. Thank you for making this so easy for all of us.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, right out loud.
“Lydia is a girl,” she said then, as if this were something I didn’t already know. “You and Thomas are boys.”
“Lydia and Thomas are Russos,” I retorted. “I am a Hickle.” Clever stuff like that comes to me sometimes.
My mother took a couple of deep breaths. I think she was trying to control her voice so MaryAnn Brady, our busybody next-door neighbor, couldn’t hear her yelling.
Mom put her hands on my shoulders. “Here’s the deal,” she informed me matter-of-factly. “When Thomas moves in, the two of you will share a room. Your room. But as soon as Ben and I are able, we will have an extra bedroom built onto the back of the house. And if you want, you can have first choice: Either the new room or your old room.”
She removed her hands and started to walk away. “I’m sorry, but that’s as fair as I can be right now. You’ll just have to accept it.”
Accept it. Gee. What d’ya know.
I’LL NEVER forget watching them move in. Ben and a friend of his from the plant nursery carried Thomas’s bed up the stairs and set it down in the middle in my room.
“Where should we put it, Charlie?” Ben asked me.
Put it back where it came from, I wanted to say. Back in your old house. But instead I pretended not to hear him and went downstairs.
Later, when I came back, everything was changed. Thomas’s bed was jammed in the corner by the window. A white chest with red knobs was shoved up next to it. A baby’s chest. That’s what it looked like. The kind that comes with a crib.
To make space, my desk had been squeezed up against my dresser, and my bed was so close to my closet that I couldn’t get the door all the way open.
Sadly I walked in and sat down. I only looked around a second before burying my head in my pillow. My big, spacious room had turned cramped and teeny.
“Peekapoo!”
Thomas had crept into the room. He was lifting up the end of my pillow.
“Peekapoo! I see you!” he rhymed this time. I groaned. “Boo,” I corrected. “It’s peekaboo.” Excitedly Thomas jumped on my back. “Look, Charrulls! Look at my stuff over there!”
He really liked me. I don’t know why, but he did.
As quickly as he had jumped up, he jumped back down, ran over to his bed, and pointed. “See, Charrulls? I’m going to sleep here and you’re going to sleep there. And it’ll be just like when I spent the night at my friend Jeffrey Pete’s house and then Mr. Pete had to come in four times and say ‘Quiet down, boys,’ and then we kept on laughing and then the next time he took Jeffrey Pete to the guest room.”
This is how Thomas talks. His whole life is held together by “and thens.”
As he was running around, Ben came in carrying three more cartons. When Thomas saw them, he went nuts.
“My toys! My toys! We packed them in those boxes, right, Dad? I was wonderin’ where they were!”
As Ben left, my mother hurried through the doorway. She was wearing a bandanna over her hair. A bandanna means my mother’s serious about cleaning. I think she wears it so she won’t get mop water on her head.
She walked over to the closet and opened the door as far as it would go. Then she scanned the floor and let out a loud groan.
“I was afraid of this,” she grumbled, turning to me. “This closet has got to be cleaned out, Charlie. Ben is going to build some more shelves. But for right now, we need to stack Thomas’s toys and games on the floor in there.”
I gave her a blank stare. Of all the chores in the entire universe, cleaning out my closet is the one I hate most. Besides, it didn’t have to be done today, did it? Today was bad enough without adding the worst chore in the universe.
“Now, Charles. Today,” she ordered, as if she had read my mind. “I want to get as much of this stuff put away as we can.”
I continued to stare. What was wrong with her anyway? Couldn’t she see what had happened to my big, spacious room? Wasn’t that enough for her?
She folded her arms and squinted at me. “Charllllie,” she said, as if lengthening my name would get me going. “The closet.”
It made me mad. It really did.
“I can’t,” I said smugly. “There’s a hand living in there.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Mom glared at me a minute more, then stormed out of the room. A second later she was back with a box of giant plastic trash bags. She opened the first one so I could see how much it would hold. Then she disappeared into the closet and began filling it with the stuff on the floor.
I could hear it. Stuff I hadn’t seen for years was being deposited in the bags for the garbage. That’s where she
would put it, too. My mother can be a very unreasonable person.
Just then I heard my xylophone crash to the bottom of the bag. It made me wince. I’ve always liked that xylophone. I realize it’s a baby instrument, but I can still play “Three Blind Mice” and something else.
I got off the bed. “Okay, okay, okay!” I told her. “You win. You always win.”
She stood up and looked at me. “You’re the one who’s making it into a battle.” Then she handed me the bag and left.
After a few minutes of sifting through old papers and dirty socks, I found my xylophone. I couldn’t find the little wooden mallet to play it with, but after searching the floor, I found a spoon. I think it was left over from a chocolate pudding I had a few months ago.
I started to play “Three Blind Mice.” Just when I got to “See how they run,” Thomas came back into the room. He dashed over to the closet door and started to sing.
I stopped playing right away.
Thomas finished the song without music. Then he pointed at my xylophone. “I don’t have one of those,” he informed me.
I knew what was coming next.
“Maybe I could have that one.”
I shook my head no.
Without wasting a second, he scurried over to my desk and picked up my globe again. “How ’bout this? Can this be mine now? Can we share it?” He spun it around and around. “I really like this thing.”
I put my head in my hands. I hate sharing. I know it’s not the way you’re supposed to feel, but I do. I don’t think I’m alone, either. I think there are millions of kids all over the world who hate it as much as I do.
Sharing is not normal. If you don’t believe me, just look at any National Geographic special. Name one lion who spends an entire day killing a zebra and then calls his friend over and says, “Here, Leo. I just spent ten hours chasing this zebra all over Africa. Help yourself.”
Face it. The only time lions like to share is when they’re already finished eating. And to me, that’s not sharing. That’s full.
Suddenly I stood up and hurried over to the three huge boxes in the middle of the floor. “Thomas,” I said loudly to make sure I had his attention. Then I began touching each box with my finger.