Chapter 6: A Mouth

I didn't take a single cracker out of that can.

I knew what it feels like when somebody finds your stash and throws it away for your own good.

I went downstairs and got a pencil.

I can't draw.

I drew anyway.

A girl with a crooked braid and red boots, sitting at a table.

A stack of pancakes taller than her head.

And a big open mouth, stuffed so full of pancake her cheeks stuck out.

I folded it and laid it on top of the drawings in the can and slid the can back under her bed.

In the morning Posy came down at six-forty as usual.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway.

She had my drawing in her hand.

She looked at it, and then at me, and then at the stove.

"Bear face or plain?" I said.

Then she walked to the table and sat down.

I made her a bear face with blueberry eyes.

She ate the nose first.

Then she ate all of it, and I turned around to the sink so she wouldn't see my face.

When I turned back, she'd taken the pencil off the counter.

On the back of my drawing, under my terrible pancake girl, she'd drawn a fix.

She'd made my girl's braid straight and given her better boots.

At the bottom she'd drawn a cat with a kitten hanging out of its mouth.

"The barn cat," I said. "You want to see the kittens after school?"

At three-thirty she walked straight past the house to the barn in her red boots and waited at the bottom of the loft ladder for me.

Five kittens lay in a nest of feed sacks, eyes barely open.

Posy lay on her stomach in the hay and watched them for twenty minutes without moving.

When the gray one crawled into her palm, she curled her whole body around it.

Her shoulders shook.

She was laughing, I realized.

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