Chapter 13: The Friend Doctor

Grandma Maureen did not ask another question in the library.

She took my hand, the way she did crossing a parking lot, and walked me out past the reading room and the desk.

Mom followed us as far as the front doors.

"Signe," Grandma Maureen said, without turning around, "the hour is over."

Mom stopped on the top step.

She did not kiss me.

I counted that too, and it was the first time a Sunday had ended without one.

Then I was in the back seat of Grandma's car with the doors locked.

Through the rear window I watched Mom stand there with her hands open at her sides.

Grandma Maureen drove for two blocks before she spoke.

"Field Day," she said. "That's the fifth, isn't it? Schoenberger sent a flyer."

"I guess."

"Funny that you'd know the date so exactly, sweetheart. Funny that your mother would, too."

I looked at my knees.

"I'm not a fool, Maddy. Two women whispering a date in a library does not happen by accident."

"It's just Field Day."

"Of course it is." She turned onto Linden Drive. "We'll see that you're nowhere near it."

She told Dad that night at the kitchen table, with the peppermint tin open between them.

I sat on the fourteenth stair, in the dark, with Mr. Ears in my lap.

"She's planning something for that day," Grandma Maureen said. "A scene at the school. Or worse. She's already got the child saying she's sick."

"Mom, come on," Dad said.

"Craig. She took a job in the building. Who does that?"

Dad was quiet for a while.

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