Chapter 6

6

The Ellingtons. They lived three doors down from the house I grew up in and their lawn was the only one in the neighborhood that stayed green through the dry, relentless summers. Mrs. Ellington knocked on our door exactly seventy-two hours after Cecilia had left me. My father was still snoring on the sofa where he had slept each night for the past year. I had realized only an hour earlier that my mother wasn’t going to come home this time. I’d gone through her dresser and the drawers in the bathroom and the place where she stashed her cartons of cigarettes. Everything that mattered to her was gone. I knew enough by then not to ask my father where she went.

“Would you like to come for a nice Sunday roast at our house, Blythe?” Her tight curls were shiny and hard, fresh from the salon, and I couldn’t help but reply directly to them with a nod and a thank-you. I went straight to the laundry room and put my best outfit—a navy blue jumper and a rainbow-striped turtleneck—in the washing machine. I had thought of asking her if my father could come, too, but Mrs. Ellington was the most socially appropriate woman I knew, and I figured if she didn’t include him in her invitation, there was a reason.

Thomas Ellington Jr. was the best friend I had. I don’t remember when I’d given him that distinction, but by the time I was ten, he was the only person I cared to play with. Other girls my age made me uneasy. My life looked different from theirs—their Easy-Bake Ovens, their homemade hair bows, their proper socks. Their mothers. I learned very early on that being different from them didn’t feel good.

But the Ellingtons made me feel good.

The thing about Mrs. Ellington’s invitation was that she must have somehow known my mother had left. Because my mother no longer allowed me to attend dinner at the Ellingtons’. At some point she had decided I needed to be home by a quarter to five every night, although there was nothing to come home to: the oven was always cold and the fridge was always empty. By then, most evenings my father and I ate instant oatmeal. He’d bring home small packets of brown sugar for the top, ones he stuffed in his pockets from the cafeteria at the hospital, where he managed the cleaning staff. He made decent enough money then, by local standards at least. We just didn’t seem to live that way.

I had somehow learned that it was polite to bring a gift when invited to a nice dinner, so I had clipped a fistful of hydrangeas from our front bush, although late September had turned most of the white petals to a crispy dusty pink. I tied the stems with my rubber hair elastic.

“You’re such a thoughtful young woman,” Mrs. Ellington had said. She put them in a blue vase and placed them carefully on the table in the middle of the steaming dishes.

Thomas’s younger brother, Daniel, adored me. We played trains in the living room after school while Thomas did his homework with his mother. I always saved mine for after eight o’clock, when Cecilia either went to bed or was gone for the night to the city. She did that often—went to the city and came back the next day. So doing my homework then gave me something to do while I waited for my eyes to get tired. Little Daniel fascinated me. He spoke like an adult and knew how to multiply when he was just five years old. I would quiz him on the times tables while we played on the Ellingtons’ scratchy orange rug, amazed at how clever he was. Mrs. Ellington would pop in to listen and always touched each of our heads before she left. Good job, you two.

Thomas was smart, too, but in different ways. He made up the most incredible stories, which we’d write in the tiny spiral notebooks his mother bought us at the corner store. Then we’d draw pictures to go along with every page. Each book would take us weeks—we painstakingly discussed what to draw for each part of the story and then took our time sharpening the whole box of pencils before we began. Once Thomas let me bring one home, a story I loved about a family with a beautiful, kind mother who became very sick with a rare form of deadly chicken pox. They go for their last vacation together as a family to a faraway island, where they find a tiny, magical gnome in the sand named George, who speaks only in rhymes. He grants them the gift of one special superpower in exchange for bringing him home in their suitcase to the other side of the world. They agree, and he gives them what they wish for—Your mom will live forever, until the end of time. Whenever you get sad, just sing this little rhyme! The gnome lives inside the mother’s pocket for eternity, happily ever after. I’d drawn the family carefully on the pages of this book—they looked just like the Ellingtons, but with a third child who didn’t look anything like them: a daughter with Crayola-peach skin like mine.

One morning I found my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, flipping through the book, which I’d hidden deep in my drawer.

“Where did this come from?” She spoke without looking at me and stopped on the page where I’d drawn myself as part of the Black family.

“I made it. With Thomas. At his house.” I reached for the book in her hands, my book. The reach was pleading. She yanked her arm away from me, and then tossed the book at my head, as though the spiraled pages and everything about them disgusted her. The corner clipped my chin and the book landed between us on the floor. I stared at it, embarrassed. Of the pictures she didn’t like, of the fact that I’d been hiding it from her.

My mother stood up, her thin neck erect, her shoulders back. She shut the door quietly behind her.

I brought the book back to Thomas’s house the next day.

“Why don’t you want to keep it? You were so proud of what you two made together.” Mrs. Ellington took it from my hands and saw that it was bent in a few places. She smoothed the cover softly. “It’s okay,” she said, shaking her head so that I didn’t have to answer. “You can keep it here.”

She put it on the bookshelf in their living room. When I was leaving that day, I noticed she’d opened the book to the last page and faced it out toward the room—the family of five, me included, our arms around one another, an explosion of tiny hearts coming from our smiling mother who stood in the middle.

At the Sunday dinner on the night my mother left, I offered to clean the kitchen with Mrs. Ellington. She clicked on a cassette tape and sang just a little as she cleared the table and wiped the counters. I watched her bashfully from the corner of my eye while I rinsed the dishes. At one point she stopped and picked up the oven mitt from the counter. She looked at me with a playful smile, slipped it over her hand, and held it up beside her head.

“Miss Blythe,” she said in a funny high-pitched voice, her hand moving in the puppet. “We ask all of our celebrity guests here on the Ellington After-Dinner Talk Show a few questions about themselves. So. Tell us—what do you like to do for fun, hmm? Ever go to the movies?”

I laughed awkwardly, not sure how to play along. “Uh, yeah. Sometimes?” I hadn’t ever been to the movies. I also hadn’t ever talked to a puppet. I looked down and shuffled some dishes around in the sink. Thomas came running into the kitchen squealing, “Mommy’s doing the talk show again!” and Daniel flew in behind him. “Ask me something, ask me!” Mrs. Ellington stood with one hand on her hip and the other hand chatting away, her voice squeaking from the corner of her mouth. Mr. Ellington popped his head in to watch.

“Now, Daniel, what is your very favorite thing to eat, and you can’t say ice cream!” said the puppet. He jumped up and down while he thought of his answer and Thomas shouted options. “Pie! I know it’s pie!” Mrs. Ellington’s oven mitt gasped, “PIE! Not rhubarb, though, right? That gives me the toots!” and the boys screamed over each other in laughter. I listened to them carry on. I’d never felt anything like this before. The spontaneity. The silliness. The comfort. Mrs. Ellington saw me watching from the sink and called me over with her finger. She put the oven mitt on my hand and said, “A guest host tonight! What a treat!” And then she whispered to me, “Go ahead, ask the boys what they’d rather do. Eat worms or someone else’s boogers?” I snickered. She rolled her eyes and smiled, as if to say, Trust me, they’ll love it, those silly boys.

She walked me home that night, which she had never done before. All the lights in my house were off. She watched as I unlocked the door, to make sure my dad’s shoes were in the hallway. And then from her pocket she pulled the book about the magical gnome and gave it to me.

“Thought you might want this back now.”

I did. I flipped the pages with my thumb and thought, for the first time that night, about my mother.

I thanked her again for dinner. She turned around at the end of my driveway and called, “Same time next week! If I don’t see you before then.” I suspect she knew she would.