“Hi, Pop.”
He turned and wandered into the living room, leaving her to close the front door. He was still in the white shirt and gray pants he wore to work, but he’d exchanged his shoes for his corduroy slippers so he must have been home for a while. (He taught shop at the high school in Garrettville; he came home well before other fathers.)
Her sister was sitting on the rug with the newspaper opened to the comics. She was six years old and had gone overnight from cute to really ugly—all chewed-down nails and missing front teeth and disturbingly skinny brown braids. “How many’d you sell?” she asked Willa. “Did you sell all of them?,” because Willa had left the carton of candy bars at Sonya’s and she only had her book bag with her. Willa tossed her book bag onto the couch and shucked off her jacket. Her eyes were on her father, who had not stopped in the living room but was continuing toward the kitchen. She followed him. In the kitchen he reached for a skillet from the pegboard beside the stove. “Grilled cheese sandwiches tonight!” he said in a fake-cheerful voice.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Your mother won’t be joining us.”
She waited for him to say something else, but he got very busy adjusting the burner under the skillet, dropping in a pat of butter, adjusting the burner again when the butter began to sizzle. He started whistling under his breath, some tune that didn’t go anywhere.
Willa returned to the living room. Elaine had finished reading the comics now and was folding up the paper—another bad sign: taking such care, for once; trying to be good. “Is Mom upstairs?” Willa asked in a whisper.
Elaine gave the smallest shake of her head.
“Did she go out?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What happened?”
Elaine shrugged.
“Was she mad?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What about?”
Another shrug.
Well, what was it ever about, really? Their mother was the prettiest mother in their school, and the liveliest and the smartest, but then all of a sudden something would happen and she would have this big flare-up. It started with their father, often. It could start with Willa or Elaine, but most often it was him. You’d think he would learn, Willa thought. Learn what, though? To Willa, he seemed perfect just the way he was, and she loved him more than any other person in the world. He was funny and kind and soft-spoken, and he never got grumpy like Sonya’s father or belched at the table like Madeline’s. But “Oh,” their mother would say to him, “I know you! I see right through you! All ‘Yes, dear; no, dear,’ but butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Willa wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. Still, he must have done something wrong. She sank onto the couch and watched Elaine place the folded newspaper neatly-neatly on top of a stack of magazines. “She said she’d had it,” Elaine told her after a minute. She spoke in a tiny thin voice and barely moved her lips, as if to hide the fact that she was talking. “She said he could just try running this house himself, if he thought he could do any better. She said he was ‘holier than thou.’ She called him ‘Saint Melvin.’ ”
“Saint Melvin?” Willa asked. She screwed up her forehead. That sounded to her like a good thing. “What did he say back?” she asked.
“He didn’t say anything, at first. Then he said he was sorry she felt that way.”
Elaine settled on the couch beside Willa, just on the very front edge.
The living room had had a do-over recently; it was more up-to-date than it used to be. Their mother had borrowed decorating books from the library in Garrettville, and one of her Little Theatre friends had brought over swatches of fabric that they laid here and there on the couch and the backs of the two matching armchairs. Matching furniture was passé, their mother said. Now one chair was covered in a bluish tweed and the other was blue-and-green-striped. The wall-to-wall carpet had been ripped up and replaced with a fringed off-white rug, so that the dark wood floor could be seen all around the edges. Willa missed the wall-to-wall carpet. Their house was an old white clapboard house that rattled when the wind blew, and the carpet had made it feel solider and warmer. Also she missed the painting above the fireplace that showed a ship in full sail on a faded sea. (Now there was a, kind of like, picture of a fuzzy circle.) But she was proud of the rest of it. Sonya said she wished Willa’s mother would come and redecorate their poky old living room.
Their father appeared in the doorway with a spatula in his hand. “Peas or green beans?” he asked them.
Elaine said, “Can’t we go to Bing’s Drive-In, Pop? Please?”
“What!” he said, pretending to be insulted. “You would turn down my famous Grilled Cheese Sandwiches à la Maison for drive-in food?”
Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother’s absences—her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.
Elaine said, “Tammy Denton goes to Bing’s with her family every single Friday night.”
Their father rolled his eyes. “Has Tammy Denton backed a winning horse at the races lately?” he asked.
“What?”
“Did a rich aunt die and leave her a fortune? Did she find a treasure chest buried in her backyard?”
He started advancing on Elaine with the fingers of his free hand wriggling comically, threatening to tickle her, and Elaine shrieked and shrank away, laughing, and hid behind Willa. Willa held herself apart. She sat rigid and drew in her elbows. “When is Mom coming back?” she asked.
Her father straightened and said, “Oh, pretty soon.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No, she didn’t, but you know what? I’m thinking we three should have Cokes with our supper.”
“Goody!” Elaine said, popping up from behind Willa.
Willa said, “Did she take the car?”
He passed a palm across his scalp. “Well, yes,” he said.
This was bad. It meant she didn’t just walk down the road to her friend Mimi Prentice’s house; she had gone off who-knows-where.
“So, no Bing’s Drive-In, then,” Elaine said sadly.
“Shut up about Bing’s Drive-In!” Willa shouted, turning on her.
Elaine’s mouth flew open. Their father said, “Gracious.”
But then smoke started coming from the kitchen, and he said, “Uh-oh,” and rushed back to set up a clatter among the pots and pans.