Their car was old and it had one different-colored fender from the time when their mother had run it into a guardrail out on the East-West Parkway, and it was always full of their father’s junk—paper cups and ruffle-edged magazines and candy wrappers and various coffee-ringed pieces of mail. For years their mother had been wanting a car of her own, but they were too poor. She said they were too poor. Their father said they were fine. “We’ve got enough to eat, haven’t we?” he asked his daughters. Yes, and they had a fancy new living room too, Willa thought, and she felt scornful and bitter and unexpectedly grown up when these words flew into her mind.
* * *
—
The grilled cheese sandwiches had a scaly look where their father had scraped off the black parts, but they tasted okay. Especially with Cokes. Their vegetable was green beans—frozen, and cooked not quite long enough so that they had a wet feel and squeaked against Willa’s teeth when she chewed them. Most of them she hid beneath the crusts of her sandwich.
When their father was in charge of dinner he didn’t bother with the frills, like completely clearing the table of its clutter before he set it; or folding the paper napkins into triangles under the forks; or lowering the shades against the cold dark that was pressing against the windowpanes. This gave Willa a hollow feeling. Also, he seemed to have run out of steam as far as conversation went. He didn’t say much during supper and he barely touched his food.
After they were done eating he went into the living room and turned the news on the way he always did. Usually Elaine went with him, but tonight she stayed in the kitchen with Willa, whose job it was to clear the table. Willa stacked the dirty dishes on the counter beside the sink, and then she took the saucepan from the stovetop and went out to the living room to ask their father, “What’ll I do with the beans?”
“Hmm?” he said. He was watching Vietnam.
“Should I save them?”
“What? No. I don’t know.”
She waited. Behind her she felt the presence of Elaine, who had trailed her like a puppy. Finally she said, “Would Mom maybe come home later tonight and want to eat them?”
“Just throw them out,” he said after a moment.
When she turned to go back to the kitchen she bumped smack into Elaine; that was how closely Elaine had been following her.
In the kitchen, she dumped the beans into the garbage bin and set the saucepan on the counter. She wiped the table with a damp cloth and draped the cloth over the faucet, and then she turned the kitchen light off and she and Elaine went back to the living room and watched the rest of the news, even though it was boring. They sat close on either side of their father, and he put an arm around each of them and gave them a squeeze from time to time, but still he was very quiet.
Once the news was finished, though, he seemed to gather himself together. “Anyone for Parcheesi?” he asked, rubbing his hands briskly. Willa was sort of over Parcheesi, but she said, “I am!,” matching his enthusiastic tone, and Elaine went to fetch the board.
They played at the coffee table, the two girls on the floor and their father on the couch because he was too old and stiff, he always said, to sit on the floor. The theory was that Parcheesi would be good for Elaine’s arithmetic; she still counted on her fingers when she did addition. Tonight, though, she didn’t seem to be trying. When she threw a four and a two she announced, “One-two-three-four; one-two,” plopping her token down on each space hard enough to rattle the other tokens. “Six,” their father corrected her. “Add them together, honey.” Elaine just settled back on her heels, and when it was her turn again she counted to five and then three. This time their father said nothing.
Elaine’s bedtime was eight o’clock and Willa’s was nine, but tonight when their father sent Elaine upstairs to get into her pajamas Willa went with her and got into her own pajamas. They shared a room; they had matching single beds along opposite walls. Elaine climbed into her bed and asked, “Who will read to me?,” because most nights it was their mother who did that. Willa said, “I will,” and she slid under the covers next to Elaine and took Little House in the Big Woods from the nightstand.
Willa always thought of Pa in this book as looking like their father. This made no sense, because a picture right on the cover showed Pa with a lot of hair and a beard. But he had that quiet, explaining manner that their father had, and whenever he said anything in the story Willa tried to read his words in their father’s furry voice, dropping her final g’s just the way he did.
At the end of the chapter, Elaine said, “Another,” but Willa snapped the book shut and said, “Nope, you have to wait till tomorrow.”
“Will Mom be home by tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Willa said. “What did you think? She’ll be home tonight, I bet, probably.”
Then she got out of Elaine’s bed and went to the door, planning to call down the stairs and ask their father to come tuck them in, but he was on the phone; she could tell by his extra-loud voice and the silences between sentences. “Great!” he said energetically, and then, after a silence, “Seven fifteen will be fine. I have to be in pretty early myself.” He must be talking to Mr. Law, who taught algebra at the high school, or maybe Mrs. Bellows, who was the assistant principal. Both of them lived here in Lark City and occasionally gave him a ride if Willa’s mother needed the car.
So she would not be home by tomorrow, was what it sounded like. She had never stayed away a whole night before.
Willa turned off the light and padded over to her own bed and slipped under the covers. She lay on her back, eyes wide open. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
What if their mother never came back?
She wasn’t always angry. She had lots of good days. On good days she invented the most exciting projects for the three of them—things to paint, things to decorate the house with, skits to put on for the holidays. And she had a wonderful singing voice, clear and sort of liquid-sounding. Sometimes, when Willa and Elaine begged her, she would sit in their room after bedtime and sing to them, and then as they drifted into sleep she would rise and back out of the room still singing, but more softly, and she would sing all the way down the stairs until she faded into silence. Willa loved it when she sang “Down in the Valley”—especially the part where she asked someone to write her a letter and send it by mail, send it in care of Birmingham Jail. It was such a lonesome song that it made Willa ache just to hear it now in her mind. But it was the sweetly heavy, enjoyable kind of ache.
* * *
—
The next morning, her father whistled his special wake-up whistle in the doorway. Tweet-tweet! he whistled—like the first two notes of “Dixie,” Willa always thought. She had been awake for ages, but she made a big show of opening her eyes and stretching and yawning. She already knew that their mother wasn’t back yet. The house had an echoey sound, and it seemed too exposed in the flat white light from the windows.