“Hey there, sweetheart,” her father said. “I let you sleep as long as I could, but I’m going to have to leave before your bus comes. Will you be able to get the two of you ready for school?”
Willa said, “Okay.” She sat up and looked across at Elaine, who lay on her side facing her. Elaine opened her eyes just then and blinked. Willa had the feeling that she hadn’t been asleep either.
“I’ve put the key on the kitchen table,” her father said. “Hang it around your neck, all right? Just in case you have to let yourselves in when you get home this afternoon.”
“Okay,” Willa said again.
He waited to make sure she was actually out of bed, and then he gave them both a little wave and went back downstairs. A moment later a car horn honked outside and she heard the front door opening and closing.
They dressed in what they’d worn the day before, because Willa didn’t feel like making a bunch of choices. Then she yanked a brush through her hair. Elaine’s hair was still in its two skinny braids and she claimed they didn’t need redoing, but Willa said, “Are you kidding? They’re falling apart.” She unbraided Elaine’s hair and brushed it, with Elaine squirming and wincing away from her, and braided it again. As she snapped the second rubber band in place she felt capable and efficient, but then Elaine said, “They’re not right.”
“What do you mean, not right?”
“They feel too loose.”
“They’re the same as Mom always makes them,” Willa said.
This was absolutely true, but Elaine went over to look in the mirror on the closet door and when she turned back her eyes were filled with tears. “They’re not the same!” she said. “They’re all floppy!”
“Well, I did the best I could! Gee!”
The tears spilled over and rolled down Elaine’s cheeks, but she didn’t say anything more.
For breakfast they had Cheerios and orange juice from a carton and their chewable vitamin pills. Then Willa cleared the table and wiped it. The counter was crowded now with dirty dishes, the ones from last night and the ones from breakfast, and they were very depressing to look at.
Their father had made himself coffee, she saw, but he hadn’t left a bowl or a plate so he must not have eaten anything.
She worried they might miss the school bus—she wasn’t used to timing this on her own—so she hustled them both into their jackets and mittens and they hurried out of the house and up the road to the bus stop and got there way too early. The bus stop was a lean-to with an old snuff ad peeling off it and a bench inside, and they sat close together on the bench and hugged their book bags for warmth and breathed out miserable rags of white air. It was better when the others arrived—Eula Pratt and her brother and the three Turnstile boys. They all crowded into the lean-to and jiggled up and down and made shuddery noises, and Willa started feeling halfway warm.
On the bus Elaine usually sat with Natalie Dean, but this morning she followed Willa to the rear where Sonya was saving Willa a seat and she settled in the empty seat across the aisle from the two of them. It was true that her braids looked kind of draggly. And the tails at their ends were too long. Their mother only left about an inch of tail.
Sonya said she’d been thinking it over, and she believed that if they sold their candy bars just to family they wouldn’t have to go around ringing strangers’ doorbells. “I’ve got four uncles on my mom’s side,” she said, “and an uncle and two aunts on my dad’s side, except my aunts live far away. But that’s okay; they can mail me the money, and I can keep their candy bars for the next time they come to visit.”
“You have a way bigger family than I do,” Willa said.
“And then my grandma Bailey: well, that goes without saying. But my other grandparents are dead.”
Willa’s grandparents were still alive, both sets, but she didn’t see them much. Well, her father’s parents she didn’t see at all, because Willa’s mother said she had not one thing in common with them. Besides, they were country people and they couldn’t leave their animals. Her mother’s parents did sometimes come down from Philly for holidays, although not that often and not for very long, but her mother didn’t really like her brother and sister and they hardly ever visited. She said her brother had always been the favorite because he was a boy, and her sister was a favorite too because she was the youngest and cutest; her sister was spoiled rotten, she said. Willa was almost sure that if she suggested selling candy bars to either of them, her mother would make a snorting sound. Anyhow, they would probably say no if they were as awful as all that.
“Maybe I’ll just go around to the people in my own block,” she told Sonya. “That’s easier than strangers, at least.”
“Okay, but Billy Turnstile’s on your block, remember. You better hurry or he’ll get to everyone first.”
Willa sent Billy a slit-eyed look. He was tussling with his brother, trying to wrest some kind of cellophane-wrapped snack from his hands. “Billy Turnstile’s a back-of-the-room boy,” she said. “What do you want to bet he doesn’t even bother.”
“Oh, and I have a godmother, too,” Sonya said.
“You are so, so lucky,” Willa told her.
When she grew up she was going to marry a man who came from a big, close, jolly family. He would get along with all of them—he’d be the same kind of man her father was, friendly and easygoing—and all of them would love Willa and treat her like one of their own. She would have either six children or eight children, half of them girls and half boys, and they would grow up playing with their multitude of cousins.
“Your sister’s crying,” Sonya pointed out.
Willa glanced over and saw Elaine wiping her nose with the back of one mittened hand. “What’s the matter?” she called across the aisle.
“Nothing,” Elaine said in a small voice. The back of her mitten had a shiny streak now like a string of glue.
“She’s okay,” Willa told Sonya.
* * *
—
But halfway through the school day, just after Willa’s lunch period, the nurse came to the classroom and asked the teacher to excuse Willa Drake. “Your little sister’s got a tummy ache,” she told Willa as they walked to her office. “I don’t think it’s anything serious, but I can’t seem to get ahold of your mother, and your sister asked if you could come sit with her.”
This made Willa feel important, at first. “It’s probably all in her mind,” she said in a knowledgeable voice, and when they reached the office Elaine sat up on her cot looking glad to see her and the nurse brought over a chair for her. But then Elaine lay back down and covered her eyes with one arm, and Willa had nothing to do. She watched the nurse filling out some papers at her desk across the room. She studied a brightly colored poster about the importance of washing your hands. Somebody knocked on the door—Mrs. Porter from sixth grade—and the nurse went out to speak with her, leaving the door partly open behind her so that Willa could see the seventh-graders crowding past on their way to lunch. One of the seventh-grade boys elbowed another and caused him to stumble, and Mrs. Porter said, “I saw that, Dickie Bond!” Her voice rang out in the hall as if she were speaking from inside a seashell, and so did a seventh-grade girl’s voice saying “…weird pinky-orangeish shade that made my teeth look yellow…”