WILLA DRAKE AND Sonya Bailey were selling candy bars door-to-door. This was for the Herbert Malone Elementary School Orchestra. If they sold enough, the orchestra would get to travel to the regional competitions in Harrisburg. Willa had never been to Harrisburg, but she liked the harsh, gritty sound of the name. Sonya had been but had no memory of it because she was a baby at the time. Both of them swore they would absolutely die if they didn’t get to go now.

Willa played the clarinet. Sonya played the flute. They were eleven years old. They lived two blocks from each other in Lark City, Pennsylvania, which wasn’t a city at all or even much of a town and in fact didn’t even have sidewalks except on the one street where the stores were. In Willa’s mind, sidewalks were huge. She planned never to live in a place without them after she was grown.

Because of the lack of sidewalks, they weren’t allowed to walk on the roads after dark. So they set out in the afternoon, Willa lugging a carton of candy bars and Sonya holding a manila envelope for the money they hoped to make. They started from Sonya’s house, where they’d first had to finish their homework. Sonya’s mother made them promise to head back as soon as the sun – pale as milk anyhow in mid-February – fell behind the scratchy trees on top of Bert Kane Ridge. Sonya’s mother was kind of a worrier, much more so than Willa’s mother.

The plan was that they would begin far off, on Harper Road, and end up back in their own neighborhood. Nobody in the orchestra lived on Harper Road, and they were thinking they could make a killing if they got there before the others. This was Monday, the very first day of the candy drive; most of the others would probably wait till the weekend.

The top three sellers would win a three-course dinner with Mr. Budd, their music teacher, in a downtown Harrisburg restaurant, all expenses paid.

The houses on Harper Road were newish. Ranch-style, they were called. They were all on one level and made of brick, and the people who lived there were newish, too – most of them employed by the furniture factory that had opened over in Garrettville a couple of years ago. Willa and Sonya didn’t know a one of them, and this was a good thing because then they wouldn’t feel so self-conscious pretending to be salesmen.

Before they tried the first house, they stopped behind a big evergreen bush in order to get themselves ready. They had washed their hands and faces back at Sonya’s house, and Sonya had combed her hair, which was the straight, dark, ribbony kind that a comb could slide right through. Willa’s billow of yellow curls needed a brush instead of a comb, but Sonya didn’t own a brush and so Willa had just flattened her frizzes with her palms as best she could. She and Sonya wore almost-matching wool jackets with fake-fur-trimmed hoods, and blue jeans with the cuffs turned up to show their plaid flannel linings. Sonya had sneakers on but Willa was still in her school shoes, brown tie oxfords, because she hadn’t wanted to stop by home and get waylaid by her little sister, who would beg to tag along.

“Hold the whole carton up when they open the door,” Sonya told Willa. “Not just one candy bar. Ask, ‘Would you like to buy some candy bars?’ Plural.”

“I’m going to ask?” Willa said. “I thought you were.”

“I’d feel silly asking.”

“What, you don’t think I’d feel silly?”

“But you’re much better with grownups.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’ll be in charge of the money,” Sonya said, and she waved her envelope.

Willa said, “Okay, but then you have to ask at the next house.”

“Fine,” Sonya said.

Of course it was fine, because the next house was bound to be easier. But Willa tightened her arms around the carton, and Sonya turned to lead the way up the flagstone walk.

This house had a metal sculpture out front that was nothing but a tall, swooping curve, very modern. The doorbell was lit with a light that glowed even in the daytime. Sonya poked it. A rich-sounding two-note chime rang somewhere inside, followed by a silence so deep that they could begin to hope no one was home. But then footsteps approached, and the door opened, and a woman stood smiling at them. She was younger than their mothers and more stylish, with short brown hair and bright lipstick, and she wore a miniskirt. “Why, hello, girls,” she said, while behind her a little boy came toddling up, dragging a pull toy and asking, “Who’s that, Mama? Who’s that, Mama?”

Willa looked at Sonya. Sonya looked at Willa. Something about Sonya’s expression – so trusting, so expectant, her lips moistened and slightly parted as if she planned to start speaking along with Willa – struck Willa as comical, and she felt a little burp of laughter rising in her chest and then bubbling in her throat. The sudden, surprising squeak that popped out seemed comical too – hilarious, in fact – and the bubble of laughter turned to gales of laughter, whole waterfalls of laughter, and next to her Sonya broke into sputters and doubled in on herself while the woman stood looking at them, still smiling a questioning smile. Willa asked, “Would you like – ? Would you like— ?” but she couldn’t finish; she was overcome; she couldn’t catch her breath.

“Are you two offering to sell me something?” the woman suggested kindly. Willa could tell that she’d probably gotten the giggles herself when she was their age, although surely – oh, lord – surely not such hysterical giggles, such helpless, overpowering, uncontrollable giggles. These giggles were like a liquid that flooded Willa’s whole body, causing tears to stream from her eyes and forcing her to crumple over her carton and clamp her legs together so as not to pee. She was mortified, and she could see from Sonya’s desperate, wildeyed face that she was mortified too, but at the same time it was the most wonderful, loose, relaxing feeling. Her cheeks ached and her stomach muscles seemed to have softened into silk. She could have melted into a puddle right there on the stoop.

Sonya was the first to give up. She flapped an arm wearily in the woman’s direction and turned to start back down the flagstone walk, and Willa turned too and followed without another word. After a moment, they heard the front door gently closing behind them.

They weren’t laughing anymore. Willa felt tired to the bone, and emptied and a little sad. And Sonya might have felt the same way, because the sun still hung like a thin white dime above Bert Kane Ridge, but she said, “We ought to wait till the weekend. It’s too hard when we’ve got all this homework.” Willa didn’t argue.

When her father opened the door to her, he had a sorrowful look on his face. His eyes behind his little rimless glasses seemed a paler blue, lacking their usual twinkle, and he was passing one palm across his smooth bald scalp in that slow, uncertain way that meant something had disappointed him. Willa’s first thought was that he had found out about her giggling fit. She knew that was unlikely – and anyway, he wasn’t the type to object to a case of giggles – but how else to explain his expression? “Hi, honey,” he said in a discouragedsounding voice.

“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-todate 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.

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; onetwo,” 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 liquidsounding. 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.

“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 seventhgrade 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 seventhgrade girl’s voice saying “… weird pinky-orangeish shade that made my teeth look yellow …”

Did all these kids come from perfectly happy families? Weren’t any of them hiding something that was going on at home? They didn’t seem to be. They didn’t seem to have a thing on their minds but lunch and friends and lipstick.

The nurse came back in and shut the door, and the sounds from the hall fell away. Still, Willa could hear when orchestra practice started. Darn. She loved orchestra. They were learning “The Gliding Dance of the Maidens” by Borodin. The first few notes were so soft and uncertain – weak notes, she always thought – that it took her a moment to sort them out, but they grew stronger on the main melody. It was the “Stranger in Paradise” melody, and the backof-the-room boys always crooned, “Take my hand, I’m a strangelooking parasite …” till Mr. Budd tapped his baton against his music stand. Mr. Budd was very handsome, with longish golden curls and bulging muscles. You could mistake him for a rock star. If Willa sold the most candy bars and got to go to dinner with him, she would be completely tongue-tied. She almost didn’t want to go to dinner with him.

The orchestra broke off and started over. Same weak beginning, same “Take my hand …” but growing louder now and more sure of itself.

“Is Mom going to be there when we get home today?” Elaine asked.

Willa glanced at her. She had lowered her arm and was crinkling her eyebrows worriedly.

“Of course she is,” Willa said.

Of course she was going to be there, but even so, Willa told Sonya on the bus that she couldn’t go home with her after school. “I have to babysit my sister,” she said. She said it just in a murmur, so that her sister wouldn’t hear. Her sister was sitting all by herself across the aisle from them again.

It was hard to tell from the front of their house whether anyone was inside. True, the windows were dark, but it was daytime, after all. The grass had a flattened, beaten-down look and the leaves of the rhododendron bush by the porch were rolled up tight as cigars; that was how cold it was. Willa fished for the key on its string inside her jacket. She could have tried ringing the doorbell first, but she didn’t want to make her sister stand waiting and then have nothing happen.

In the foyer, there was a ticking silence. In the living room the only motion was the stirring of a curtain hem above a radiator. “She’s not here,” Elaine said in that small voice of hers.

Willa threw her book bag onto the couch. “Give her time,” she said.

“But we already gave her time! We gave her all last night!”

“Thinking time,” their father called it. Their mother would shout at him and stamp her foot, or slap Willa in the face (such a stinging, shameful experience, being slapped in the face – so scary to the person’s eyes), or shake Elaine like a Raggedy Ann, and then she would grab her own hair in both hands so that even after she let go of it, it stayed bushed out on either side of her head. Then next thing you knew she’d be gone, with the house standing shocked and trembling behind her, and their father would say, “Never mind, she just needs a little thinking time.” He wouldn’t seem perturbed in the least. “She’s overtired, is all,” he’d say.

“Other people get overtired,” Willa had told him once, “but they don’t act the way she does.”

“Well, but you know she’s very high-strung.”

Willa wondered how he could be so understanding when he himself never lost his temper – had never even raised his voice, as far as she could remember.

She wished he were here now. Generally he was home by four, but they couldn’t count on that today because he’d be riding with someone else.

“You want a snack?” she asked Elaine. “How about milk and cookies?”

“Well, cookies, maybe.”

“No milk, no cookies!”

That was what their mother always said; Willa used their mother’s merry, singsong voice. It was an effort, though.

In the kitchen she poured a glass of milk and set it on the table along with two Oreos. She didn’t take anything for herself because she had this weird feeling that something was stuck in her throat. Instead she fetched her book bag from the couch and carried it into the dining room, where she always did her homework. Before she’d even started on it, though, Elaine arrived, bringing her cookies but not her milk, and settled opposite her. First-graders didn’t have homework, so Willa asked her, “Want to color in your coloring book?”

Elaine just shook her head.

Willa made up her mind to ignore her. She drew out her math assignment and set to work, but she was conscious all the while of her sister’s eyes on her. Every now and then she heard a mousy crunching sound as Elaine took a nibble from an Oreo.

By the time Willa started on her history questions, Elaine had finished both cookies and was just sitting there, every now and then heaving loud sighs that Willa pretended not to notice. Then the telephone rang. “I’ll get it!” Elaine said, but Willa beat her into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver first. “Hello?” she said.

“Hi, sweetheart,” her father said.

“Hi, Pop.”

“Everything okay there?”

She knew what he was really asking, but all she said was “Yup. I’m doing my homework and Elaine’s just had her snack.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Well, I ought to be there before long. I’m just waiting for Doug Law to finish meeting with a student.”

He was riding with Mr. Law, then. That was better than Mrs. Bellows, who sometimes stayed in her office as late as six or seven. Willa said, “Okay, Pop.”

“Get ready for the world’s best grilled cheese sandwiches!”

“Okay.”

She hung up and turned to Elaine, who was watching her closely. “He says he’ll be home before long,” Willa told her.

Elaine heaved another sigh.

Willa looked around the kitchen at the counter crowded with dirty dishes, more dishes in the sink, Elaine’s untouched glass of milk sitting on the table along with the clutter from yesterday. “We should clean up,” she said. “Want to help me do the dishes? Me washing and you drying?”

“Yes!” Elaine said. She sounded excited about it; ordinarily it was their mother who washed and Willa who dried. “Do I get to wear an apron?” she asked.

“Well, sure.”

Willa tied one of their mother’s aprons just under Elaine’s armpits, to keep it from dragging on the floor. Then she filled both sides of the sink with hot water, and Elaine hauled the step stool over so she could reach the counter. After Willa had washed the first plate and dipped it into the rinse water, she set it in the dish rack and Elaine picked it up carefully and dried every little crevice with a towel. She took ages at it, but that was all for the better, Willa figured. She started moving more slowly herself, drawing out the process, and when she’d finished washing the dishes she wiped down every surface, including the stovetop, and she cleared the clutter from the table and returned Elaine’s milk to the fridge.

“I did good, don’t you think?” Elaine asked when she’d dried the last dish.

“Yes, you did, Lainey,” Willa said.

It wasn’t so bad, really, being in charge. She began to imagine it as a permanent situation – just the three of them forever, coping on their own. Why, she and her father between them could keep things going just fine! They both liked systems, and methods. If her mother ever came back, she’d say, “Oh.” She’d look around her and say, “Oh. I see you’re doing better than I ever did.”

“Know what?” Willa asked Elaine. “I vote we make a dessert.”

“Dessert!” Elaine said. She started smiling hugely, showing the gap in her teeth. She smoothed her apron down her front. “What kind of dessert?”

“A cake, maybe, or a pudding. Chocolate pudding.”

“Yes! Do you know how to do that?”

“I’m sure we can find a recipe,” Willa said. She was warming to the idea now. As a rule they didn’t have dessert. She had always envied Sonya, whose mother served dessert every night of the week. And chocolate pudding was their father’s favorite – that and chocolate silk pie, but Willa thought a piecrust might be complicated.

“We’ll keep it a secret from Pop till after supper,” she told Elaine, “and then we’ll bring it out. He’s going to be amazed.” She was moving the step stool as she spoke, climbing up on it to look through the books on their mother’s cookbook shelf. “The Bride’s Kitchen,” she read. “That would have the easiest recipe, I bet.” She brought it down with her and opened it on the counter. Elaine came to stand at her elbow, her eyes on Willa’s finger as it traveled down a column. “Chocolate cake, chocolate milk …” Willa read out. “Chocolate pudding. Two sixty-one.” She flipped to page 261. “Sugar, cocoa powder, salt. Half-and-half, vanilla … uh-oh. Cornstarch.” She didn’t even know what cornstarch looked like, but she went over to check the cupboard where their mother kept the flour and such, and there it was. She set the box on the counter and Elaine said, “Can I stir, Willa? Can I?”

“Sure,” Willa told her.

Elaine wasn’t allowed to do anything on the stove yet, so Willa put a saucepan on the kitchen table and had her mix everything there. Of course Elaine made a mess of it, splashing enthusiastically over the rim of the pan, and the cornstarch and cocoa powder sat there in lumps instead of blending in, but Willa said, “Good job, Lainey,” and then she moved the pan to the stove and stirred it herself, more gently, while it was heating.

But she had no better luck than Elaine had. The lumps remained, even after the mixture began bubbling around the edges. It looked like plain milk with brown- and-white gravel in it. “What’s happening? Is it turning to pudding?” Elaine asked, because she wasn’t tall enough to see for herself. Willa didn’t answer. She raised the heat even higher, and the pan would have boiled over if she hadn’t snatched it up and moved it to a cool burner, but still the gravel remained. “I don’t understand,” she told Elaine. She snapped off the right-hand burner, which was glowing a deep, dark red, and then she stared down into the saucepan.

“What? What?” Elaine asked.

“I don’t – ”

Out in the living room, their father called, “Hello?”

Willa and Elaine looked at each other.

“Anyone home?”

“Hide it!” Elaine whispered. “Put it in the fridge.”

“I can’t! It’s not pudding yet!”

“What is it?”

“Whatcha up to, ladies?” their father asked from the kitchen doorway.

Willa turned to face him, trying to block his view of the saucepan, but he came closer and looked over her shoulder. He was still in his wool jacket and he smelled of winter air. “Cocoa?” he asked her.

“It’s chocolate pudding,” Willa told her shoes.

“It’s what?”

“It’s chocolate pudding, Papa!” Elaine shouted happily. “We made it for your dessert! It was going to be a surprise!”

“Well, gosh. I am surprised,” he said. “I didn’t know you two could cook. Why, this is really something!”

“We ruined it,” Willa said.

“Say what?”

“It’s all lumpy!” she burst out. “It won’t mix in, and we’ve been stirring and stirring.”

“Oh, now. Let’s have a look,” he said.

She moved aside, unwillingly, and he stepped up next to the stove and took hold of the spoon that slanted inside the saucepan. In a testing sort of way, he gave the mixture a stir. “Hmm,” he said. “I see.”

“It’s a mess!” she told him.

“Well, not a mess, exactly; it’s just a little … Where’s your recipe?”

She poked her chin toward the cookbook lying open on the counter, and he went over to check it. “So,” he said, “you mixed the sugar and the cocoa and the salt. Then you stirred in all but a quarter-cup of the half-and-half over very low heat.”

“Well …”

“Then in a separate bowl you made a paste of the cornstarch and the remaining quarter-cup of half-and-half – ”

“What? No. We just stirred everything together all at once.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Is that why it’s doing this way?”

“Why, yes, I believe so, honey.”

“But I didn’t know!”

“When you’re trying out a recipe, you’ll find it pays to read all the instructions before you set to work.”

She went back to staring at her shoes, because she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

“First you check the list of ingredients, to make sure you have everything – ”

“I did that.”

“Well, good, honey. Then you assemble them on the counter – ”

“I did! I was being so careful!”

“Then you read through the whole process, you see. It’s kind of like what I tell my students when they’re working on a carpentry project. You figure out what to do right away and what to do later, which step ought to come first and which step— ”

She couldn’t stand the way he drilled at her, pushing on so persistently no matter what she said back. She said, “I get it! Good grief. I’m not some dummy.”

“Well, of course you’re not, sweetheart. This is a learning experience, that’s all. Next time, you’ll know better.”

“But I knew this time! I lined up all my ingredients … And now look. I wanted to surprise you!”

“Honey. It doesn’t matter. Believe me.”

“Doesn’t matter?”

She raised her eyes and stared at him. She didn’t care now if he saw that she was crying. She hoped he did see. “How can you say it doesn’t matter,” she asked him, “when I went to all this trouble?”

“No, I just meant – ”

“Oh, forget it,” she said, and she spun on her heel and left the kitchen. She went back out to the dining room and sat down in her chair and picked up her pencil.

Her father followed, with Elaine a shadow behind him. “Willa, honey,” he said.

“I’m studying.”

“Willa, don’t be this way.”

“Will you let me do my homework, please?” she asked him.

He waited a while, but she kept her head lowered, frowning steadily at her notebook, and finally he went back to the kitchen. Elaine stayed there a moment longer, watching her, but then she turned and left too.

Willa drew a fierce black line through her last history answer.