“The bank?” Nicky asked. “Which part does the bank own?”
I sighed. “No particular part. It’s just that when Mom and Dad bought our house, they didn’t have enough money to pay for the whole thing. So they borrowed money from the bank. Most people do that. Now we have to pay the bank back, a little each month. Well, not a little — I don’t know how much exactly. Plus, we have to pay the electricity bill, the phone bill, and the gas bill. And all those bills are high since there are ten people in our family. So I bet Mom and Dad are using the money in our savings account already. I just keep wondering: When the money in our savings account is gone, what will happen to our family? What will we do?”
Byron looked concerned. Then he said, “Dad’ll probably have a job before we run out of money.”
“Maybe. But maybe not,” I countered. “I think we should be prepared.”
“How?” asked Vanessa and Margo at the same time.
“Well, we could earn money to put in the savings account. I’ve been hoarding all my baby-sitting money since Dad lost his job. I’ll give it to Mom and Dad soon.”
“We could earn money, too!” Jordan cried.
(I’d been hoping someone would say that.)
“Yeah!” said Vanessa, inspired, “and I know exactly what I could do.”
“What?” I asked, feeling suspicious, but I wasn’t sure why.
“I could sell my poems to magazines!”
Vanessa is an aspiring poet. She has notebooks and notebooks filled with her poetry. Sometimes she even speaks in rhyme, which is annoying.
“Vanessa —” I started to say. (The triplets were snickering.)
“No, really. I could,” said Vanessa. “Don’t laugh.”
Of course, Adam laughed even harder. Then he added, “Don’t worry. We’re not laughing at you … we’re just laughing near you.”
Vanessa smiled at that. Then she said, “I really am going to try it, though. Writing poetry is what I do best.”
“Hey!” cried Margo. “You know what I saw in a magazine the other day? Wait a sec. I’ll go get it.”
“I bet she saw one of those ads to draw ‘Blinkie’ or whatever it is,” said Jordan. “Now she thinks she can become a famous artist.”
But what Margo returned with was a page from some magazine that said: If y cn rd ths, y cn bcm a secy and gt a gd jb.
“That says,” Margo began proudly, “‘If you can read this, you can become a secretary and get a good job.’ Well, I can read it, and I’m only seven. So I can certainly get a good job.”
“As an after-school secretary?” said Byron, teasing.
“Well, you never know. Maybe I could sign up at that temporary place where Mommy works.”
“Margo, I’m not sure about that,” I said.
“Me, neither,” added Jordan. “I’m going to do something I know will work. I’m going to mow people’s lawns.”
“I could pet-sit, or walk people’s dogs,” said Byron.
“Maybe I’ll, um, I’ll …” Adam trailed off.
“Wait! I know!” cried Byron. “The three of us could start an odd-job service. We’ll call it ABJ, Incorporated.”
“ABJ?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Adam, Byron, Jordan.”
“Now I like that idea,” I said. “That’s using your heads, you guys.”
“Maybe I could get a paper route,” said Nicky thoughtfully.
Before one of the triplets could jump down his throat I said, “Another good idea, Nick-o. Why don’t you see if any of your friends has a paper route? Find out what you have to do to get one.”
“Okay.” Nicky grinned.
At this point, Margo lost her head for a moment and thought she was in school. She raised her hand.
“Margo?” I said, over the giggles of the other kids.
“If an after-school secretary isn’t a good job, then maybe I could set up a lemonade stand. Claire, you could help me. Vanessa, too. We could be CMV, Incorporated.”
“I think you’ll just have to be CM, Incorporated. I’m still going to work on my poetry,” said Vanessa.
So the job problems were solved. But something was bothering Byron.
“Mal?” he said. “If we don’t pay our mortgage, what happens?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied honestly, “but I think that, after awhile, the bank can take our house away from us.”
“And that,” said Byron, “is probably how some people become homeless.”
The Papadakis kids are favorite sitting charges of Kristy, in case you couldn’t tell from her notebook entry. Linny is nine (a little older than David Michael), Hannie is seven and in the same class with Karen at their private school, and Sari is just two. They live on the other side of the street from Kristy, two houses away from the Delaneys. (Shannon Kilbourne lives between the Delaneys and the Papadakises.)
As Kristy wrote, that Sunday morning was cloudy and cool.
“Can we invite friends over?” Hannie asked Kristy as soon as her parents had left. She was looking forlornly out the window.
“Sure,” replied Kristy. “Who do you want to invite?”
“Karen!” said Hannie.
“David Michael!” said Linny.
“Well, that’s easy,” Kristy told them, smiling. “They’re home. And they’re probably bored. Do you want me to call them?”
“Yes,” said Linny seriously, nodding his head.
So Kristy called home and invited her brother and sister over.
“What shall we do?” asked Karen as soon as she and David Michael had stepped into the Papadakises’ house.
“Let’s play with Myrtle the turtle and Noodle the poodle,” said David Michael.
“Nah. We already did that today,” Linny told him.
“Dolls!” Karen suggested to Hannie.
“Nah,” said Hannie.
“Invaders from the planet Neptune?” Linny suggested to David Michael.
“Nah,” said David Michael.
“Hey!” cried Karen. “I know something we’ve never played, and we can all play it together. Even Sari. Even you, Kristy.”
“What?” said the boys suspiciously. (Most of Karen’s games involve either dolls, witches, or dressing up, none of which interests Linny or David Michael.)
“We can play office.”
“Office?” repeated Hannie.
“Yes. We’ll set up one of your desks like a desk in a real office — with papers and pencils and paper clips and —”
“And that old telephone that doesn’t work,” added Linny, getting into the spirit of things. “It’ll be good because it’s a real phone, not a plastic one.”
Kristy couldn’t believe that the four kids wanted to play together, but they were already racing upstairs. She followed, holding Sari’s hand as Sari climbed the steps one at a time, one at a time.
The kids chose the desk in Hannie’s room, and in no time it looked pretty officelike.
“Let’s make a waiting area,” suggested David Michael.
“Yeah,” said Karen. “All offices have waiting rooms with magazines.”
So Linny dragged a chair into his sister’s room, placed it next to her chair, and put a small table in between them. Then Hannie ran downstairs and returned with a pile of magazines.
“I got some Golden Books, too,” she said. “For Sari. In case she has to wait.”
“Oh,” said Kristy, “is this a doctor’s office?”
Hannie, Linny, David Michael, and Karen looked at each other.
“I don’t want to play doctor’s office,” said Linny. “That’s for babies.”
“Besides, we wouldn’t need desks; we’d need tables and stethoscopes and those little hammers,” said Karen sensibly.
“We’ll play something really grown-up,” said Linny, thinking hard. “We’ll play … we’ll play job agency.”
“Job agency?” said Hannie, perplexed.
“Yeah. I saw it on I Love Lucy once. Lucy and Ethel needed jobs, so they we
nt to this office and a man there said, ‘What do you do?’ and Lucy said, ‘What kind of jobs do you have open?’ and the man said, ‘What do you do?’ and anyway, finally, Lucy and Ethel ended up working in a factory that makes chocolate candies.”
“Wow! Fun!” cried Karen.
“What parts are we going to play?” Kristy asked.
Not until after a lot of squabbling and arguing were the parts assigned. It was decided that Karen and Hannie would own the job agency. They would sit behind the desk. And Linny, David Michael, and Kristy would be people needing jobs. (Sari was going to play Kristy’s daughter.)
“Okay,” said Hannie. “Let’s begin. Our office is open!”
“I’ll be your first customer,” said David Michael, “since I need a job really, really, really bad.”
“Badly,” Kristy corrected him absentmindedly. She was thinking of my father.
“Badly,” David Michael repeated.
He stepped up to the desk. Linny, Kristy, and Sari sat in the “waiting room,” Sari in Kristy’s lap. Linny looked at a magazine. Kristy read a story to Sari.
Meanwhile, David Michael was saying, “Hello, my name is David Michael Thomas and I need a job. Really badly.”
“Okay,” said Karen. “What kind of work do you do?”
“What kind of jobs do you have open?”
“Well, what kind of work do you do?” asked Karen again.
“It depends. What kind of jobs do you have — have open?” David Michael got the giggles then, and so did the girls, then Linny, then Kristy, and then even Sari, although she didn’t know what was going on.
When the giggling died down, Hannie said, “Let me look at my list of jobs. Okay.” She pretended to scan a sheet of paper. (The paper was blank.) “We need a substitute teacher. Do you teach school?”
David Michael shook his head.
“Do you cook? A restaurant needs a chef.”
“I can make toast,” said David Michael. “And chocolate milk.”
“You’re hired!” cried Hannie.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” said David Michael. “Now I can feed my family again. And buy clothes for them.”
The kids giggled, but Kristy found herself thinking about Dad and my family again. Would Dad be reduced to going to some agency and taking a job he was overqualified for? Would he end up as a waiter in a restaurant — when he had gone to school for his law degree?
Kristy told me later that she felt a lump in her stomach, just thinking about these things, and that she was relieved when, about an hour later, the sun came out and Linny cried, “Oh, good! We can go outdoors!”
The game of “job agency” was abandoned, and Kristy accompanied the five kids into the backyard.
“Hey, it’s warm enough to go swimming,” David Michael pronounced.
“Yeah!” said Karen. “Let’s go over to Amanda and Max’s.”
“You’re going to go over to Amanda’s?” repeated Hannie in dismay. Amanda is slightly older than Karen, but the girls are friends anyway. Not best friends, but friends. Hannie, on the other hand, who lives in Amanda’s neighborhood day in and day out (not just on the weekends like Karen), can’t stand Amanda. The feeling is mutual. Amanda doesn’t like Hannie much, either.
“Yes. Now it’s a perfect day to go swimming,” said Karen. “Come on, Hannie.”
“No way,” Hannie answered. “I don’t like Amanda. You know that.”
“But you want to go swimming, don’t you?”
“Not badly enough to go over to the Delaneys’.”
David Michael looked at Linny. “You’ll go swimming, won’t you?” he asked.
“No,” answered Linny. “I don’t like the Delaneys, either. And neither do you. How come you’re going?”
“Because … I … want … to … go … swimming,” said David Michael impatiently.
“Okay, go ahead,” said Linny.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Hannie said to Karen. “I don’t care.”
“Okay, we will,” Karen replied haughtily.
“You guys,” said Kristy warningly. “Is the pool worth fighting over?”
“We’re not fighting,” Karen told her.
Kristy could have guessed otherwise, as her brother and sister left, and Hannie and Linny remained behind. Hannie looked close to tears, but Linny just began to dismantle the “job agency.” He was very quiet.
“That is so unfair,” Hannie cried.
“I’m sorry they left,” said Kristy.
“It’s not just that,” Hannie replied. “I know Karen wants to go swimming. And she and Amanda are friends. I wish Karen had stayed here, but I guess Karen has a right to play with other kids. But David Michael doesn’t like the Delaneys at all. I think it’s unfair of him to use their pool when he doesn’t even like them. Amanda and Max probably think he wants to play with them.”
“Yeah,” Linny spoke up finally. (He was gathering together the mazagines and books.) “I would never go somewhere just to use someone’s pool. It really isn’t fair. Hannie’s right.”
“Do a lot of kids use the Delaneys’ pool?” asked Kristy.
“Oh, tons,” Hannie answered. “Amanda and Max think they’re the most popular kids in Stoneybrook.” She sounded very wise.
“How many of these kids are really Amanda and Max’s friends?” Kristy wanted to know.
“A few, I guess,” said Linny.
“But the rest of the kids are taking advantage of the Delaneys?”
“Yup,” replied Linny.
Hmm, thought Kristy. That was a problem. She’d seen it coming, but she didn’t know just how bad it had gotten. Worse, her own brother and sister were part of the problem. At least, David Michael was. Karen truly is friends with Amanda, but she shouldn’t have deserted Hannie that morning.
After Kristy left the Papadakises’, she called to tell me what was going on.
I was at the Delaneys’ again. It was a Wednesday afternoon, one of my regular days there. And I was sitting at the edge of the pool in my bathing suit, sipping a Coke. Behind me was a mansion with a fish fountain inside. In front of me, beyond the pool, a green lawn rolled down to tennis courts.
I felt like a princess — except that I was a paid princess. This wasn’t my mansion, my fountain, my pool, my lawn, or my tennis courts. And the four-hundred-dollar cat that was dozing on the sun-warmed pavement beside me wasn’t mine, either.
But I could dream, couldn’t I?
So I did dream as I watched Amanda, Max, Timmy, Angie, and Huck play in the water. Long before anything actually happened, though, I stopped my dreaming and started paying even closer attention to the children. I don’t know why. I could just sense something brewing.
On the surface, everything seemed all right. Angie was practicing her diving, as usual. And she was doing nicely, jackknifing and tumbling off the board. The boys were taking turns whooshing down the slide into the water, calling out things like, “Bombs away!” and “Look out below!” And Amanda was floating around on a raft shaped like a turtle, her legs hanging over the end. She was reading Superfudge, by Judy Blume, and was lost in a world of her own.
What first made me pay even stricter attention to things was Max’s saying, “Let’s be otters at the zoo instead of dive-bombers, okay? Then we can go down the slide on our stomachs.”
Okay, so Max had gotten tired of dive-bombing.
Big deal.
Then Amanda closed Superfudge with a sigh and said, “What a great book.”
“Are you finished with it?” I asked her.
“Yup. And I just began it yesterday.” Amanda paddled herself to the side of the pool, handed me the book so that it wouldn’t get wet, and then climbed out of the pool and sat next to me.
“Hey, Angie!” she called. “I finished Super-fudge. Now will you play with me?”
Angie had just emerged from underwater. Her hair was slicked back from her face.
“I’ve got a diving meet next week,” was her reply.
?
??So are you here to play with Amanda or to practice?” I couldn’t help asking.
Amanda looked at me in awe. Then she sat up straight and said, “Yeah, are you here to play with me or to practice?”
Angie blushed to the roots of her hair. “Um —” she began, but she was interrupted by Max, who clearly had tired of the pool altogether. He was standing next to me, drying himself off.
“What’s up, Max?” I asked.
“I want to go hit balls in the tennis court,” he said.
“We don’t!” Timmy said, apparently speaking for both himself and Huck.
“Bombs away!” added Huck as he catapulted into the water.
“How about you?” I asked Amanda gently. I sensed another scene coming on like the one Stacey had written about.
“I — I don’t know,” replied Amanda, not sounding at all like the self-important snob she’d been the first time I sat at the Delaneys’.
“Have you had enough swimming?”
Amanda nodded.
So I was faced with Stacey’s problem. I was in charge at the Delaneys’. The Delaney kids did not want to swim. But there were three other kids in the pool. I had to do what Stacey had done.
“Okay! Angie! Huck! Timmy! Out of the pool! It’s time to do something else. You can play tennis with Max or … or …”
Amanda tugged at my suit and I leaned down. She whispered in my ear.
“Or,” I continued loudly, “Cabbage Patch dolls with Amanda.”
These suggestions were met with groans.
“But I have a new doll,” said Amanda.
“So what. So do I,” said Angie.
“Well, you guys still have to get out of the pool,” I said.
Angie, Huck, and Timmy did so, with much huffing, grumbling things like, “What a rip-off,” and, “Thanks for nothing!”
Even so, Amanda and Max looked at me gratefully. Amanda went so far as to say, “Thank you, Mallory.”
When Huck and Timmy and Angie had dried off, Max said, “Okay, I’ve got extra rackets for you guys.”
And Amanda said, “My new doll is upstairs, Angie.”