“I miss my daddy,” Hope began, and immediately started to cry. Brent handed her a tissue and she wiped her eyes. Then she seemed to be okay.
I watched her, safe in Brent’s arms, fingering her gold locket as she spoke. She never once looked out at the people, and I don’t think many of them heard her, but the ones in front sure did.
“He’s a very nice man,” Hope went on. “He’s funny and he sings me funny songs. He calls me Emmy. No one else does.”
At that point, Mom buried her face in her hands and wept silently.
“He likes animals, even Mouse, and he can always fix my swing. He’s … he was a nice man,” she said again. “He was tall. I love my daddy. That’s all.”
Brent put her down then. All around me I could hear sniffing and little gasps and hands rummaging through purses for more Kleenex. Carrie was crying rather loudly.
Denise struck a chord on the piano and played another piece. The service was over about fifteen minutes later.
Afterward, our family stood in the receiving room. Everyone wanted to talk to us on the way out. They wanted to hug us, too, and I kept pulling back. I didn’t want all those arms around me.
“Dear,” Mrs. Washburn said warmly, “I’m so sorry.” She drew me to her, and I stood stiffly and allowed her to kiss my cheek. Then I stepped back.
When Mrs. Petersen came up and put her arms out, I didn’t move a muscle. She paused and I saw her glance at me, thoughtfully. Then she moved on and gave Mom a hug.
I noticed Hopie looking sort of woozy then, so I said to Denise, who was nearby, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” We took Hope back to the little anteroom, and she perked up when Denise handed her a piece of candy.
Later, there was a reception back at our house. Now I understood why everyone had brought food by all week—we could serve it to the guests. I spent most of the reception in the kitchen slicing cake and arranging plates of fruit and filling candy bowls.
Twice Mom came in and said she’d like me to join the guests, but I couldn’t do it. They were all telling me to buck up and be brave and that things could only get better. And if I heard one more person tell Brent he was the man of the family now, I thought I’d scream—if Brent didn’t kill the person first.
At last I escaped to my room. I locked the door, lay down on my bed, and felt the tears begin to fall. “Oh, no,” I thought. “It’s starting.” I tried to turn off the tears, afraid that if I started crying, I’d never be able to stop. But I couldn’t turn them off entirely. So I let myself cry for awhile and then went to my desk and found the copy of Dad’s obituary that had appeared in the Neuport News the day before. Through eyes blurred with tears I read it once, then crumpled it up, took it into the bathroom, and set fire to it in the sink.
As I watched the flames slowly devour it, I suddenly felt very angry. “Dad, you jerk,” I thought. “Why did you have to die? Why did you leave us without you?”
BOOK III
Autumn Again
Chapter One
ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in the middle of November, I slammed my locker shut on the eighth-grade floor of Neuport Middle School and ran down the two flights of stairs to the sixth-grade floor. I peeked through the window into Carrie’s classroom. Even though the last bell had rung, Ms. Saunders, Carrie’s teacher, hadn’t stopped teaching. She always made Carrie late, and that made me impatient.
I leaned against the wall, dropped my book bag on the floor, and waited.
It was exactly five months and twelve days since Dad had died. Summer had come and gone, and another autumn had arrived. It was just this time last year when Dad had first found out how sick he was. All we O’Hara kids were a year older. I was thirteen and Carrie was eleven. We were students at the same school again—for one year. Next year I would be a freshman in high school. It was hard to believe. And Brent was a senior in high school. Next year he’d be in college. That was even harder to believe.
Hopie was five. She’d turned five in September and had a big bash, inviting her entire class to her birthday party. She no longer went to the Harper Early Childhood Center. Now she went to the “extended kindergarten” program at the elementary school from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. Hope wasn’t thrilled with this turn of events. She’d loved Mrs. Harper (she’d even invited her to her birthday party), and she missed her old school. Kindergarten had not gotten off to a good start.
At last the door to Carrie’s classroom opened and kids streamed out.
Carrie looked indignant. She didn’t bother to greet me. “Do you know why Saunders was keeping us?” she asked huffily as we hurried out of the building. “Because,” she went on without waiting for me to answer, “Tricia Kennedy said she didn’t understand how to do an outline, so Saunders starts explaining the whole thing—to the whole class. Everyone else knows how to make an outline. Why should we get punished just because Tricia is practically retarded?”
“Carrie,” I said, “it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. We’re going to be late getting Sissy again. She’ll probably be hysterical.”
Carrie wasn’t exaggerating. With Dad gone, money was tight. Since we couldn’t afford day care for Hope anymore, Carrie and I were supposed to pick her up after school and take care of her until Mom came home. Brent couldn’t help us because he had a job after school and on weekends. He worked at Johnson’s Garage, fixing cars, and made a lot of money, which was a good thing because he needed it to help pay for college. He needed a scholarship, too.
Anyway, even though Carrie and I had never once forgotten to pick up Hope, she seemed frightened that we would do just that. Sure enough, when we reached her classroom, Hopie was sitting on a rug in the story corner, hugging a teddy bear, sucking her thumb, and crying. Her teacher was hovering nearby, but I could tell that Hopie didn’t want her to come any closer.
I couldn’t understand it. Hope wasn’t even the last kid left. Three others were still there, making a farm out of blocks. They looked perfectly happy. Hope looked as if she’d been abandoned. And she’d waited for someone to pick her up at the HECC nearly every day of her life.
We entered the classroom, and Carrie began gathering Hope’s belongings while I spoke to Miss Donnelly, the teacher.
“How long has she been crying?” I asked.
“Just for a few minutes. She had a pretty good day today, but you know how it is. She thought you weren’t coming.”
I nodded. “All right.”
“Don’t worry,” Miss Donnelly said. “She is improving. But this is a tough year for her, a lot of changes—new school, new house, your father gone.”
The house. That was another thing. We’d had to move out of 25 Bayberry. For me, the day Mom broke that news to us was almost as awful as the day she’d told us Dad was first in the hospital. The house was part of the family; it was O’Hara; it was Dad. Twenty-five Bayberry had been lived in by O’Haras for almost two hundred years. Selling the house had been like getting rid of the last of my father.
Even Dad’s gentle aunt Laura, whom we rarely heard from, had stepped in when she found out Mom planned to sell. She’d tried to buy the house herself, just to keep it in the family, but she didn’t have nearly enough money.
And that was the whole problem, of course. Neither did we.
We weren’t poor or anything, but as I said, money was tight. With Dad gone, our income was cut by more than half. Plus Mom was now facing the first of four college tuitions. On top of that, insurance hadn’t covered all of Dad’s medical bills, and we owed thousands of dollars to the Neuport Medical Center and to the nursing service we’d used.
So one hot August evening, Mom had gathered us together and told us we were going to move. “This house is much too big and costly for us to keep,” she’d said. “The yard is huge. Dad liked to take care of it, but I don’t, and I don’t want you kids to feel you have to. And a lawn service is too expensive. The heating bills here are sky-high, and the repairs on an old place like this are needed too often.
Do you realize that in a couple of years, a new roof will have to be put on?
“I spoke to a real estate agent, and I’ve figured that with the money we’d make selling Twenty-five Bayberry, we can buy a new smaller home and pay all the hospital and nursing bills.”
We’d protested, of course. I’d cried, and Brent had stormed off angrily, but Mom’s reasoning was too logical, although selling the house wasn’t easy for her either. The day we moved, she sat down on the last packing carton before the movers took it out of the house. “It’s not fair,” she said to me. “It’s just not fair.” And she burst into tears.
Moving day was in early September. The new house was a small one in a development just two streets away from Bayberry. It sat on a measly half-acre of land that was absolutely bare except for two twigs in the front yard which the real estate agent called maple trees.
At 25 Bayberry, which had rooms to spare, each of us had had our own bedroom. The new house had three bedrooms. Carrie and I shared one, Brent got one to himself since he was the only boy, and Mom and Hope shared one. Clearly, that was not an ideal arrangement. But Mom said that next year when Brent went away to college, I could have his room and Hope could move in with Carrie.
“Liza, we’re ready.” I turned away from Miss Donnelly to see Carrie holding a bundled-up Hope by the hand.
“Okay. Thanks, Miss Donnelly,” I said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye. … Good-bye, Hope.”
Hope looked at Miss Donnelly, and for a second or two I thought she wasn’t going to answer her. But at last she said, “’Bye.”
“Show-and-Tell tomorrow, okay?” Miss Donnelly reminded her.
“Okay.”
We started the walk home.
“Are you going to bring something for Show-and-Tell, Sissy?” Carrie asked her.
Hope was busy watching her breath puff along in the frosty air. She thought for a moment. “Could I bring Dr. J.?”
Dr. J. was our new kitten. He was named for Julius Erving, the famous basketball player, because he liked to leap through the air. Mom had brought Dr. J. home shortly after we’d moved to the new house. She’d gotten him at the Pet Emergency Center where we’d taken Charlie so many months ago. He was an eight-week-old butterball then who looked just like Charlie, and in fact, Mom had gotten him more for me than for anyone else, but he didn’t do the trick. He was cute and cuddly, but he wasn’t Charlie.
He slept with Hope every night.
“Oh, Hope, I don’t think so,” I said. “He’d have to stay all day in your classroom. You’d have to bring his food to school. And his litter box.”
“Yeah,” agreed Hope, sounding disappointed.
“What else could you bring?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
And that was the end of that conversation. I glanced at Carrie, who shrugged.
When we reached our house, we were greeted noisily by Fifi, Mouse, and Dr. J., who all appeared to be starving. Fifi jumped up and down as I unlocked the front door and then skittered into the kitchen, feet sliding on the linoleum, Mouse and the Doctor at her feet.
Hope giggled. (The animals were among the few things that made her giggle these days.) Then she fed the pets while Carrie and I fixed the three of us a snack. After that we fooled around, and Denise and her sister, Maggie came over for awhile. When they left, it was time to start dinner. Brent and Mom got home from work around six o’clock, and soon we were sitting down to eat. It was a routine, and I liked it—knowing what was going to happen every hour of the day. No surprises.
Another thing I liked was dinner in the small dining room of our new house. I had thought I would hate it, after all the meals we’d eaten in the dining room of 25 Bayberry, with its high ceiling and brass chandeliers and the rose-patterned wallpaper that had covered the walls for almost eighty years. But the first time we sat down to eat in the new house, I felt relieved. It took several minutes for me to figure out why. Then I realized that the room was so cramped that we hardly missed Dad at all. During the last summer at 25 Bayberry, his absence had screamed out to us at every meal. In the new house, in the cramped quarters, the five of us seemed to fit around the table almost naturally. We looked more like a completed jigsaw puzzle and less like one with a piece missing.
At dinner that night, our conversation somehow turned to Christmas. I forget who started the discussion, but before long, I saw a familiar sparkle in Hope’s eyes. She listened to Carrie and Brent talking about saving money for Christmas presents. After awhile she said, “Mommy, do you think we’ll make things in Miss Donnelly’s room?”
Mom looked confused. “What kinds of things, honey?”
“You know, Christmas things,” Hope said impatiently.
“Like macaroni chains?” asked Carrie with a giggle.
Hope scowled at Carrie, then turned her attention back to Mom. “Like what we made with Mrs. Harper—snowmen and stars and snowflakes and a Santa Claus and presents.” She was growing excited at the very thought of it all.
“I imagine so,” said Mom.
“Goody,” replied Hope. And then, “Goody, goody, goody!”
Mom, Brent, and Carrie were looking very pleased at this change in Hope, and they began making other Christmas plans, but I couldn’t join in. Something numbing had washed over me. The idea of Christmas made me feel awfully sad. How could we celebrate Christmas this year? How could we do it without Dad? It didn’t feel right. He’d want to be with us.
I put my fork down, unable to finish eating. Maybe we could sort of skip Christmas this year. Cancel it. It wasn’t a terribly original idea, I knew. It had been done before. The Grinch tried it, and Ebenezer Scrooge would have loved it, but it seemed right for our family. We could ignore Christmas, or maybe just go out to dinner or pretend we were Buddhists or something.
I was about to suggest this to the others when the phone rang. Brent sprinted for it, listened for several seconds, then said disgustedly, “Liza, it’s for you. Denise.”
“Who were you expecting?” I demanded as I took the phone from him. “El-len?” Ellen Myers was Brent’s new girlfriend.
Brent made a face and went back to the dining room.
“Denise?” I said.
“Hi!” Denise sounded as if she were bubbling over. “You’ll never guess what. Never. So I’ll just tell you.”
“Okay,” I said, and quietly closed the door between the kitchen and the dining room.
“Cathryn Lynn just called …”
“Yeah?”
“And you know how she sits next to Margie in your math class?”
“Yeah?”
“And Margie sits next to Marc Radlay?”
“Yeah?” I could feel my heart pounding faster.
“Well, today Margie told Cathryn Lynn that she overheard Marc telling Justin Sommerville that he likes you!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I swear.”
I couldn’t believe it. For two years I’d been wanting a boyfriend. Now, without my doing a single thing, Marc Radlay was practically falling in my lap. Maybe. I wondered why he hadn’t said anything to me. We had two classes together, plus lunch and free period, and he never spoke to me. He always hung around with Justin and a bunch of other eighth-grade boys.
“What should I do?” I whispered frantically to Denise.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just wait. And wear the makeup I gave you.”
“Okay …”
“Listen, I have to go.”
“Okay. … ’Bye. … ”
“See you tomorrow.”
I hung up the phone in a daze. Marc Radlay liked me. He liked me!
Chapter Two
I STOOD IN THE kitchen for a few seconds, trying to put Marc Radlay out of my head. After the initial shock and excitement, I suddenly wasn’t sure how I felt about the news. Liking a girl meant asking her to be your girlfriend … didn’t it? And being someone’s girlfriend meant going out and having fun. That was what was holding
me back. Fun. I hadn’t had much of it since Dad died, and I didn’t think I wanted any of it now.
I returned to the dining room and sat down. The topic of conversation had changed. While I was relieved that we were not talking about Christmas anymore, I wasn’t thrilled with the new topic. It was money. That was all we seemed to talk about these days. How we could get more money, and how we could stretch what we had. At the moment, Brent was on one of my least favorite money subjects.
“But what if I don’t win the scholarship?” he was saying.
“We’ll worry about that if it happens,” replied Mom. “For now, just keep your grades—”
“I think we should worry about it now,” interrupted Brent. “If we wait until it happens, I won’t be able to go to Princeton. I’ll have to go somewhere else. It’s not like someone is going to hand me the money on a silver platter if I don’t get the scholarship. It’s either get the scholarship or no Princeton.”
“Princeton,” said my mother, “is not the only good school in the country.”
“I know,” said Brent, “but it’s the one I want to go to. And all the other good schools are just as expensive.”
Mom sighed. “Brent, go ahead and apply to the state university, in case. Anyway, there’s still some money put aside for you—we didn’t spend everything in the college account—and I’m looking into loans. You’re saving money this year, too, and there are work programs at most universities. I hope you’re investigating them.”
“I am.”
A lot was being left unsaid, but I could hear it all anyway. All the “buts” and “ands” and “what ifs.” I really thought Brent was worrying unnecessarily. In the first place, his grades were excellent; he had a good shot at being valedictorian of his class. In the second place, it wasn’t as if there was just one scholarship he could win. Lots of scholarships and prizes were awarded to students in our town every spring.
But Brent, once he had understood just how tight money was, had taken over the worry of it as a sort of pet project. He had encouraged Mom to cut back on our allowances, to buy the cheapest brands at the grocery store, to trim our hair herself instead of taking us to the hair salon, to save on gas, and that sort of thing. He’d even told Mom not to adopt Dr. J. because he said we didn’t need another mouth to feed.