One Square Inch Read online

She was laughing now. “Look at it this way: Thanksgiving is always the same old same old. This will be the different Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving without a turkey. The side dishes are always the best part anyway, the stuffing, and the creamed onions, and the pumpkin pie. And this year we’ll have Chef Cooper’s special pumpkin pie.”

  The holiday aisle was freshly stocked with Christmas decorations—long rolls of wrapping paper, boxes of shiny red, green, and gold ornaments, plush snowmen and Santas. In the Thanksgiving section, the shelves were almost bare. I picked up the one remaining turkey, a three-inch-tall wax candle. The turkey’s comb had partly melted and run down over one eye.

  Mom gave another laugh. “He’s better than nothing, don’t you think? He looks like he could use a good home.”

  I forced a laugh in return, but I wondered: was our house really a good home? For a wax candle turkey, not to mention for me and Carly?

  Jodie’s family was coming at five; at four o’clock the house still looked terrible, though it smelled appealingly of the chicken and stuffing baking in the oven. Finally, at four-thirty, Mom started carrying armloads of fabric upstairs, directing Carly and me to help her. I frantically ran the vacuum over the most visible areas of the newly exposed carpet, and Carly darted around with a dustcloth. Then came the mad scramble to set the table.

  “We’ll turn the lights down low, and it will look fine,” Mom said. “We’ll eat by candlelight. It will be our turkey candle’s finest moment.”

  When Jodie’s family arrived promptly at five, the house was acceptable. Mom explained to them that this was going to be the Thanksgiving with chicken rather than turkey, presenting it as a hilariously funny story about the terrible lack of planning at King Soopers. At least Jodie’s parents both chuckled.

  “The side dishes are always the best part anyway,” Jodie’s mother said, just as Mom had said the day before.

  But everyone knew that the best part was the turkey.

  “And, anyway, we do have a turkey!” Mom said gaily. “Carly, run and get him. You know, our little wax turkey friend from the table!”

  At just that moment, the lights went out.

  Mom was laughing so hard now she could hardly speak. Jodie’s parents weren’t laughing; they were smiling in a sort of awkward, embarrassed way.

  “No . . . turkey! And no . . . electricity!” Mom gasped between spasms of laughter. “Well, the Pilgrims didn’t have electricity, either, on their first Thanksgiving.”

  They had a turkey, though.

  “I wonder how extensive a blackout this is.” Jodie’s father walked over to the window to survey the state of the rest of the neighborhood. Joining him, I could see that everybody else’s lights were on, including the porch light next door at Jodie’s house.

  “Hmm,” Jodie’s father said. “It looks like it’s just your house, Emily. Maybe your oven blew a fuse? Where’s your fuse box? Let me take a look.”

  When he checked, he found that it wasn’t a blown fuse.

  “Maybe the utility company has it in for you, Em,” Jodie’s father teased. “What did you do to tick them off? Late on your bills?”

  He obviously meant it as a joke, but I thought of the unopened bills on the kitchen counter.

  The six of us ended up carrying what there was of the Thanksgiving feast over to Jodie’s house and eating it there. Even without company expected, Jodie’s house was clean and orderly, the dining room table decorated with a centerpiece of a cornucopia and autumn leaves.

  The wax candle turkey came with us: my mom insisted. “It’s his special day!”

  We didn’t light his wick. He just stood on the table, the table without a turkey, next door to the house without electricity.

  “Let’s go around the table and each say what we’re grateful for,” Jodie’s mother instructed.

  “I’m grateful that I’m friends with Jodie,” Carly said.

  “I’m grateful that I’m friends with Carly,” Jodie said.

  “I’m grateful that my depression is behind me, and I’m finally well again!” Mom said.

  Jodie’s mother took Mom’s hand. “Yes, thank God for that,” she said, but I thought she looked worried.

  I still didn’t know what I was going to say when it was my turn. I was grateful that Thanksgiving was almost over, grateful that it hadn’t turned out even worse, grateful that my pie looked so pretty on the sideboard, with the edges of the crust crimped so evenly and golden brown.

  “Cooper?” Jodie’s mother prompted.

  “I’m grateful that I know how to bake a pie.” I hoped it came out funny, the way Spencer would have said it, and it must have sounded funny enough, because everybody laughed.

  Later, when dinner was done and everybody was mostly finished cleaning up, I was heading back to the kitchen to get one last sliver of leftover pie to snack on while I watched some football with Jodie’s dad; Jodie and Carly were up in Jodie’s room playing.

  At the kitchen door, I overheard my mom and Jodie’s mom, Jodie’s mom’s voice so low I couldn’t make out what she was saying, my mom’s voice too loud, as it always was these days.

  “Of course I’m unusually energetic! Sally, I did nothing but lie in bed all summer long! I have so much lost time to make up for!”

  Jodie’s mom murmured something else.

  Then my mom: “No, I’m not seeing Dr. Leibowitz anymore. I don’t need to see her. You go to a doctor when you’re sick, not when you’re well.”

  Then: “I appreciate your concern, Sally, really I do, but I’ve never felt better in my entire life!”

  I slipped back to the football game without my pie. I couldn’t have swallowed it anyway. A grownup had finally talked to Mom, and what had it accomplished?

  Absolutely nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  The lights were back on by Friday afternoon; apparently Mom had found the money somewhere to pay the electric bill. I spent the rest of Thanksgiving break mostly at Ben’s or Spencer’s; Carly spent most of it with Jodie. The few hours that we were home we spent together in Inchland.

  Before, I had listened as Carly made up the Inchland stories. But lately she was so quiet that I was doing most of the talking.

  “I’m surprised that King Inchard and Queen Incharina aren’t more worried about Princess Inchitella,” I said. “I mean, she’s their only child, and a princess of royal blood, and she’s been gone for ages. And let’s face it, it’s not like Inchland is a big country.”

  “I don’t think they ever really loved her,” Carly said. “They were always too busy with their royal activities to spend any time with her. That’s why she left, remember? Because she was so lonely.”

  “She’s not lonely now.” I tried to sound positive and encouraging. “Now she has Parsley. But, hey, maybe the two of them get lonely sometimes, too. Or bored, just hanging out together. Do you think they need a pet?”

  We had had a dog named Muffy, but Muffy had died two years ago, and we hadn’t had the heart to replace him.

  “Maybe.”

  Carly didn’t say anything else, so I went on with the story. “One day, when Inchitella and Parsley are out walking around Inchland, they see a tiny kitten, just six weeks old. Its mother had an accident—she was run over by a car.”

  “Cooper! You know they don’t have cars in Inchland.”

  “I meant by a carriage. Inchitella and Parsley hear the kitten crying, so Inchitella picks it up and warms it in her cloak, and they carry it home to the stable and feed it warm milk. And then they name it . . . What would be a good name for a kitten?”

  When Carly didn’t offer any suggestions, I said, “Button. So that’s how Button came to live with Inchitella and Parsley. Did you know that Button has magical powers?”

  Carly shook her head. I thought she was starting to look more interested.

  “Yes. Button is very small, of course, like everything else in Inchland, but Button can turn herself big when she wants to, so that Parsley and Inchitella can ride on
her back.”

  “Does she crush the buildings when she walks?”

  “No. You know how cats are. She places her paws very carefully.”

  “Are the other Inchies afraid when they see her?”

  “No, they can’t see her, because when she turns herself big she turns herself invisible, too.”

  “Where does Button sleep?” Carly asked.

  “In a basket. A straw basket lined with down from Inchland ducklings.”

  “I have a little doll’s hat made of straw!” Carly remembered. “We can use it for Button’s basket.”

  In an instant she had found it in her closet. Turned upside down, and lined with a few snippets of yarn, it was the perfect bed for a tiny stray kitten.

  “Inchitella and Parsley have a special song they sing to Button when they want her to go to sleep,” I continued. I didn’t like to have anybody hear me sing, even Carly, so I just said the words aloud as I made them up. “Sleep, little Button, curl up and rest. Sleep, little Button, safe in your nest.”

  “Say it again,” Carly begged.

  I did. Then Carly sang it, to a tune of her own, in her high, pure voice. The song wasn’t a sad song—what was sad about a simple lullaby?—but Button was so safe and snug in her basket, and it had been so long since I had felt that way, that I had to look down so that Carly wouldn’t see how close I was to crying.

  13

  As the date of the first and only performance of Hansel and Gretel approached, I knew Carly’s lines as well as she did from hearing her recite them so often.

  “Look, Hansel! It’s a house! A house made out of gingerbread, all covered with candy!”

  “Oh, Hansel! The old witch has put you in this cage because she means to eat you!”

  “I am only a stupid little girl, Old Mother. I do not know how to peek into the oven. Please show me.”

  But as far as I could tell, Mom had made no progress on constructing the house, the cage, or the oven. She wasn’t working on her quilt for the quilt show, either. To my relief, she also seemed to have forgotten about Inchland, though a half-finished, teensy-weensy tea set, fashioned of modeling clay, sat on the kitchen counter, in danger of being crushed by the gigantic, human-size dirty dishes that towered over it. Instead, she had thrown her energies into planning a family vacation.

  “Where should we go for winter break?” she asked Carly and me one night at dinner.

  “New Jersey,” Carly said promptly. “To see Gran-Dan.”

  Talk about a bad idea. What would Gran-Dan do if Mom were let loose in his neat, orderly house, strewing her stuff all over it, spreading chaos everywhere? We’d spend the whole break doing nothing but listening to the two of them fight.

  “We go there all the time,” Mom said. “This year we need to go somewhere special. There’s a whole big world out there for us to see.” Her face lit up. “Wait!”

  She hopped up from the table and headed upstairs. In a moment she had returned with a long roll of plain white paper and a box of markers. “We’ll make a list of all our ideas. Carly, you go first. Think of someplace exciting.”

  “Alaska?” Carly suggested. “Or Hawaii? Because we’re studying them this year in school?”

  Mom had already cut a four-foot length of paper from the roll and taped it to the side of the kitchen cabinets. ALASKA, she wrote, in large blue letters on the top of the paper, and then beneath it, in green letters, HAWAII.

  “Cooper?”

  “Hawaii would be pretty cool.” I wouldn’t mind a long white beach beside the sparkling blue ocean, bordered with palm trees.

  “Carly already said Hawaii. Think of somewhere different. Paris! London!”

  “Don’t we need passports to go to Europe?”

  Mom waved her hand. “I found a site on the Internet where you can get passports in forty-eight hours.”

  “Okay, Paris,” I said, since I obviously had to say something.

  She wrote PARIS on the list in alternating red and blue letters.

  “Where do you want to go?” Carly asked.

  For answer Mom flashed us a grin and continued adding to the list: PERU, PATAGONIA, EGYPT, NIGERIA, NEW ZEALAND, INDONESIA, BRAZIL.

  By the time she finally laid down her marker, I thought that the only place not on the list was the only place I really wanted to go: Inchland.

  At school, I got the second-highest grade on a math test, which was a pleasant surprise. Mrs. Alpert was home recovering from surgery; our substitute for Language Arts didn’t care whether we put our names on the top left-hand corner, top right-hand corner, or even at the bottom of the page. Poached Egg had us playing basketball, on enormous teams with twenty kids on a side. In social studies we were doing current events. You got extra credit if you could find newspaper articles about Mexico, Central America, or South America. I found one on the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil.

  Mr. Pasta’s class was gearing up for “Pasta Live,” the cooking show scheduled for the same week as Carly’s play. The “Pasta Live” show was planned in two parts. In the first half, teams of students would demonstrate cooking techniques and produce a bunch of snacks that the audience could enjoy at intermission. In the second half, Mr. Pasta would take the stage, wearing his chef’s hat and waving his spatula, in competition with a trio of parent challengers.

  I was exceedingly grateful that my mother was not one of them. Two dads had already come forward, plus Ben’s mom, who was a wonderful cook. I had conveniently “forgotten” to bring home the notice with the call for volunteers. With any luck, my mom might miss the show altogether, because she would be busy working on the set for Carly’s play the next day.

  Six students were going to be onstage during the second half serving as chefs’ assistants, three helping the parent team and three helping Mr. Pasta. For fairness, Mr. Pasta drew the names out of a hat. I was surprised when mine was the second name chosen for the parent team. Even in a lottery, I had somehow expected Ben to be the one picked. Lindsay’s name was the third name drawn for Mr. Pasta’s team. It was too bad the two of us weren’t on the same team, in case there were going to be any peppers that needed chopping.

  When Gran-Dan called that weekend, I told him about “Pasta Live.” I didn’t say anything more to him about Thanksgiving. The week before, I had overheard Mom telling him about the turkey, and the power failure, but of course she made it sound like the funniest story ever.

  “So there’s going to be a contest between Mr. Pasta, I mean Mr. Costa, and three of the parents.”

  “Is your mom one of them? She sure seems to be going like gangbusters these days, talking a mile a minute and quilting up a storm from what she tells me.”

  It was the perfect chance for me to say something. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had told Gran-Dan then, about the credit card bills, and the power outage, and the way she laughed too loud, and the unbelievable mess everywhere. But Gran-Dan kept on talking.

  “Quilting is well and good, I told her, but it doesn’t pay the bills, and your dad’s Social Security survivor benefits only stretch so far. My advice, Cooper, is pay the bills first and keep the artsy stuff as a hobby.”

  I couldn’t imagine my mom with her quilting as a hobby, doing some boring job all day long that she’d hate.

  “I don’t do any artsy stuff,” I lied. “Carly’s the artsy one.”

  “Well, the two of you go at it together most of the time, it seems to me,” Gran-Dan said. He made it sound like a criticism. “Pirates. Igloos.”

  It was a good thing he didn’t know about Inchland, even though it was his deeds that had started it all.

  “Go ahead and put Carly on the phone, will you?” he said then.

  “I’ll go look for her,” I said. And our conversation was over.

  14

  To my great relief, on Sunday a plywood structure began taking shape in the living room. The witch’s gingerbread house had a slanting roof rising to a pointy peak. The door of the house was going to
be a real door that opened and shut, so that Hansel, Gretel, and the witch could go in and out. On each side of the door, Mom had planned a shuttered window, with a window box abloom with red and yellow wooden lollipops.

  Carly and I helped to paint the lollipops at the kitchen table Monday after school. “Pasta Live” was going to be on Tuesday evening; Carly’s play, on Wednesday.

  “We only need to paint the fronts,” I said. “No one’s going to be able to see the backs.”

  “God will,” Mom commented. Then she explained, “When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he spent just as much time on the parts no one in the chapel would ever be able to see, because God would be seeing them.”

  Good for Michelangelo, I wanted to say. Or Do you really think God cares about the backs of lollipops for a second-grade play? Instead I asked, “How long did it take him to paint it? The whole ceiling?”

  “Four years.”

  I hoped Mom would notice that we didn’t have four years to make the set for Hansel and Gretel. We had two days, and one of those days would be taken up with the cooking show at Western Hills.

  “Have you started making the oven yet? And Hansel’s cage?” I asked.

  Mom looked annoyed. “No, I haven’t started making the oven yet. Or Hansel’s cage. Maybe you haven’t noticed that I’m already working twenty hours a day on building the house, and trying to find budget airfares for winter break, and applying for our passports, not to mention finishing my quilt, and sending in the grant application for the art show at the Community Table. I can’t do everything, Cooper!”

  “Cooper and I can finish painting the lollipops,” Carly offered. “We just need five more red ones and five more yellow ones. We can do them while you start on the oven and the cage.”

  “Will you two stop talking about that oven and cage?” Mom’s voice had a hard, angry edge to it. “I know what needs to get done. I know how long it takes to do it. I don’t need my own children reminding me.”

  She snatched at the jar of yellow tempera paint just as Carly reached for it to paint her next yellow lollipop. I watched in silent horror as the jar tipped over, its bright paint racing across the table like a wave rushing onto the Jersey shore, surging past the edge of the table to cascade in a flat waterfall onto the kitchen floor.