Bad Girls in Love (16 page)

O
n that Sunday, Mikey's mother got her back home by nine thirty.

A.M
.

Actually, it was 9:21
A.M
., so unexpectedly early that Mikey's father wasn't there. Mikey let herself into the empty house, put her duffel bag down on her bed, and called Margalo. Esther answered on the first ring, as if she'd been waiting by the phone.

“Esther it's me and I want to talk to Margalo,” Mikey said. “Right away.”

“Hi Mikey! I missed you.”

“That's great, Esther. Get Margalo.”

“They're still asleep.”

“It's nine thirty,” Mikey protested.

“They're all in the living room.”

“Why are they sleeping in the living room?”

“For the sleepover,” Esther explained. “Wait . . . I hear—”

Margalo's mother got on the phone. “Mikey? It's Aurora, she'll be here in just—go get Margalo, Esther—are you at your mother's?”

“No.”

“I have to—hold on a minute,” Aurora said. Mikey heard her put the phone down and heard distant muffled voices. She hung up. What was Margalo doing having a sleepover and not inviting her, and not even telling her?

In about one-half minute the phone rang, but Mikey knew who it was. She listened to the message as Margalo recorded it onto the answering machine. “I know you're there. I bet you're angry. But it's not—this didn't even get planned until Friday afternoon, when you were already gone to your mother's. It just happened, we just decided on the phone Friday, it's only four of us who weren't going to Ronnie's, you weren't—”

The machine cut her off.

The phone rang again—one ring, two, three, four—and then the machine picked up: “We're the Elsingers. Leave us a short message.”

“Mikey, for slime's sake.” Pause. Humming of tape. “Pick up the phone.” Pause. Humming of tape. “Come
on
, Mikey—” Cut off.

Again: “Don't be a total hairball, Mikey. Pick up the phone, I know you're listening.” Pause. Tape humming. “I don't know why you think I don't know you're there. I bet I even know where you're standing. And what you're wear—”

Ring, ring, ring, ring
. “We're the Elsingers. Leave us a short message.”

“OK, Mikey. I have a baby-sitting job this afternoon, until late. So call me back or don't, it's up to you. If you'd rather be angry at me, even though there's no reason, go right ahead.”

Click. Beep
. End of message.

Best friends since the first day of fifth grade? Ha! Topsoil! Margalo knew Ms. Barcley's phone number. She could have called and—

And what? And Mikey would have known she was missing the sleepover. Was it worse to miss it and know it, or miss it and not know it?

Never mind that. Mikey needed to get angry—it felt pretty good, in fact—at somebody, anybody. And it felt better to
be
angry—and besides, Margalo knew Mikey well enough to know that Mikey would have wanted to know about it even if she couldn't go. (Just like Mikey knew Margalo well enough to know that Margalo would have included her in the sleep-over.) Mikey went out to the kitchen and poured a bowl of Cap'n Crunches, and poured milk over the crisp miniature pillows, and ate standing up. The milk-and-sugar taste, combined with the friendly crunching sound inside her head as she chewed, made her feel like a little kid.

When the phone rang again after about fifteen or twenty minutes, she still didn't answer it. “I thought you might have figured it out, but I guess not,” Margalo said. “This is slimeing stupid, Mikey.”

Mikey knew that. Sometimes she liked being stupid.

Margalo waited a full ten seconds, then hung up again.

Mikey finished her cereal, rinsed the bowl, rinsed the spoon, put them both into the dishwasher. Her father wouldn't expect her home for a couple of hours at the soonest, so she didn't expect to see him until then. And where was he, anyway? Maybe she'd call Shawn. Because they were friends, that was what he'd said. Friends called each other up and talked, just to talk, so there was no reason for her not to call him now that he said they were friends.

She dialed his number and asked the man who answered if she could speak to Shawn. The first thing that popped out of her mouth when she heard his “Hello?” was: “Where's your mother?”

“At church. Why? Who is this?”

“Because she never answers the phone. Mikey.”

“Listen, Mikey, I can't talk now. I'm leaving—my dad's—I'm meeting some people at the Mall.”

“Oh. Oh, OK. Maybe—”

“Bye.”

Mikey held on to the phone for a minute, then set it down. If that was the way everybody was going to be, she'd just do homework. After she finished her homework, she could make a spaghetti sauce for dinner if she got started with defrosting hamburger right away. So she did that. She could call Margalo later, after Margalo's overnight guests had left and before her baby-sitting job started. Let Margalo stew for a while. It
would serve her right for—they
could
have called last night, couldn't they? Just taken a short break from their fun to call. Mikey started on homework.

She was partway through the science reading—who
cared
how rocks were formed?—when the phone rang, and she had to race from her usual homework locale at the kitchen table to go out to the living room and answer it. She got there just before the machine picked up. “Hello?”

“Mikey?” The male voice sounded surprised. “It's me, Hon. I didn't think you'd be—I was calling to leave a message. In case you got back early and I wasn't . . .”

“Hi, Dad,” she said when he didn't finish what he had started to say. But he seemed to have turned his head away from the phone and to be talking to someone else, telling someone else, “She's home already.”

“Dad? Where are you?”

“At the office.”

“What time did you go in?”

“I wasn't planning to come home until—I'll be home by one.”

“No problem,” Mikey said.

“She must have driven you home herself?”

“Nine thirty,” Mikey told him.

“Well, so now you can make tennis practice,” he said. “Do you want to?”

“Yeah. I would.” It would feel good to be swinging her racquet and hitting the ball. A few overhead smashes—she imagined it—would feel pretty slimeing good.

“I'll be home in a little while—if that's OK? Mikey, there's someone I'd like you to meet. Would you like to meet someone?”

Mikey knew what he was asking: Did she want to meet some woman he was dating? Who was probably the person in the background. Who was probably some woman at work and also probably—because her dad didn't lie to her—the reason why he hadn't told her how early he'd gone in that morning. She didn't want to hear or think any more about that.

“What do you say, Hon?” he asked.

She kept it short. Clear. “No.”

“Some other time,” he said.

Uh-oh
, Mikey thought. “Mom's getting married Thursday.”

There was a silence. Then, “You've met this man, do you like him all right?”

“He's rich. He's older. She said we don't have to worry about child support.”

“Hunh,” her father said. “How much older?”

“She's moving to Dallas.”

“How rich?”

“Pretty.”

“Hunh,” he said again. Then out of the blue he asked, “Do I want to meet him?”

What was all of this meeting of people? “I'm cooking spaghetti sauce,” Mikey told her father, and hung up.

Without thinking, Mikey punched 1 on speed dial. “Esther,” she said. “Get me Margalo and don't give me any lip.”

“It's Susannah,” the girl's voice said.

“You heard me.” Mikey didn't care who got Margalo, as long as it was quick.

Margalo said, “I can't talk, Mikey.”

“My father wants me to meet someone.”

“You're kidding.”

“Not.”

“Your parents are falling in love like there's no tomorrow,” Margalo said.

“Can they still fall in love at their age?”

“They're still human,” Margalo said. “At any age.”

“My mom's getting married this week.”

“Oh,” Margalo said. She thought. “I might get home too late to call you.”

“She bought me a dress. For the dance,” Mikey said.

“Guilty conscience? Listen, Mikey, I really have to—”

“OK. See you,” Mikey said, and hung up.

Sometimes she was sorry she'd talked Margalo into a career in baby-sitting. Sometimes it was inconvenient when Margalo was always off earning money.

Mikey went back to finish her homework, and then she got to work on the spaghetti sauce. She chopped and sautéed onions, adding garlic at the very end. She crumbled ground meat into the pan and browned it. She stirred in tomato paste and water, canned tomatoes, basil, oregano, a bay leaf, salt and pepper, and set the heat under the pot as low as it would go. While she washed up, the smell of the sauce started to fill
the kitchen, rich and tomatoey, a nourishing smell, the smell of Sunday evening—homework done, three hours of tennis adding to her normal appetite, her dad across the table and both of them talking, slurping spaghetti into their mouths.

She still had a couple of hours before practice, so Mikey went to unpack her suitcase.

Of course, the phone rang as soon as she got into her room. She was spending her whole life running for the phone. “Hello,” she said, not exactly friendly.

“Mikey?”

“Who is this?” But she thought she recognized the voice. It might be him. Again. “Is this you again?” she demanded.

“I told you I'd call. So I can find out what you decided.”

She bet she could figure out who this mysterious secret admirer was if she thought about it. If she felt like spending the time thinking about it, she could figure out this voice and get a face attached to it. “I didn't decide anything,” she told him, deciding right then that maybe she'd gather some clues. “What do you want today?”

“You could tell me how your weekend went, at your mother's.”

“How do you know I went to my mother's?”

He went on, as if she hadn't spoken, as if he'd planned what he was going to say and couldn't be distracted. “Because my parents are still married to each other, so I don't know what it's like to go visit one or the other of them. To be a guest in one parent's new house. What do you do when you're, like, a guest? I mean, not just their kid, in their house.”

Mikey sat down. She'd never thought of it that way. “Go out for dinner with her and her dates. Go clothes shopping.”

“You
like shopping for clothes?”

“No. But she does, so it's what we do.”

“What did you get?”

“This weekend? For me, a dress for the dance.”

He hesitated. Asked, “You're going to the dance?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why—”

“If you know me so grime-ing well, you already know why.”

“She wants you to go to the dance?” he guessed.

“Bingo!” cried Mikey, loud and sarcastic.

“So your tennis matches must be pretty stressful for her.”

“Is this Ralph?”

“Ralph?” he asked. “Ralph who?” he asked. “Ralph Nader?”

“Very funny,” Mikey said.

He wasn't going to tell her who he was. And actually, that was OK with Mikey. She liked not knowing. It made him into a ghost, easy to talk to. “Don't feel sorry for my mom,” she said. “She's getting married. This Thursday.”

“Oh. I guess that's the real reason why you have a new dress.”

“I'm not going to that wedding,” she told him.

“You don't like the man she's marrying?”

“I'm not invited,” she told him.

“You're kidding.”

She didn't say anything.

“You're not kidding.”

She didn't say anything.

“Don't you mind?” he asked.

“It's only a wedding. It's small, just a few friends, it isn't like—it doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“You're really not kidding,” he said.

The conversation was getting boring.

“I'd mind,” he said. “I'd mind a lot.”

She explained. “If I was there, it would just be her usual stuff, but it would be more of it because it's her perfect wedding to her ideal man.”

“What do you mean, usual stuff?” he asked. He sounded interested, so she told him.

“The usual mother stuff. Stand up straight, pull in your stomach, look like you're having a good time, at least try. Don't talk about this, don't eat that way, why can't you try. I already got a lot of it this weekend, because she's packing and I couldn't do anything right.”

“Not even books?”

“Not even books.”

“What can you do wrong with books?”

“Get them out of order. Put them in the wrong way. Label the boxes wrong.”

“Well,” he said. “Well. Do you know what I think?”

“How could I know that?”

“She sounds to me like—all that criticism—she sounds like someone who doesn't want to feel bad about what she's doing. So she turns it into things wrong with you.”

“Is this Margalo?” Mikey demanded.

“No,” he said, and laughed. “So how are things going with Shawn?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said. A memory of Shawn's face came to her, like looking at a photograph. She looked at the memory. “Well,” she admitted, “he says we're just friends. Which I'm not, and I told him I wasn't, but—oh, trash it,” she said.

“What is it about him, anyway?”

Mikey tried to explain. “What it is, is—Shawn—you look at him and you know—he's something special,” she said. “You can't miss it. You see him and you just know. . . .”