Dicey’s Song

ON THE DAYS when Sammy rode along behind James on the paper route, Dicey picked up the mail on her way home. It was early in October when Gram got an answer to her letter to the hospital in Boston where Momma was. Dicey found the letter among a pile of advertising circulars in the mailbox. She stuffed all the mail into her science notebook.

Dicey would have liked to just leave the circulars or to have returned them to the senders, but Gram said they’d use them to start fires when the weather got cold. Dicey doubted that it ever got cold here in southern Maryland. By October on the Cape, back home, the air was crisp and the leaves were turning colors, and the sand had lost all of its summer warmth. Here, all that happened so far was the water in the Bay turned clear and you could see to the shallow sandy bottom. And the leaves on the paper mulberry were turning a yellowy green. The nights were chilly, but the days were warm enough for the children’s shorts to be comfortable. But Gram promised Dicey there would be cold weather coming.

Gram already had Sammy at work chopping up kindling with a small ax. She had forewarned Dicey that they were going to need to take the big, two-handled saw to a couple of fallen trees one of these weekends. Dicey had groaned at this, knowing that the time would have to be taken from the slow work on the boat. At the rate she was going, it would never be ready for the water next spring. But she had groaned silently.

Dicey showed the Boston letter to Gram, who was making bread at the kitchen table. Gram looked at it out of the side of her eyes, grunted and continued kneading. Dicey ate an apple and waited. When they sat down together, Gram looked at Dicey before she opened the envelope. “I hope you’re not expecting good news,” she said.

“I’m not expecting anything,” Dicey answered impatiently. “I just want to know what it says.”

“I’m not expecting good news,” Gram said. She opened the envelope carefully with steady fingers.

It was a long letter, typed, three pages. Gram read it once quickly, then again slowly. She didn’t show Dicey the pages she was finished with. Dicey bit her lip with impatience and tried not to fidget. When Gram finished the second reading, she folded the papers back into the envelope and then folded her fingers tightly together.

Dicey waited. Gram’s mouth was straight and her eyes stared vacantly at the envelope.

Dicey waited.

“I need a cup of tea,” Gram announced. She went to the stove to heat water. When her back was to Dicey, she said, “No change.”

“None at all?” Dicey asked. She kept her voice level, hiding her own disappointment. She spoke as matter-of-factly as Gram did.

“So we’ll go ahead with the adoption,” Gram said. Dicey stared at her, at the strong back under the loose clothing, at her tanned legs and bare feet. “We can get to work on those forms, now we know.”

“What did they say?” Dicey asked.

“I told you once, girl, no change. Are you listening?”

But the letter was three pages long. It didn’t take three pages to write no change. “What if we went to see her?” Dicey asked.

“Do you know how much that would cost?”

Whatever it cost it would be too much.

Gram dunked the teabag in her cup, then set it aside to be used again. She turned and looked at Dicey. “Life is a hard business,” she remarked.

“Was it bad news?” Dicey asked, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

“Don’t you listen?” Gram demanded. There was anger in her voice and in her dark hazel eyes.

“It doesn’t take three pages to say no change,” Dicey answered, her own anger rising. But she was angry because she was worried and frightened.

Gram snorted. “For doctors it does,” she said. “I don’t want you making the mistake of thinking life isn’t going to be hard,” she said again.

“I know that,” Dicey said.

“I guess you do. I’m a natural fool,” Gram said, “I keep trying to count on things. And Sammy’s too young for that long bike ride. Maybe,” Gram said.

Dicey knew what the woman was thinking, how the connections were made behind her eyes. But she was glad nobody was there to hear how Gram’s mind jumped around.

“I’m going to the barn, if that’s all right,” Dicey said. She waited for her grandmother to answer. If Gram wanted Dicey to stay, for company, Dicey would like that. But Gram just said, “Suit yourself.” Dicey shrugged and went out to get a little work done on the boat, and she did not let herself wonder what it was Gram had been counting on. Because Gram said the letter said no change.

October went on. The children were settling in, just as fall was settling in, over the farm and the water, into shades of brown: the harrowed soil, the dried summer grasses, the broken stalks of corn, and the long golden bars of sunlight from a sun setting closer to seven now than eight. Gram had filed all of her forms, with the lawyer’s help. Now they awaited action on the fat folders filled with copies of the children’s birth certificates and school records, with government papers in triplicate, saying everything that could be written down in numbers about Gram and the farm, about Momma and the kids.

Sammy mostly left Dicey alone with the boat, and when he did come bother her (she had one side more than half done by then) seemed interested only in asking questions, about how the Indians scalped people and whether there were ghosts, about the ragged bottom of the big barn doors. “Do you think someone did that on purpose?” he asked, fingering the broken-off boards. “Dicey? If you hit at it with a bat, or a sledge hammer.”

“How’s school?” Dicey asked.

“Fine I guess,” Sammy told her, not interested in the subject. Well, at least he wasn’t coming home with black eyes and bruises and ripped clothes, the way he had from school in Provincetown and from summer camp in Bridgeport. As long as Sammy wasn’t fighting, Dicey wasn’t going to worry about him.

James worked hard, reading and taking notes for his report. He’d decided on a topic, “Why the Pilgrims came to America.” “It’s interesting,” he said, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s nice to have something to do again,” he told them.

Maybeth came home from school one day with an invitation to a birthday party. “You can ride your bike and I’ll ride mine to pick you up,” Dicey said, because it would be getting dark when the party was over. “What’ll you do about a present?” Dicey didn’t know what a guest at a birthday party was supposed to do.

“I thought I’d make something,” Maybeth told her. “With pine cones. Gram will help. Will you help, Gram?”

“Of course, I will. But you can’t wear your shorts and T-shirt.”

All the children’s clothes had to be practical. They had shorts and shirts, that was all. “That doesn’t matter,” Maybeth said.

“Maybe it really doesn’t,” James said to his grandmother. “Do you know who else is invited, Maybeth? Is it the whole class?”

“Just some of us,” she told him. “The cake’s going to have pink frosting.”

Maybeth was making friends, and Sammy seemed not to be getting into trouble, and James was working hard. Dicey herself had what might be called a friend in Mina. They’d gotten A’s on their rock classification project, and Mina always greeted Dicey at school, whenever she saw her. “Hey, Dicey, how you doing.” Dicey always answered, “Pretty good and you,” the way you were supposed to. Then she beat a fast path to her desk, or the next class. She didn’t want anybody to think she was trying to have friends.

She had seen the guitar-playing boy a couple of times. The first time, she had walked right up and asked him the words for that song about the coat of many colors. He remembered her. After a while, she saw him every day it wasn’t raining. He was sitting in the same place, playing his guitar when she rushed out to get on her bike and go to work. He told her his name, Jeff, and asked her hers. “Dicey Tillerman,” she said, and waited for what he would say next.

“You related to that old lady with the farm?” he asked. Dicey nodded, her chin high. “What are you, a grandchild?” Dicey nodded again. “Listen, you can sing the melody of that song?” he asked her. “I want to try a harmony.” Dicey could and did, listening to his voice as he made a harmony line with what she was singing, sometimes blending, sometimes moving in contrast. She thought he was fancying it up too much, but she didn’t say so. And she liked singing that song, even though she didn’t understand the story of it. “You sing pretty well,” Jeff remarked.

“Not particularly,” Dicey told him. “Just better than you. My sister is the one who can really sing. You should hear her sing this song.”

“I’d like to,” he said, his face friendly. What did he expect her to do, invite him to her house or something? There was something he expected, or wanted, Dicey could see that.

“I gotta go now,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. “I’ve got another song you might like.”

“I gotta go,” Dicey insisted and turned away to get her bike out of the rack and ride away.

Millie never minded if Dicey was a few minutes late. She didn’t seem to notice. The business continued to improve, Dicey thought; Millie never said anything, as if she had forgotten the terms of their deal. The third week came and went without a word from Millie. And the fourth week. The only thing Millie said about business to Dicey happened when Dicey came in to find her at the checkout counter studying a long printout. Behind her, all over one of the aisles, boxes of dried cereal were spread around. Millie was reading down the sheet, her lips moving silently, her fingers moving along under the words.

“Want me to put those up on display?” Dicey offered.

“I dunno where they came from,” Millie said. “I dunno where they’ll fit.”

“You didn’t order them?”

Millie shook her head. Dicey looked around for what to do. The windows could wait another day or two, or they could be washed right away. The floor . . . needed a damp mopping she decided. The windows would wait.

“Oh no,” Millie spoke behind her. “Look what I did. Sometimes I’m so stupid. Just look at that.”

Dicey looked over her shoulder. The page was the distributor’s order sheet. Millie had filled it out in pencil, changing her mind many times, as Dicey could tell by the erasures and crossings out. “I meant to order corn chips and I ordered corn flakes. I’ll never sell all these boxes. What’ll I do?”

“Can’t you send them back?”

“But the corn chips are for people who want them. I always have them.”

“Or have a special sale on corn flakes,” Dicey suggested. How could Millie have mistaken those two words?

“I hate the ordering, I always make mistakes, and I have to check it all the time. Herbie — he tried to teach me how to do it, but he gave up.”

The sheet looked pretty simple to Dicey. You just found the items you wanted and put the number you wanted in a little box beside the name and then figured out how much it cost and copied that down. “How can you make mistakes on this?” she asked.

“Because I never learned how to read, not properly. I can’t even read a newspaper. You didn’t know that, did you. You didn’t know what a stupid old woman you were working for.”

“But you went to school,” Dicey told her. “You said you went to school with Gram.”

Millie laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “They kept me back some, when I was littler. Then, I got so big it was embarrassing to them, and I always behaved myself. So they’d just pass me on. I never graduated, didn’t Ab tell you? No, she’s no gossip. It doesn’t matter and it didn’t then, because I was going to get married. Herbie didn’t care. He liked me the way I was. You wouldn’t understand, you’re one of those smart kids.”

“You can’t read?” Dicey was amazed.

“Of course, I can read,” Millie said patiently. “I just take so long at it, and the words all look alike. I don’t know, maybe now with all the machines they have for teaching, maybe now I could have learned. But it’s too late for me.”

Dicey didn’t know what to say. “If you told me what you wanted I could fill out the order sheets,” she finally offered.

Millie’s face showed hope. “Do you think so? You’re awfully young.”

“Sure,” Dicey answered. “I don’t have any idea of what you should stock in, but I can read names and numbers.”

“That would be a load off my mind,” Millie said. “It’s gotten so, since Herbie died, the distributor won’t let me return things any more if I make a mistake. And then,” she confided, “I get so nervous about making a mistake I go over it again and again, and it takes so long, and I can’t think properly about it. Sometimes I cross out what I wanted to order and order the wrong things. As if I wanted to do it wrong.”

Dicey nodded and kept her face expressionless. “Then you do want me to stay on,” she said.

“Stay on? Here? Of course,” Millie said, “what made you think I didn’t? I can’t handle all this business alone.”

“I was just making sure,” Dicey said quickly.

Dicey rode home to Gram’s house these October days through sunlight turning golden and red, stopped by the mailbox (wondering each time why Gram had said nothing to the little kids about that letter from the doctor in Boston) and put in a quick half-hour’s work on the boat. She had accepted the slowness with which she was going to make progress. She kept herself from being impatient, just as she kept herself private at school.

After supper these days, and before she dashed through her own homework, she read with Maybeth for a half hour or so, the two of them at the kitchen table. Maybeth had lists of words she was supposed to memorize, vocabulary sheets. In the reading book, these words appeared in the stories. Mrs. Jackson had told Maybeth that if she stumbled on a word in a story, then she should go back and memorize the list again. So most of the time poor Maybeth was guessing her way through a list of twenty words, and Dicey would stop her when she made a mistake and Maybeth would go back to the top of the list and start again. Maybeth didn’t seem discouraged, but Dicey sure was.

She thought about Maybeth and Millie; and she didn’t want Maybeth to be like Millie when she grew up. It wasn’t that Dicey didn’t like Millie, because she did. It was all right, working for Millie. Dicey was learning a lot about how to run a grocery store, and she hoped that sometime Millie might show her how to butcher the sides of meat. But it wasn’t interesting, not like other people she had worked for, when she had conversations with them. She felt pretty sorry for Millie, so big and slow-witted. She wanted something better than Millie’s life for Maybeth.

Maybeth plugged along, reading, math, social studies. She never practiced her piano until everything else was done.

At the piano, at least, Maybeth moved fast. The scales had given way to rhythmic exercises and to real pieces, with chords. James, studying the music in one of the books Mr. Lingerle loaned Maybeth, said he couldn’t figure out how she could read the notes off onto the piano keys. Maybeth said it wasn’t hard. James said he thought it looked harder than reading words. Maybeth shook her head, no, and went back to the piece she was playing.

Gram took an old blouse of hers, with tiny flowers printed on it, and cut it down to make a dress for Maybeth to wear to the birthday party. It took her a week, every night, to finish it. It wasn’t a great dress, but Maybeth looked pretty in it. She was so excited, she whirled around the living room, letting the skirt swirl out.

James showed Dicey his report on the pilgrims. Dicey only read it because he wanted her to so badly, but once she’d started she found herself really interested. James had written about all the reasons why the Mayflower people wanted to come to America. He had found out who they all were and where they’d come from, and what had happened to them once they got to Plymouth. Dicey was surprised at what he was saying. Only some of the people came over for religious reasons, and even those (as James pointed out) hadn’t come because of a belief in religious freedom. They came over to practice their own religion, which was a very different thing from what Dicey had always heard. Some of the people came because they weren’t welcome in the society of England, because they were sort of rotten apples there. Some came because they had to, like wives, children, and indentured servants. Some came because they wanted to live and work in a land that civilization hadn’t already polished and divided, because they loved wildness, because they wanted to match themselves up against the wilderness and see how they did. Dicey could understand that feeling. Some of the settlers were looking for easy money, gold or furs, to get rich quick.

“It’s really good,” she said to James when she finished reading. He was standing anxiously behind her.

“You think so?”

“It’s interesting,” Dicey said. “I bet it’s the best report anybody does — I bet it’s miles better than any other report in your class. I’ll tell you,” she said, overwhelmed into honesty by the impression it made on her, “I don’t think I could write one this good.”

James tried not to look as pleased as he felt. “You think Gram would like to read it?” he asked.

At about that time, Mr. Chappelle assigned Dicey’s class a paper. He wanted them to write a character sketch, he said, about a real character they had met, someone they knew. He wanted them to show the conflict in a real person’s life. As soon as he said that, the complaints and questions began. Dicey stopped paying attention. She knew who she’d like to write about, she knew a whole lot of people. Momma, for one; but she couldn’t, because that wasn’t any of his business. Will Hawkins was another. She’d like writing about him. Not about the way he’d been a good friend to the children, taken them along with his circus and driven them down to Crisfield; and not even about what it was like to live with a circus, although that would be interesting. Dicey would write about the way Will was so honest with his friends, yet tricked the people who came to see his shows. Because the circus was like that, full of tricks that you didn’t know about until, like the four children, you had lived in it. Probably the people who came to see the shows didn’t care, but it wasn’t what the people wanted that interested Dicey. She wanted to write about those two opposite sides of Will. Maybe, if she wrote about him, she could figure out how he fit those two sides together in his life; maybe he did it by keeping them entirely separate, his friends and his work. She thought about him, traveling now around the country with his circus. He’d promised to come see them when the circus came back to the area, and she believed he would.

And there was Cousin Eunice, back in Bridgeport. In Dicey’s opinion, Cousin Eunice was a boring person, but she had conflicts too. She too had taken the children in. But she had only done it because she wanted people to think she’d done the right thing. What she really wanted to do was live the life she’d planned for herself before the Tillermans turned up. She didn’t want the children, they were nothing but trouble to her, trouble and expense; but she’d made herself change all her plans.

Dicey might just write something as good as James, she thought, the ideas tumbling around in her head. Then she corrected herself: almost as good as James. James was just too smart for her to keep up with.

Maybe she could write about Momma. If she called her Mrs. Liza, then Mr. Chappelle wouldn’t ever guess who she really was. If she just didn’t say certain things.

After class, Mina waited for Dicey by the door. “This essay might be fun,” Mina said. “I’ve got an idea.”

Dicey didn’t know why Mina wanted to talk to her. They hurried on through the crowded halls to home ec.

“I’d like to talk to you about it,” Mina said.

“Sure,” Dicey said. She usually liked Mina’s ideas.

“How about after school?”

“Can’t,” Dicey said. Mina waited for her to say more, but Dicey didn’t. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t, except that the more anybody knew about her . . . they had a kind of hold on her. She wasn’t sure, anyway, how Mina would feel about Dicey having a job, if Mina would feel sorry for her.

“You want to come by my house?” Mina asked.

“Can’t,” Dicey said.

Mina looked at her and Dicey looked right back. Contradictory expressions were on Mina’s face, a little confusion and some anger and some laughter. Mina chose to laugh. “You sure are a hard person to be friends with, Dicey Tillerman.”

Was that what Mina was doing? Dicey was so surprised, because Mina had lots of friends already, she didn’t even answer. They entered the horrible home ec. class, where they were supposed to be making work aprons, using everything they had learned about cutting and sewing, hems and buttons. Dicey had figured out a way to avoid most of the button troubles, a pretty clever way, she thought. The rules were you had to have two buttons on it and a hem and a tie around the neck. Dicey was following the rules, but in her own way.

It had gotten so she could almost count on seeing Jeff after school, over by the bike racks. He’d call out to her, “Hey, Dicey.”

She would saunter over. “You ever hear this one?” he’d ask, and play her a song. Some of them, a lot of them, she already knew. Once, because it was in her mind for some reason, she asked him to play one of Momma’s favorites, “The water is wide, I cannot go o’er.” He didn’t know it, said he’d never heard it, but a couple of days later he had it ready for her.

Usually, Dicey would stay and sing with him, because she liked singing. A couple of times, he asked her about her sister who could sing so well, but Dicey never told him much. She thought, though, Maybeth would like Jeff. He was in tenth grade, he said, and he reminded Dicey that she was in eighth. “I know that,” Dicey answered. “So do I,” he said, peering up at her from where he sat bent over his guitar. The conversation was stupid, but she smiled. He smiled back, but she had to get to work so she didn’t bother finding out whether he thought it was stupid too.

One day, when Dicey came up to the back porch under a gray sky, her hands and shorts flecked with some of the paint she had scraped, she heard the piano playing a rolling, rippling melody, one that you couldn’t ever sing along with. There were no words that could keep up with the notes that swept from bass up through tenor to soprano. The piano was the only voice that could manage to sing that song. She stopped and listened, dumbfounded. How had Maybeth gotten so very good all at once?

She stepped into the kitchen and saw Maybeth sitting down at the table with Gram. Their heads were bent down over a reading book. Beside them was one of the word lists Mrs. Jackson never ran out of. Maybeth read aloud, word by stumbling word. You could hear her guessing. Dicey followed the music down the hall.

A man sat at the piano. He was so fat that his fanny hung down over the back of the bench. He was fat like a cartoon fat person. For a minute, Dicey saw nothing but fatness, then looked at the details. The back of his head had a bald spot, a pink circle with a few stray hairs carefully combed over it, as if he were trying to hide it. Like trying to hide a basketball under three shoelaces, Dicey thought. His eyes and nose and mouth were all buried in the flesh of his face, and his double chins hung down. His hands, despite looking thick and clumsy at the ends of huge arms, danced over the piano keys. He was concentrating so hard — adjusting his position on the bench as the chords took him up and down the keyboard, staring down at the keys under his fingers — that sweat ran down by his ear and his shirt was stained under the armpits. His mouth was open as if he was panting. And the music poured out of the piano like a stream pouring down the side of a mountain, or like the wind pouring over the bending branches of trees.

Dicey stood, listening.

After a while, the music ended. He sat in the silence, smiling to himself. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. Then he seemed to sense Dicey, silent in the doorway. He turned and looked at her.

“Who are you?” Dicey asked. “Are you the music teacher?”

“Isaac Lingerle,” he said. He watched her watching him. “You must be Dicey.”

“I didn’t see any car,” Dicey said.

“It’s parked out front, under a big tree.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I brought Maybeth home, and I want to ask your grandmother a question. But she said first Maybeth had to do some reading. That couldn’t wait, she said. Your grandmother’s not the woman to argue with.”

At that, Dicey smiled. He smiled back at her.

“Maybeth has to work awfully hard,” Dicey explained. “It’s important for her.”

“What about you, do you have to work hard?”

“Not at school,” Dicey told him. “They’ll be through pretty soon. I’ve gotta wash my hands to help get supper.”

He turned back to the piano. His hands, poised above the keys, as if he was thinking about what to play. He was as massive as a mountain, Dicey thought. Or at least a big hill.

She was coming back downstairs, having dusted off her shorts and her shirt as well as washed her hands, when she met Gram. The woman went into the living room and waited for the music to break off.

Mr. Lingerle turned to face her and stood up. “Beethoven,” he said, as if she’d asked him something.

“You’re not married,” Gram told him.

He looked puzzled, then his face turned a little pink. “As you see,” he said.

“Then you’ll stay for supper,” Gram told him.

Dicey almost protested: they would never have enough food to fill that huge body.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked uneasy, as if he didn’t trust Gram.

“I’ve got no time to talk now, but after supper while Dicey does the dishes,” Gram told him. She turned and left the room.

Dicey was laughing inside her head at the effect Gram always had on people. Mr. Lingerle stood looking at the place where Gram’s bare feet had stood.

“How’d she know I wasn’t married?” he demanded.

“She was asking you,” Dicey said.

“That was a question?” He shook his head. “What a family,” he remarked.

Dicey closed her mouth over her response and left him alone there.

They had crabs for dinner and baked potatoes. Gram told the boys to empty every crab they had into the bushel basket, and by the size of the mound of cooked crabs on the center of the table, Dicey could tell that Gram shared her estimate of Mr. Lingerle’s appetite. James looked at their guest once, and then kept his eyes off him. Sammy tried not to stare and didn’t succeed. Maybeth, looking tiny next to him, kept up a kind of chatter about school. Sometimes, if Mr. Lingerle asked him a direct question, Sammy talked too. Mr. Lingerle seemed to know Sammy. Mr. Lingerle ate only four crabs after all, just like Dicey, and he picked out the littlest potato when the plate came to him, and he had only a couple of slices of tomato.

Finally, Sammy couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer. “You don’t eat very much,” he accused the guest.

Mr. Lingerle flushed again. Dicey wondered about this, because he was entirely grown up and not even that young any more, not even a young grown-up. He took a deep breath and answered Sammy, and all the rest of them. “Let’s just acknowledge that I’m fat.”

“Nobody said anything,” Gram snapped.

Mr. Lingerle drew back. “I just think it’s better to say,” he apologized.

“Well, you’re right,” she snapped. “On both counts.”

Dicey giggled. She thought her grandmother was pretty funny sometimes. Dicey enjoyed her grandmother, and the way her grandmother’s mind worked. Mr. Lingerle gave Dicey a curious look, then he gave Gram a curious look, and his eyes became less wary. “You Tillermans certainly take some getting used to,” he remarked. “Maybeth has been surprise enough. I’m a simple man,” he said, with a smile that creased the flesh around his mouth. “I’m planning to relax and enjoy myself, unless you object?”

“We want you to,” Maybeth told him.

“Did you eat enough?” Sammy asked.

James tried to shush him, without success.

“Frankly, no. But here’s what I’ll do. When I get home, I’ll stuff myself with something. I’m always nervous, the first time people meet me, and I’m never hungry when I’m nervous. Does that answer your question?”

“You count your blessings, young man,” Gram said to Sammy; but her eyes were twinkling.

“Yes, Gram,” he answered. “Next time I won’t say anything.”

“Good.” Then Gram sent the little kids into the living room to do their homework. Dicey rolled up the crab shells in newspaper, washed and dried the dishes and glassware. She heard Mr. Lingerle ask Gram if Maybeth couldn’t have two lessons a week instead of one. She heard Gram say no.

“Listen to me for a minute,” Mr. Lingerle pleaded. “I’m not saying Maybeth is a genius, or anything like it. But she is one of those people, one of those lucky people, who will always have music in their lives. People who can always find pleasure in music, no matter what else — hurts them, or goes wrong. I’d like to give her as much music as I can, because — because I want to. It’s a pleasure for me. And then” — his chair creaked as he leaned forward — “when I hear what the other teachers say about her — and when I see how hard she works — at the piano she has success. Don’t you want her to be successful, somewhere?”

“Of course, we do,” Gram snapped. Dicey, polishing plates dry, knew what was bothering Gram. Money. But Gram wasn’t going to admit that. Dicey admired her pride, but she thought Gram was wrong not to tell Mr. Lingerle.

“I know what you’re thinking, girl,” Gram said. Dicey came to stand beside her.

“I’m right,” Dicey said.

“You always think you’re right,” Gram said.

Dicey just went back to the sink. She could have been finished five minutes ago, but she wanted to listen in.

Gram was silent, then said, “We don’t have the money.”

“I wasn’t asking for money,” Mr. Lingerle cried, exasperated. “Did I mention money?”

Dicey turned around to catch the end of Gram’s quick smile. “If you can afford it,” Gram said.

“I can’t afford not to,” Mr. Lingerle told her. “I guess you can’t know — how exhilarating it is to teach someone like Maybeth. So, we’re agreed?”

“Entirely,” Gram said.

Before he left, Mr. Lingerle played them all a couple of pieces on the piano. Then he asked them to sing for him, because Maybeth had told him they liked to sing, so they sang “Amazing Grace.” Mr. Lingerle joined in with a rich bass harmony. Gram asked them to sing “Who Will Sing for Me,” and they did. Then Sammy wanted to sing “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” When they had sung themselves out, Mr. Lingerle thanked them for a pleasant evening and left, getting himself, somehow, into a little Volkswagen that jounced off down the driveway, following its thin beams of light. They turned back to homework.

When Dicey was saying good night to Sammy, her brother said to her: “I didn’t know he was like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nice.”

“What did you think he was like?”

“Funny.” Sammy rolled over and looked at her with hazel eyes. “The kids all laugh at him.”

“Because he’s fat?”

He nodded.

“Do you?”

Sammy shrugged. “I’ve never been in trouble yet,” he said.

• • •

DICEY FINISHED her work apron the earliest of anyone in the home ec class. She spent the rest of the days assigned to this project pretending she still had work to do (so that Miss Eversleigh would keep off her back) and getting her other homework finished. On the day the project was due, Miss Eversleigh told every girl to put on her apron. Dicey stuck a marker in the story she was reading for English and jerked her apron over her head. She sat down again and opened her book.

But everybody had to stand up. Dicey wasn’t sorry she’d done as bad a job as she’d done, but she wished she didn’t have to stand up so everybody else could see. She made her face stony.

There was silence for a few minutes, while everybody looked at what everybody else had made (everybody except Dicey, who kept on reading), and Miss Eversleigh went around to everyone, like a general reviewing the troops, Dicey thought, acting as if the aprons mattered. When the first ripple of laughter began, Dicey looked up.

They were looking at her, at her apron. Well, she knew the hem rippled up and down, and the neckband pulled one side of the bib up to her shoulder, and the two big red buttons she’d used for decoration on the bib sat at just the wrong places. She knew that and she didn’t care. She glared at the laughing faces, her chin high. Wilhemina was trying not to laugh, but her cheeks puffed out with holding it in, and her eyes glistened. Dicey just stared at her. The only other angry person in the room was Miss Eversleigh, and she was staring anger at Dicey. Dicey was thinking of what to say, and she kept her chin up high like Gram’s, when the bell rang. Ending class.

Dicey whipped her apron up over her head and rolled it into a ball. She grabbed her books, fast, because Miss Eversleigh was moving toward her. She rushed out of the room, slamming the apron into the trash basket by the door.

In the hall she collided with Mina. “What do you want,” she demanded.

“It was funny-looking,” Mina said.

“I wanted to take mechanical drawing,” Dicey said. “If I were a boy, they’d have found room for me in that class.” She heard the anger in her own voice.

“Don’t take it out on me,” Mina said, angry herself now. “Boy. I thought I could count on you not to be — ordinary.”

“I never asked you to count on me for anything,” Dicey said. She stormed down the hall, riding the waves of her own anger. At least it was Friday and she wouldn’t have to go to school again until two days later.

When Dicey got home on Fridays, she usually had the house to herself for a few minutes. Gram picked Sammy up at school, and they did grocery shopping before returning together in the outboard. James was off delivering papers. Maybeth had her second piano lesson on Fridays.

Dicey slammed around the house, taking her books up to her room, pouring a glass of milk. She swept out the downstairs with quick strokes of the broom. She began to feel all right again. She was about to go out to the barn and get down to work, when Sammy and Gram arrived; so she went down through the marsh to the boat, to get the last bags of groceries.

“We’re having steak tonight,” Sammy announced. “Gram got it.”

“Got the steak, and a check from Welfare,” Gram said. Her mouth was tight. “They paid us everything from the time we first filed. So I thought — something to celebrate. If it deserves celebration.”

Gram didn’t like taking charity, Dicey knew that because Gram said so. For that matter, neither did she. But Gram had said, when she finally agreed to take them in, that that might be what they had to do.

“I must say,” Gram said, moving from table to refrigerator, “I’ve never gotten money back on taxes before. It ought to feel good.”

Dicey finished the sentence for her: But it doesn’t. She felt like she ought to apologize to Gram. After all, it had been her idea to come down here and see if they could stay. The words I’m sorry started to form themselves on her lips. But nobody made Gram do things. If she didn’t want the children, all she had to do was say so.

“Steak’ll be good,” was all Dicey said.

“It better be,” Gram answered.

“I wanna play catch,” Sammy said. “Dicey?”

She shook her head.

“Please?”

“James’ll be home in a while. Ask him.”

“Gram? Will you?”

“Not today.” Gram was slamming around the kitchen. Dicey guessed she knew about how her grandmother felt.

“I’m gonna go meet James,” Sammy decided. He ran out the door, letting it slam behind him. Gram had taken off her shoes and was putting eggs and butter out on the table. She hauled down her big mixing bowl. “What are you making?” Dicey asked.

“Chocolate cake and I don’t want any help, nor need it,” Gram said.

The last time they had Gram’s chocolate cake was for Sammy’s birthday; but then Gram seemed happy about making it.

Dicey went out to the barn. While she scraped, she thought about the English assignment. She’d show them she could write something good. She began thinking of how she would write about Momma, how to say enough for it to tell what had happened, but not as if she was talking about her own mother. After a while, she put down the scraper and went upstairs to the desk in her bedroom. She had thought of a way to begin that would give her a good ending too. She began to write.

Downstairs, she heard the boys come in, with raised voices as if they were quarreling. Vaguely, she wondered what they could be quarreling about. Gram would settle it. Dicey continued writing, until a question that had been hovering around the back of her head, away behind her ideas, sneaked around to the front: wasn’t Maybeth supposed to be home by now?

Outside, the sun was going down. Time to get to the kitchen, probably past time. Clouds crowded the sky, heavy and dark. The marsh lay under a pale mist, and in the distance, the Bay was dark purple.

James and Sammy sat over a game of checkers. Dicey said hello before turning down the hall to the kitchen. “I’d steer clear,” James advised her. “Something’s eating Gram.”

“She got a welfare check today,” Dicey explained.

“I don’t know,” James said.

Gram had set the table and put out glasses on the counter. She had put potatoes into the oven to bake. She had a stick of butter ready on the table. The cake she had made stood on the sideboard, tall and frosted. The steak waited beside a huge iron frying pan, beside the stove. Gram sat at the head of the table, in her usual place. Under the yellow kitchen light, her face looked pale and tired.

“And what do you want?” Gram demanded.

“I was going to set the table,” Dicey said. Why was Gram angry at her? “Where’s Maybeth?”

“Late,” Gram said. Her face closed off.

“What were Sammy and James fighting about?” Dicey asked.

“The place of a perfectionist in this world,” Gram said. Whatever that meant. “Ask ’em yourself.”

Dicey went back down to the living room. “What were you two quarreling about?” she demanded.

“Are you angry?” Sammy asked. “Why is everyone angry at me?”

“Nothing really,” James told her. His hazel eyes were worried. “We shouldn’t have bothered Gram. Sammy just said I wasn’t being careful where I threw the papers, it wasn’t even important.”

“Were you?” Dicey asked him.

James shook his head.

“I told him,” Sammy said.

“Do you think something’s happened to Maybeth?” James asked.

“What could happen to Maybeth,” Dicey said to soothe him. But, of course, anything could happen to Maybeth, or any of them, or anyone. James was too smart to be fooled about that, but he let himself believe her. She could see in his eyes how he was making himself believe her, and her tone of voice.

“Is that why Gram’s angry?” Sammy asked.

Dicey began to understand. She looked out the front windows, past the wide porch and down to where the driveway disappeared into the narrow stand of pines. Nothing except growing darkness. “She really is late.”

“I’m hungry,” Sammy said.

Dicey wandered back down to the kitchen. Worry was like the mist along the marsh, it rose up from the floors of the house.

“What time does she usually get in?” Dicey asked Gram.

“An hour and more,” Gram answered. “If you haven’t got anything to do in here, why don’t you just leave me alone.”

Dicey obeyed. She was halfway down the hall when she met James and Sammy coming at her, both running. “The car’s here!” Sammy called, as if Dicey were miles away.

Maybeth had burst into the kitchen and was explaining. Gram had a smile on her face that didn’t flash away the way her smiles usually did. Mr. Lingerle climbed heavily up the steps and waited in the doorway, with the darkness behind him. He had a bandage on his right hand.

“ . . . a flat tire,” Maybeth was saying.

“That’s all right,” Gram said.

“And the jack slipped, and it caught his fingers, and somebody stopped to help us. We went to the Emergency Room.”

Gram looked up. “Come on in, what’s this Maybeth’s telling me?”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Tillerman, I know you must have been worried. I tried to call from the hospital — ”

“I don’t have a phone,” Gram told him.

“It wasn’t even that serious, only a couple of stitches,” he apologized.

“I don’t have a phone and I should. With children in the house it’s irresponsible not to have a phone,” Gram said angrily.

“It’s all right, Gram,” Maybeth said. Gram reached out and hugged Maybeth close. Then she let her go and took a deep breath.

“Yes, it is, and I’ll get a phone put in. You’ll stay for supper,” she asked. “We’re having steak.”

“Gram,” Sammy protested. “Gram.”

She ignored him and waited for Mr. Lingerle’s answer. Dicey understood, just then, and wished she didn’t, just what the Tillermans had done to Gram by coming to live with her. Because she did love them, and that meant not only the good parts, but also the worry and fear. Until the children came along, nothing could hurt Gram. And now . . . but Gram must have known that, she’d had children of her own, she must have known that when she said they could live with her. Dicey wished she didn’t understand. She wished she could still be like Sammy, concerned only about whether or not he’d have as much steak as he wanted, already forgetting the worry since everything was all right again.

“Thank you, I’d enjoy that,” Mr. Lingerle said.

“Good,” Gram said, with a quick glance at Sammy.

Sammy looked up at Mr. Lingerle. “Are you still nervous when you eat here?” he asked. His eyes shone hopefully.

Mr. Lingerle burst out laughing, and the Tillermans joined him.