I watch him go in the opposite direction of Gretchen’s dad and her dog. Pretty soon he is a speck, too. And then he is gone.
What a rotten morning this is turning out to be.
I sit down on the top step, hoping Gretchen’s dad will be coming back this way so I can pat the dog on their way home. I wait and wait, but they don’t come. Autos and people and streetcars start to go by. A lady walking past our house sees me sitting on the stoop and she stops and frowns at me.
“Child, does your mother know you’re sitting out here in your nightdress?” she calls out.
I don’t know. I don’t know if Mama can see me here.
So I stand up and go back inside the house. I’m hungry now. I go into the kitchen, and I’m glad Maggie is up with Alex, because she’ll make me something to eat. Her eggs aren’t as good as Evie’s, but they are better than nothing.
She frowns at me, too, when I step inside.
“Was that the front door?” she asks. “Were you outside just now?”
I nod. “Can we have breakfast? I’m hungry.”
Maggie sets Alex into his high chair. He picks up a wooden spoonthat he likes to play with and bangs it on the tray. He is one year old now. We gave him Maggie’s birthday—May 15—because he needed to have one and she wanted him to have hers. I wanted him to share mine with me—I’m eight now—but my birthday was in February and it wouldn’t have worked for him to be one back then. His birthday had to be in May or June, Maggie and Evie said. Even Papa said it.
“What on earth were you doing outside in your nightgown?” Maggie says.
It occurs to me right then that Maggie might want to know Jamie has left. She is friends with him. I saw all the letters she posted to him when he was in the war.
“Jamie’s gone,” I say.
Maggie is opening a box of Post Toasties. I guess we aren’t having eggs. “Gone where?”
“He didn’t say.”
Alex points the spoon at me and says, “Gah da!”
“What do you mean, ‘he didn’t say’?” Maggie is frowning again. She puts the box of cereal down.
I pull out a chair at the kitchen table and sit down. “I mean, he didn’t tell me.”
Maggie looks from me to the front door and back to me again. “You talked to him out there in your nightgown?”
Jamie didn’t say a word about my being in my nightgown. He hadn’t even noticed. Why was everyone else making such a big commotion about it?
“I was watching Gretchen’s dad go by with her dog, and I saw him come out of his house. And then I talked to him.”
Maggie looks like she wants to send me to my room, but she can’t because I haven’t done anything wrong. But that’s the look she has on her face.
“You’re not making any sense,” she says.
I’m done with her. “You’renot making any sense.” I get up out ofthe chair. I’ll go back up to my room and wait for Evie to wake up and make me breakfast.
“Wait!” Maggie says, grabbing hold of my arm. “What do you mean he’s gone? Tell me.”
I pull my arm away from her. “I mean, he said he can’t stay here. He went away. He had a duffel bag, and it was full.”
Maggie’s eyes get wide and the mad look slips away. Another look comes over her, but I don’t know how to describe it.
“What did he say to you?” Maggie’s voice sayspleaseeven though her words don’t.
I can’t quite remember what Jamie said about his mama not missing him. I try to think of how he said it, but I can’t.
“He told me to be good.”
Maggie slowly turns toward the front door. Alex babbles some made-up words, but it’s like she doesn’t hear him at all. Maggie tears out of the room, into the foyer, and throws open the door. I follow her.
A second later she is the one standing on the stoop in her nightgown in the full light of day, instead of me.
She is the one staring up the boulevard.
She is the one wanting so very hard to have something that’s not hers and not having any way of getting it.
