Read Online Joy School by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page B

spices, I remember Cynthia telling me that, that she grows spices in the summer. Plus tomatoes, which she cans. These are skills I don’t know anything about. I don’t think many people know how to can, although seniors in Miss Woods’s class do. I never saw basil growing. If Cynthia and I are still friends in the summer, that is one thing I would like to see: Nona’s garden, with things you can eat just growing for free. You want something? Just go out in the backyard and pick it. She has lettuce coming up from the dirt, raw peas.
    “She’s up there
screaming
now,” Cynthia says. “At my mother. Can’t you hear her?”
    I listen carefully. “No.”
    “I’ll hold the phone out,” Cynthia says. “Listen.”
    I listen again. “No,” I say. “I can’t hear.”
    Nothing.
    “Cynthia?” I say.
    Nothing.
    Well, look at this.
“Cynthia!”
    “What?” she says. “Did you hear?”
    “No.” I’m getting tired of this conversation.
    “Oh well, you wouldn’t understand it anyway, it’s all Italian.”
    “Your mother speaks Italian?”
    “Oh yeah. Nona gets her mad enough, she’ll spout Italian all day long.”
    Well. A dent in Mrs. O’Connell.
    “Can you come over tomorrow?” Cynthia asks.
    “It’s Thanksgiving.”
    “I know. But before dinner.”
    “I don’t think so. My sister’s here and everything.”
    “Really? I didn’t know you had a sister. What’s she like?”
    The door opens, and I hear Diane’s voice. Then she is in the kitchen putting grocery bags on the counter. She waves at me but there is nothing in it, no life.
    “I’ll have to talk to you later,” I say.
    “Is she right there?” Cynthia asks, like we have secrets together against Diane.
    “No. I just have to go.”
    “But can you come over on Friday?”
    “I guess,” I say. “All right.”
    “I’ll teach you piano.”
    A brightening in me. “Okay.”
    My father comes in the kitchen, his face shut down. Well, here we are, back to the old days, just like that. I don’t know what it is between the two of them. It is like they are allergic to each other.
    “Hey,” I say.
    No one answers.
    “Need any help carrying things in?”
    “We got it all,” Dickie says. He looks like he is ready to blow up with uncomfortableness. I feel sorry for him. I wish I could tell him to go in my room, but that would be taking sides and my father would just get madder. When he is like this, he welcomes more to keep him going.
    “I’ll just go get the mail,” I say.
    My father starts putting groceries away. I pity the shelves he will slam the cans down onto.
    Diane goes into the living room and sits on the sofa. She is holding one hand with the other, rubbing her knuckles. I keep thinking, inside her is that little baby. Held right in her center. Surrounded by magic liquid. Listening for her body to tell it every single thing to do.
    Dickie comes in and sits beside her and it’s like he isn’t even there.
    “Hey, Dickie,” I say. “Want to get the mail with me?” It’s a country-type mailbox, out at the curb. It has a red flag to put up when you want to tell the mailmanto stop and take something. I don’t know why we have a country mailbox when this is the suburbs, but who knows why they do what they do here? I could show Dickie how it works.
    “No thanks, Katie.”
    He wants to help Diane, but I can tell him he might as well give up right now.
    I go outside and it is such a relief to be out of that house. There is the sky, which has nothing to do with any of this. I’d thought we were going to make pies and it would be a little fun. I’d imagined my father and Dickie wearing aprons too, and it would be cute-funny, like when the men on TV cook and do things all wrong which only makes their wives say, Oh HONEY, and love them more. But no.
    Well, there is some mail, but it is all window mail. Bills. But then I see a small envelope, purple. I turn it over, feel so happy at the sight of a letter from Cherylanne. One thing