Girlhearts Read online

  “You didn’t say thanks,” Sam said.

  “For what, the story? Okay, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” He looked at me as if he wasn’t a foot shorter and four years younger. “You’re pretty.”

  “Are you hitting on me, or do you mean pretty old?”

  I turned my head a fraction again and saw James across the aisle and three rows back. There was an empty seat behind him. If I had the nerve, I could get up and sit down there, the way Sam had sat down next to me. I’d lean over the seat and tell him my dream, and maybe I’d even tell him about Mom and me running through the rain.

  “Sarabeth! You want to hear another Star Trek story?” Sam pulled at my sleeve.

  “Sam! Want the truth? No, I don’t. We don’t have the time for it anyway.” The bus was pulling into the school parking lot. “Boo hoo, too bad, so sad,” I added.

  “Mean person,” he said.

  “Am I?” I stood and pulled on my backpack. “I hope not. I was just teasing.” All the time, I was watching James from the corner of my eye, checking out who he was talking to.

  “Maybe you are mean,” Sam said. “And maybe you’re not.” He shrugged. “How could I know? It’s up to you.”

  “Aren’t you the wise old man!” I tapped him on the shoulder and we got off the bus. I could sense James walking in the crowd behind me, but I didn’t turn around again.

  “Oh, girl,” Patty sang into the wet, snowy air, “your heart is pure and strong.… You know the way I love you …” The warmth of the words, the coolness of her perfect face, that was Patty, through and through. “… and though I’ve sometimes done you wrong,” she sang, her arms linked with Asa’s and Jennifer’s, “I’m begging you … listen to me now, girl.… Don’t make us part.”

  The words shook me. It was Patty’s voice, the feeling in it. She could look and sound remote, but after last year, I knew just how strong she was, just how emotional.

  “Girlheart, girlheart,” Jennifer and I joined in on the chorus.

  It was after school, and the four of us were on the way to the mall. I gestured to Asa, Come on, you sing, too, but she shook her head and made the puking motion. Unsentimental Asa!

  “All I need is for you to say,” Jennifer, Patty, and I sang, “you’ll let me into your girlheart, today.”

  We held onto the last note: “… aaaaaaaaay.” Patty gave out first, and then I did, but Jennifer, who was a runner and had the lungs for it, stayed on it. “What a song, what a song!” she said when she finally let go of the note.

  “I don’t know how you can all fall for that stuff,” Asa said. “Those lyrics are so manipulative. ‘Let me into your heart.… I know I’ve done wrong,’ bla, bla, bla, whine, whine, whine.”

  Asa spoke just the way she looked—decisive, firm, solid. Patty said that Asa had always had that deep voice, even when she was a little kid, as if she’d always been on the way to her future, which, we all predicted, was to be a judge, like her father.

  “That guy in the song is not really sorry,” she went on; “he’s just trying to get in good with her again.”

  “How do you know it’s a guy who’s saying it?” Jennifer said.

  “Jen! It’s obvious.”

  “I don’t think it’s so obvious. It could be two girls in love, and one of them—”

  “You’re just being outrageous, and exorbitantly so,” Asa said.

  “Exorbitantly so? Excuse me? Could you try talking like a regular human being?”

  “Could you try expanding your vocabulary?”

  I only half listened. All day, I’d felt distracted, slightly off balance. Maybe I was getting sick, like Grant, who’d been home with the flu all week. Anyway, Jen and Asa were always bickering; it was nothing new. Maybe they did a little less of it when Grant was with us. She was a calming influence on everyone.

  “Asa, did I tell you I like your braids,” Patty said.

  “Changing the subject, Patty?” Jennifer asked.

  Asa tossed her head, making her African-style braids with beads clink. “It took forever to get them done, but it was worth it.”

  “Negative, negative,” Jennifer crowed. “I’m surprised at you, Asa, the big liberal, taking over someone else’s culture. Braids on Diane McArdle and the other African-American girls are cool, but on you—”

  “I know the argument,” Asa interrupted, “and I don’t accept it. If you wear an embroidered blouse, are you stealing my Armenian culture? If I wear overalls”—which she did nearly every day of the week—“am I stealing a farmer’s culture? If a guy has a beard,” she steamrollered on, “is he stealing Sarabeth’s father’s Jewish culture?”

  “Your father was Jewish, Sarabeth?” Jennifer asked.

  I nodded. “But no beard.”

  “Wow, I didn’t know you were, too,” Jennifer said.

  “Were, too, what?”

  “Jewish, like me. Oh, wait, is your mother?”

  “What, Jewish? No.”

  “Too bad! Then you aren’t, either.”

  We stopped on the corner of Erie Boulevard, waiting for the light to change. The sky was heavy, a color like dulled silver, which probably meant more snow. Cars passed in a stream of noise and fumes.

  “Your mother has to be Jewish for you to be,” Jennifer said, hooking her arm through mine. “That’s our law. But it’s cool that your father was; it sort of connects you and me more.”

  “I’m not through with what I wanted to say about my braids,” Asa said. “Jen, is your criticism of my hairdo about culture or envy?” She gave Jennifer’s frizzy red hair a hard tug.

  Jennifer liked that. She liked anything physical. She laughed and dashed across the four lanes ahead of us.

  In the mall, we wandered, looking at clothes and makeup. After a while, we went upstairs to the food court. “I’ll keep the table warm while you all go get some food,” I said, putting my jacket over the back of a chair.

  “Are you on a diet, Sarabeth?” Asa said. She hooked her thumbs through her overall straps. “You better not be! You’re skinny enough.”

  “Jennifer’s skinnier,” I said.

  “Jen’s all muscle. You’re not in her class, Sarabeth. You cannot afford to lose one more ounce.”

  “Judge Asa has proclaimed,” Jennifer said, throwing off her jacket.

  “I just don’t want anything, Asa. I’m not hungry.” I sat down, hooking my heels on the chair rung.

  What I didn’t say, and what I wouldn’t say, was that Mrs. Milleritz’s call that morning was almost a guarantee that Mom would be short of cash by the end of the month and maxing out her credit card to pay bills. She’d be fishing around for every spare quarter. The few dollars I’d spend now might not look like much to my friends, but they were big to Mom and me.

  I watched Jennifer, Asa, and Patty walking over to the food court. At the Chinese place, Jennifer turned and made an “are you sure?” face at me. I nodded and waved her on. Jennifer liked to annoy people for the sheer hell of it, but she was good. I really loved her, loved them all, everything about them. Even their names seemed special to me. Patty Lewis. Asa Goronkian. Jennifer Rosen. Grant Varrow.

  The four of them had been friends forever. I was the newbie. Well, not completely. It was over a year now since I’d been new in school and they’d taken me into their group. Since September, James was new in school, too, and new on the school bus, which he didn’t take regularly, but just often enough to feed my crush.

  When Patty, Jennifer, and Asa came back, they had pizzas and sodas. Jennifer put a can of soda down in front of me. “Jen, I don’t want anything,” I said.

  “Too bad, it’s for you, and I’m not taking it back.”

  I reached into my jeans and pushed a bill across the table to her. Jen pushed it back. “Hello! It’s a present; you can thank me.”

  “Thank you, but I can pay.” I pushed the money toward her again. Back it came. “Jen!”

  “Sarabeth!” she mimicked. She picked up a slice. “Dr
ink up. You don’t always have to be so freakin’ independent.”

  “My stepfather bought a Lexus,” Patty said. “Okay if we talk about that, you two? He said he needed it for his law practice. Did I tell you all this already? He took my college money to pay for it.”

  “No, you didn’t tell us. He took your college money?” Asa froze with a slice halfway to her mouth. “He can’t do that.”

  “He did it,” Patty said. “The account was in Mom’s name, and when they got married, she made everything joint with him.”

  “What a venal, awful man,” Asa said. “That is so bad. That’s wicked and greedy.” Her nose pointed forward in outrage. “And your mother, what’s the matter with her, Patty? Why did she just give him the account?”

  “Same reason she married him. She’s in luuuve. He is, too. With himself.” Waves of color passed over Patty’s pale cheeks.

  Patty’s and my bad joke together was that both our mothers had been busy over the summer, Patty’s acquiring husband Kevin in July and mine disposing of boyfriend Leo in August.

  “The more I live with him, the less I know how my mother could have fallen for him,” Patty said. “Sometimes, I wish I could just get out of there.”

  I moved my chair closer to hers. “If it gets too bad, Patty, you can always come live with us again.”

  She nodded. “I might take you up on that, I really might.”

  “Negative, negative,” Jennifer said, bouncing in her seat. “No more moves, Patty! You’ve moved around too much already. It’s not good for you. First, you left your uncle’s house, which, okay, I know you had to, but still, it was a move. Then you went to live with Sarabeth, where you were all crowded and crammed together, and then you and your mom got that apartment on Oak Street, which was no big deal, let’s admit it, and now—now, at least, you’ve got a house of your own—”

  “I don’t look at it as mine, actually,” Patty said.

  “—and a room of your own,” Jennifer went on, “a nice room, and if you moved in with Sarabeth—well, why would you do it? What for, what would you gain? You’d be living all squeezed up—”

  “‘All crowded and crammed,’” I put in. “Our place isn’t that small, Jen.”

  “Hey, it’s a trailer.” Jennifer gave my arm one of her trademark squeezes. I’d have a black-and-blue mark tomorrow. “Don’t go getting all sensitive on me, Sarabeth.”

  When we left the food court, I stopped at the phone booth near the outside door to call Mom. I got our answering machine and Mom’s message. “Hello, we’re all busy right now. Leave a message, and someone or other will return your call.” She always tried to make it sound like there were more people than just the two of us living there.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, “you there? Hello, hello. You want to pick up? Okay, I guess you’re not there. I’m going out for the bus now. I’ll be home in half an hour.”

  Outside, we waited under the Plexiglas shelter. People poured out of the mall, hurrying to their cars in the lot. Patty and Jennifer’s bus pulled up, steaming and heaving. A few minutes later, Asa’s bus stopped. I was alone in the shelter. It was snowing again, big wet flakes that probably wouldn’t last too long. Cars went by on the boulevard with their lights on, and the sky got darker and darker.

  FOUR

  It was past five when I got home. I went around turning on lights. Tobias was sleeping again near the refrigerator. “You don’t feel any better?” I asked him, kneeling down to pet him. “Where’s Mom? She should be home by now.”

  I put a tape Grant had lent me in the cassette player, and checked the fridge to see if Mom had left a note about supper. No. What she had left, though, was her good old black shoulder bag, the one she took everywhere, the one that was stuffed with everything she needed when she went to work. It was lying on the counter, half-open, and when I looked inside, I saw that her wallet was there, along with all the other junk she toted. For a moment, I zipped and unzipped the bag, trying to figure out why Mom had gone off in the car without wallet, license, or money.

  Maybe, after I’d left, someone had called her to work, and she’d just grabbed the car keys and run out. That would explain the breakfast dishes still in the sink and her bed still unmade. Mom never went out and left her bed unmade. But still, she should have been home by now.

  Okay, say she went to work, came home, and decided to go out again, and this was when she grabbed the car keys and forgot her shoulder bag. But where would she be going with just car keys and nothing else? To see Cynthia, of course. “Duuuh,” I said out loud, and picked up the phone.

  Cynthia answered on the first ring. “It’s me,” I said. “Let me speak to Mom, please.”

  “Jane’s not here, Sarabeth. It’s just me and baby. Was she planning to come over?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought … Cynthia, she isn’t home yet.”

  “So?”

  I paused. “So, nothing. Except, she should be home.”

  “Oh … my.” Cynthia was laughing at me. “You two are so attached. At the hip, I swear. What are you worried about? Maybe she had some errands to do.”

  “Yeah, that’s actually what I was thinking.” Little white lie, but better than having Cynthia laugh at me again.

  After I hung up, I peeled potatoes, made burger patties, and put a pot of water on the stove to heat. I kept watching the clock. I made a salad, set the table, and sliced the potatoes straight into the boiling water, a habit that drove Mom up the wall.

  Around 6:30, I went to the front door and looked out. Lights were on all around in the court. The snow had stopped, and the sky was clearing. Big drifts of fat clouds passed overhead. There was a little slice of moon showing in the sky on the other side of the highway.

  By seven, I was too hungry to wait for Mom any longer. I mashed the potatoes and threw a burger on the pan. When I finished eating and Mom still wasn’t home, I started calling my friends. Grant first. She had her own phone with her own phone number and had probably never peeled a potato in her life. “Do you know how to peel potatoes?” I asked.

  “Is that a special skill?” Grant said hoarsely.

  “Yeah, you go to potato-peeling school. Do you feel better?”

  “Better than yesterday,” she croaked, “but my throat is still sore. I stayed in bed practically the whole day. I didn’t mind, though. I listened to music for hours.”

  Grant had changed my ideas forever about rich girls. She was the calmest and the most unspoiled person I knew, even if she didn’t know how to peel potatoes. By the time we stopped talking, it was past eight. I made cocoa and watched TV for a while. At 8:30, I called Cynthia again. “Did I tell you that Mom went out without her shoulder bag?”

  “Okay. So?”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little strange?”

  “Not really. I forget things all the time. Are you panicking because she’s late getting home? Cut the woman a little slack, Sarabeth; she’s a big girl. Let her out of your pocket.”

  “I’m not panicking, Cynthia, and I don’t have Mom in my pocket. Whatever that means.”

  “She’ll probably walk in the door the minute you hang up.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I hung up. Mom didn’t walk in the door.

  I went in her room and turned on the computer. One of the women she cleaned for, a lawyer, had given it to Mom a few months ago, when she bought a new one for herself. Nothing wrong with it; it was just a little old, a little slow, but we loved it.

  I found Asa on-line. “wsup?” she asked.

  “not mch. my mom’s not home yet. i called cynthia & she really annoyed me. she sd don’t panik, like i panik all the time.”

  “cyn ust 2b yr momz best frend?” Asa asked.

  “so rite. they moved away, closer 2 the army base.”

  “hez a soljer?”

  “u got it.”

  “yuk.”

  “they hav a kid now, darren.”

  “cute?”

  “spoiled.”
<
br />   “ha! lol!”

  Then we talked about Grant and, after that, about Patty’s stepfather, Kevin, and how much Patty didn’t like him.

  “wood ur mom let patty live w u again?” Asa asked.

  “4 sure.”

  “yr mom iz great.”

  “sometimes, this am she waz raving. sed i looked like a slob.”

  “u? nevernever.”

  “she hates the shirt i wore 2day.”

  “no way. i luv that color, so weird. i am so sorry about patty. she deserves someone great 4 a stepdad. she’s been thru enuf already.”

  “this is tru!”

  “my gram sez u can try til the moon turns 2 blu cheez and u wld still never figure y people fall 4 the people they fall 4.”

  I glanced at the clock: 9:20. “g2g now. luv you.”

  “luv you 2! c ya. bye.”

  I waited until ten after ten before I called Cynthia again. She sounded groggy. “Did I wake you up? Are you sleeping?”

  “I was, Sarabeth. Not now, obviously.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. What’s up?”

  “Mom’s not home yet.”

  There was a pause. “What time did you say you got home?”

  “It was after five, maybe twenty after.”

  “And you haven’t heard anything from Jane since then?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Another pause. “Okay,” she said again. “Let me call some places. This isn’t like Jane. You’re right; she’s not like this. She never came home this late before, did she?”

  “No. No, never.”

  “Okay, let me call the police, see if they know anything—”

  “I can call the police, Cynthia, I can do that.” I should have thought of it. Nine one one. Even little four-year-olds knew to do that.

  “No, let me do it,” Cynthia said.

  “Why? I can do it.” I wanted to do something. I’d been sitting around for hours, just waiting.

  “Sarabeth, they might listen to me more—you know what I mean, faster, quicker, whatever—because I’m an adult. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  “When?”