A Friend at Midnight Read Free

trained dog, honored the ring of a phone. Reb and Lily often called each other on their cell phones just to shut Nate up for a minute.
    â€œI’ll be right back, Nate,” Lily told him. “I have to answer the phone. You put your head down and close your eyes. Before you know it, my phone call will be over and I’ll be back.”
    Nate was still pretty easy to dupe. He said, “Okie, Wiwwy,” which was how he said “Okay, Lily,” and even though Lily tried to harden her heart against Nate, she adored him when he put his head down and murmured, “Okie, Wiwwy.”
    Lily whipped out of the room without looking into Michael’s half. Michael’s three quarters, actually. Nate had exactly enough space for his crib and one person to stand next to it.
    Michael had stripped his side of every possession, taking every baseball card and toy truck and Lego and book and video game and CD and of course York. He had even taken the sheets off his bed—Michael!—who believed that laundry belonged on the floor and changing sheets was for sissies. After Michael threw his used sheets in the laundry room that day, he came back to admire the bare mattress: Proof. He was leaving. For good.
    Lily understood Michael’s decision to go. They all wanted to storm away when Mom remarried and they all wanted to storm away again when Nathaniel was born. But when Michael really did storm away, Lily knew in her heart why she and Reb had not. They knew better.
    It gave Lily a bit of peace to know that Michael had York the Bear with him. York would never let Michael down.
    The second ring was cut short. There was not a third one. Lily pounded down the stairs to look at the caller ID on the kitchen phone and see who had hung up. Probably some solicitor who had managed to avoid the Do Not Call list.
    Lily adored the telephone. She loved e-mail and text messaging, because she loved every variation on communicating, but mostly Lily loved the sound of her own voice. Just since yesterday’s phone calls, she had a hundred new things to tell every friend she had. If she got lucky, Nathaniel would fall asleep and give her two fine nap hours for phone calls.
    Mom and Kells would not be back till after midnight. They had driven Reb to college. It was the first semester of Reb’s freshman year, and Lily had been counting the days right along with her sister, excited about seeing the campus and the dorm, meeting the roommates, helping unpack, hanging clothes and posters. But when the last box and suitcase had been wedged into the car, there was no room for Nate’s car seat and no room for Lily.
    â€œThat works!” cried her sister brightly. “You guys stay here.”
    Lily was crushed. “Let’s divide everything in two cars,” she offered quickly. “Mom drives one car, Kells drives one. No fair leaving me and Nate behind.”
    How pleadingly her older sister looked at her. Reb, like Michael, wanted to enter a new world. She didn’t even intend to use her nickname from now on. Michael had left forever, and now Reb would turn into some college woman named Rebecca, while Lily would be abandoned in a swamp of dirty diapers and educational toys.
    Their house was chaotic in the best of circumstances, because not only did Mom drop everything everywhere, using the dining room table to match socks and the living room rug for stacking catalogs, but she piled her concert band’s music on the stairs and left broken school instruments she needed to repair on the kitchen counter and lost whole series of CDs under the sofa. Lily even saw a cell phone peeking out from under a sloppy heap of paper napkins. Had to be Mom’s—everybody else held tightly to essentials, or they would vanish forever in Mom’s chaos. It was hard to believe that their messy mother easily controlled a four-hundred-student band program. Today the house was strewn with stuff Reb wasn’t taking after