Like People in History Read Free Page B

I asked, writhing with envy.
    "Four hours," he replied smugly.
    My mother unlocked the kitchen door, reached back for his suitcase, and half lifted, half dragged it over the threshold. She gestured us in.
    "By the way, this is your cousin, Alistair Dodge."
    "Second cousin, actually," Alistair corrected.
    My mother couldn't resist being demonstrative to me again. She half hugged me, then sat me down at the Formica table in the breakfast nook, signaling Alistair to join us. "You must be starving," she said to me. "He's used to a little snack after school," she explained to Alistair, which irritated me even farther. He seemed indifferent as he removed his cream felt hat and sat down directly across from me. "In fact, you must be starving too."
    "Dodge is a car," was all I could say.
    "We're not those Dodges," Alistair replied. "My grandmother says we're tons older than those Dodges. She calls them upstarts."
    My mother was hustling behind us, getting food together.
    I stared at Alistair, and if I'd hated him on sight, I now knew at least three reasons why. Four: he looked like me. Oh, not exactly. He was taller, and narrower waisted. His hair was a paler blond than mine, and unlike mine, it wasn't darkening—and wouldn't darken—to brown. But even as unformed, unsettled-faced nine-year-olds, we had the same features. It was more than uncanny to me, I'd just really become aware of my face, my features, my self as it were, during those past months among Grace and Dawn and Lois with their attachment to and growing obsession with mirrors and their own physical uniqueness. Now I felt as though this stranger had just appeared and stolen what I'd thought was mine.
    My mother set down tall glasses of milk and an assortment of snacks between us: Oreos, Fig Newtons, what appeared to be a homemade marble-swirl bundt cake.
    "Well look at you two!" she said, sitting down on a third side to us. "You could be brothers rather than cousins once removed."
    The phone rang, and she answered it and moved into the dining room to talk to Augie's mother.
    "How long you planning to stay?" I asked: no subtlety at all.
    "As long as the divorce takes."
    "Divorce" was a word I'd never heard before from a child. "What divorce?"
    "My father and mother's divorce," he said, delicately biting around the edge of a Fig Newton. "They're having a custody battle to see which one gets me."
    Custody battle? What was that? I pictured two adults facing each other with guns in their holsters, about to draw like they did on TV.
    "My dad thinks he’ll win because he found my mother with a... a correspondent!" He whispered the last word.
    "Isn't that someone you write to?"
    "God, you're naive!"
    "Where's this battle happening?"
    "Grosse Pointe. Actually, the court is in Detroit. But we're from Grosse Pointe."
    I tried picturing Detroit, Michigan. On our school map it was pink and broken into two pieces by one of the Great Lakes.
    "Chief Pontiac," I said. "The Indian."
    "They make Pontiacs up in Flint," he corrected. He got off his chair and carried his half-finished glass of milk over to the Pyrex coffeemaker, then he adroitly poured some of the dark liquid into his glass. "Flint is a dreary place."
    My mother turned back into the kitchen, wrapped in pink telephone-wire spirals.
    Now he's going to get it, I thought.
    "Oh, I'm sorry, Alistair. I didn't know you..."
    "That's okay, Cousin Eleanor, I can help myself." He showed her the glass. "I'm used to taking mine au lait!" he said.
    She left the room, and I watched as he actually dipped his Oreos— whole, without separating them and licking off the cream—into the coffeed milk, sitting in my kitchen and eating my snack, calling my mother "Eleanor," which was reserved for adults only, speaking French, having flown in a plane, with his parents divorced and battling for him, and I knew a fate had befallen me far worse than the abandonment I'd earlier feared.
    When my mother came back into the kitchen to sit, she bumped