Staying Together Read Free Page B

your bedroom and caught me pawing through the things in your desk?”
    â€œMin didn’t catch me, though,” Ruby had said. “If you do something like that, you have to do it in secret. The trick is to avoid getting caught.”
    Flora had let out a sigh so enormous that Ruby had backed away from her because she could smell Flora’s breath, and Flora had been chewing mint gum, apparently for quite some time, and it had a sour edge to it.
    â€œRuby, you are missing the point. Okay. Let me rephrase the question.” (Ruby had decided not to ask Flora if she’d been watching courtroom stuff on TV again.) “How would you like it if you knew I’d been looking in your drawers?”
    â€œBut if I knew, that would mean I had caught you, wouldn’t it? And I already —”
    â€œNot necessarily,” Flora had interrupted her. “What if I just
confessed
to you that I’d been going through — I mean, looking in — your drawers?”
    Ruby had narrowed her eyes. “Have you?”
    Flora had shrugged. And when Ruby had said nothing, Flora had smiled. “See? It doesn’t feel very nice, does it?”
    Ruby turned onto Main Street now and attempted to put the conversation out of her head. She was not a villain. All that had happened was that she had found a beautiful crystal owl in a box in Min’s desk, had recognized it as something that had belonged to her mother (Min’s daughter), and had borrowed it. Well, and then she had dropped it and it had broken into many pieces. Ruby had not panicked, though. She had thought about the situation in a calm manner and had decided to replace the owl before Min discovered it was missing.
    â€œThat is wrong on so many levels,” Flora had said after Ruby told her what had happened.
    According to Flora, what Ruby had done was wrong because:
    A. She shouldn’t have been looking in Min’s drawers in the first place.
    B. She should have told Min the truth right away.
    C. The owl was in the box along with several other items belonging to Ruby and Flora’s mother that Min had clearly been saving because they were special to her, and if Ruby replaced it with a different owl she was cheating Min out of something important.
    But if Ruby managed to find another owl that looked almost exactly like the one she had broken, and Min never knew what had happened, what was the problem? Ruby was just trying to keep Min from getting upset.
    Still, it was all very complicated, and on this afternoon, as Ruby headed into town to carry out her plan — to buy the replacement owl at long last and to sneak it back into the box in Min’s desk — she wasn’t entirely sure that what she was doing was right. Certainly, Flora thought it was far from right. But Ruby had worked awfully hard to earn money for a new owl — a new
and very expensive
owl. Which just went to show how much Min meant to Ruby. Ruby had been willing to work for weeks, months even, to raise enough money for a new owl. And in the process, she had tried to improve herself.
    That was another thing Flora was conveniently overlooking. When Ruby had realized that she needed to correct her mistake, she had taken a good look at herself — at all her faults — and decided she needed improving. So she had drawn up a self-improvement plan, and it had been a huge success. She’d become neater, she’d brought her grades up, and she was working hard in her dance class and in the Children’s Chorus at the community center. You’d think Flora would have been pleased that Ruby, who in November had been put on probation in the chorus after a disastrous performance, was now a regular member again and had even been given a solo in an upcoming performance. The performance was, in fact, to be a fund-raiser for the community center, the very same organization for which Flora had had the idea to make the quilts.
    But no, all Flora saw was