The Silver Star Read Free Page B

on sale. When he did, we could get eight for a
dollar, and then we really stocked up.
    We ate our pies in the evening at the red Formica table, but we didn’t much feel like playing Chew-and-Spew—or the Lying Game—so after dinner, we just cleaned up, did our
homework, and went to bed. We’d looked after ourselves before when Mom was away, but thinking she might be away for days and days somehow made us take our responsibilities more seriously.
When Mom was home, she sometimes let us stay up late, but without her around, we always went to bed on time. Since she wasn’t there to write excuses, we were never late to school and never
skipped a day, which she sometimes let us do. We never left dirty dishes in the sink, and we flossed our teeth.
    Liz had been doing some babysitting, but after Mom had been gone a week, she decided to take on extra work, and I got a job delivering
Grit,
a newspaper with useful stories about, say,
keeping squirrels from eating the wires in your car’s engine by putting mothballs in an old pair of panty hose and hanging them under the hood. For the time being, money wasn’t a
problem, and while the bills were piling up, Mom was always late paying them anyway. Still, we knew we couldn’t live this way forever, and every day, turning down the block on the way home
from school, I looked up the driveway, hoping to see the brown Dart parked beside the bungalow.
    One day after Mom had been gone almost two weeks, I went to Spinelli’s after school to stock up on chicken potpies. I thought I’d never get tired of chicken
potpies, but I had to admit they were sort of wearing on me, particularly because we’d been eating them for breakfast, too. A couple of times, we bought beef potpies, but they were hardly
ever on sale, and Liz said you needed a magnifying glass to see the meat.
    Mr. Spinelli had a grill behind the counter where he made hamburgers and hot dogs, wrapping them in tinfoil and keeping them under the red warming light, which steamed the buns until they were
nice and soggy. They sure smelled good, but they were beyond our budget. I loaded up on more chicken potpies.
    “Haven’t seen your mom in a while, Miss Bean,” Mr. Spinelli said. “What’s she been up to?”
    I froze up, then said, “She broke her leg.”
    “That’s a shame,” he said. “Tell you what. Get yourself an icecream sandwich. On me.”
    That night Liz and I were doing our homework at the Formica table when there was a knock at the door. Liz opened it, and Mr. Spinelli stood outside, holding a brown paper bag with a loaf of
bread sticking out the top.
    “This is for your mother,” he said. “I came to see how she’s doing.”
    “She’s not here,” Liz said. “She’s in Los Angeles.”
    “Bean said she broke her leg.”
    Liz and Mr. Spinelli looked over at me, and I started glancing around, avoiding their eyes, acting, I knew, about as guilty as the hound dog who stole the hambone.
    “She broke her leg in Los Angeles,” Liz said smoothly. She was always quick on her feet. “But it’s not serious. A friend’s bringing her back in a few
days.”
    “Good,” Mr. Spinelli said. “I’ll come see her then.” He held out the groceries to Liz. “Here, you take these.”
    “What are we going to do now?” I asked Liz once Mr. Spinelli had left.
    “I’m thinking,” Liz said.
    “Is Mr. Spinelli going to send the bandersnatches after us?”
    “He might.”
    “Bandersnatches” was the word Liz took from
Through the Looking Glass
—her favorite book—for the do-gooding government busybodies who snooped around making sure
that kids had the sort of families the busybodies thought they should have. Last year in Pasadena, a few months before we moved to Lost Lake, a bandersnatch had come poking around when the school
principal got the idea that Mom was negligent in her parenting after I told a teacher our electricity got turned off because Mom forgot to pay the bill. Mom hit the ceiling.