Under Cover Read Free Page B

ballet dancer sitting on the floor in worn and tattered
practice clothes. That was me—in my dreams.
    Since my dreams had changed, maybe it was
time to take down the poster. But I still liked it. I liked the
idea of working so hard that your tights got full of holes and your pointe shoes turned to mush.
    What would I do for a job? Frosty Dan
didn’t want me; they’d made that clear, even though I’d always been
a good customer. Maddie wouldn’t have any work for me unless she
got desperately swamped. She’d stay up all night rather than share
her riches. After all, she did have a car to support. And very
often I got the benefit of her having it.
    I thought about starting my own home-based
typing service. Mom would have a fit at strange people coming to
the house. I’d have to rent office space somewhere and that would
give me a fit.
    I rested my arm beside me and it landed on
Dad’s letter that I had dropped there. Why couldn’t I get any
answers? Somebody had to know something, and for a very good
reason.
    I went down to the living room where Grandma
was watching the ten o’clock news. She muted it and looked up at
me.
    “Do you realize,” I said, “if we got that
letter meant for Hey Buddy, we might be the only ones who know
Dad’s coming? He gave Hey Buddy all the flight information and
he’ll expect Hey Buddy to be at the airport and Hey Buddy doesn’t
know anything about it.”
    Grandma said, “How do you know he didn’t give
the same information in the letter that went to Hey Buddy, if it
did?”
    “Why would he, if he thought this one was
going there? Even if he did, there’s no way we can find out. Unless
you know who and where Hey Buddy is.”
    Grandma shook her head. “Honest to
goodness.”
    “Even if I wrote to him now,” I said, “he
wouldn’t get it in time. He never gave us any sort of phone number.
Why can’t he move up a century and have a computer like everybody
else?”
    “I can’t speak for him, honeybun. All I know
is there’s a lot of stuff about electric plugs not fitting
everywhere. When your grandpa and I went to Paris that time,
somebody gave us a set of adaptors for different places. Maybe
that’s all changed now, I don’t know. Maybe they came up with a
universal plug. It would make a lotta sense, but then they’d have
to change all the wall sockets and the wiring—”
    “Grandma.”
    “Sorry, kid. I got a little off topic there.
What was your question?”
    “About Dad. Somebody meeting him. He’ll be
waiting at the gate forever because Hey Buddy doesn’t know he’s
coming.” I felt a shiver of excitement as I pictured my dad
actually being there in person.
    “It wouldn’t be a gate,” Grandma said. “Not
the regular kind. It’d be Customs.”
    “Okay, but that’s not the point.”
    “So what is the point? You want me to
go and meet him?”
    “Well, um…us? I’d go myself if I had a car.
Anyway, he and you would recognize each other better than him and
me.”
    She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “Yeah,
you’ve changed quite a bit in what, six years? Almost seven.”
    I’d been ten when he came that other time. I
hadn’t filled out yet, as Grandma liked to remind me. In all the
right places, as she described it. Like now I had a bust and hips
and what she called a wasp waist. That was what inspired the
comparison with 1890s chorus girls. She’d even dug out a picture of
one to make her point.
    Even though I was grown up “in all the right
places,” Grandma refused to lend me her car. She let me use it
other times, but this was different. “It’s complicated, driving in
the city,” she said.
    “Oh, and you’ve had more experience than I
have?” We both got our licenses not quite a year ago.
    “I know the city better than you do,” was her
reply. “Come to think of it, for Kennedy you don’t go in the city,
you go around it. But that’s complicated, too.”
    I happened to know you did go through parts
of it, but for her, only