On the longest day of the year, I waited for everyone to fall asleep. Mom still wasn’t home when I went around all the doors with the flowers. I crawled back onto my trundle, Ellen asleep across the room, and the bed below me empty for the first time, and waited for the sound of my mom’s car coming home. She left it on the driveway and came in through the back, so silently I could hear the hum of the crickets when the door opened. There was quiet then. A few minutes later I heard the sound of the vacuum cleaner starting up in the rec room, and I knew the flowers and all their possible protection would be gone. Something would be taken from us, again.

13

I found Harriet the Spy under my pillow, Marie’s favorite book from childhood. I remembered the first time she read it, one of my few memories of Marie crying, sitting on the stairs, trying to tell us how Ole Golly was leaving and now Harriet would have no one because her parents weren’t like real parents. Something about Harriet and Ole Golly had hit her in a place where there was no armor. She was eleven; I would have been eight. I later read it, too, at about the same age, and expected a burst of emotion that never came. It was sad when Ole Golly left, but not devastating. I didn’t know why it had upset Marie so much.

I sat on the front step the morning after she had gone and read, skipping ahead to that part when Ole Golly goes. I’d forgotten about the illustrations. The writer had done them herself, sketches in black pencil. Ole Golly looked almost monstrous, a mix between Morticia Addams and a linebacker. In Sage’s basement they had paintings—or prints, as Sage called them—by Modigliani. The people in them were elongated and out of proportion. Ole Golly looked like a Modigliani painting, except in crude black pencil. I could remember exactly where I was when I’d read it first—in our closet with a flashlight, thinking that I was a bit like Harriet. I had even started a notebook for spying on others.