expected to answer his mother’s question.

“What do I think of Ramona? Since she’s

Howie’s girlfriend, I think she’s a great kid.

Don’t you, Howie?”

“Oh, shut up, Uncle Hobart.” Howie

scowled at the carpet.

Good for you, Howie, thought Ramona.

You’re on my side.

“Howie!” cried Mrs. Kemp.“That’s no way

26

to talk to your uncle.”

“I don’t care,” said Howie. “My knee

hurts.”

“Really, I don’t know what got into you

children this afternoon.” Mrs. Kemp was

thoroughly provoked.

Ramona could have told her in one word:

grown-ups. Instead, she stared at her book and thought, I am never going to come back here again. Never, never, never. She did not care what anyone said. She did not care what happened. She was not going to be looked after by someone who did not like her.

“Poor Mom,” said Uncle Hobart. “How

about a piece of your apple pie.”

Poor us. Ramona included Howie and

Willa Jean in her pity as she wished that

someday, just once, she too could sit on an accordion. She knew she never would, even

if she had the chance. She had grown past

Willa Jean’s kind of behavior, which had been 27

fun while it lasted. Ramona smiled as she recalled the happy afternoon she had spent, when she was Willa Jean’s age, boring holes in the garage wall with her father’s brace and bit—until she was caught.

28

2

Ramona’s Problem

At dinner the evening after the accor-

dion incident, the members of the

Quimby family were silent and thoughtful,

as if they all had serious problems on their minds.They really were thinking about their problems, but they looked thoughtful because they were trying to avoid the bones in the fish they were having for supper. Eating fish with bones without looking thoughtful is

29

impossible. Picky-picky, meowing for his turn, wove himself around their legs.

Ramona, who did not care for fish and

was willing to let Picky-picky have her

share, wished her mother would say,

“Ramona eats like a bird,” as if Ramona

were unusually delicate and sensitive. Some mothers were like that, but not Mrs.

Quimby, who would only say cheerfully,

“Eat it anyway,” if Ramona complained that she did not like fish.

Since she could not get away with eating

like a bird, Ramona poked her fork through her fish to remove every single bone before taking the first bite, and while she pushed, she worried. How was she going to inform

her family that she was never going to stay with Mrs. Kemp again? Never, and then

what? If she did not stay at the Kemps’ after school, her mother might not be able to

work in the doctor’s office, her father could 30

not go to college, and the whole family would fall over like dominoes pushed by

Ramona.

Mr. Quimby laid a fishbone on the edge