Lizette has a brother who’s three years older than us. He’s nice. When Lizette and I were in kindergarten, he was my reading buddy. I remember that she always ran to hug him when he came into our classroom.

“You’re lucky, too,” I said. “Luckier.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because your parents are together. And you have Damian.”

“Yeah. But you have your mom, your dad, and Jesse. And Sheila. And a restaurant where you can eat anything you want, anytime you want it!”

That’s not actually true. It’s not like I can just walk in to Beatrice and order French fries and an ice cream sundae. But I didn’t say so.

“Plus,” she said, “Damian is allergic to animals. So I can’t have a cat or a dog. You have both.”

Right then, her dad rang our bell. Lizette smiled (clown smile) and bounced off the bed.

—

When she was gone, I found Mom loading the dishwasher. No music.

I said, “You’re coming to the wedding, right?”

She looked surprised. “I haven’t even thought about it.”

“I want you to come,” I said.

She nodded. “In that case, I will be there with bells on.”

“Okay. But you don’t need to bring bells. Jesse says Sheila is doing the decorations.”

She told me it’s an expression. It just means she’s going to get dressed up.

Then she turned the radio on.

I didn’t think she wanted to dance, so I went to my room to worry.

Drop Everything and Worry

My dad almost choked to death once, on an orange. It was a long time ago, before the divorce. He’d shoved a few sections in his mouth (it was maybe a quarter of an orange, he told me later), and then he couldn’t breathe. He started running around the apartment in a panic. Mom wasn’t home. I didn’t know what to do, and even if I had known, I wasn’t strong enough to do it. Dad rushed out of our apartment and banged on our neighbor’s door. The neighbor realized right away what was wrong and did the Heimlich maneuver on Dad. The orange popped out of his windpipe and flew across the hall, where it landed on Mrs. Carmody’s doormat, which says “Welcome” in ten languages. (Angus has memorized them all.)

The neighbor was Jesse. He wasn’t our neighbor, really—he was cat-sitting for our actual neighbor, who was in California. It was really lucky Jesse was there, because our actual neighbor is a lawyer who is almost never home, and Dad might have died right on his doorstep. Now that I think about it, I don’t even know why that lawyer got a cat in the first place.