I told her how Dad wouldn’t let me take any days off from school even though Sonia was only there for one week, and how Sonia and Sheila had made cookies together and gone shopping without me, which made me feel left out until I came home and found a big cookie and a pair of very cool barrettes on my pillow. I told her how Sonia was spending time at the restaurant with Jesse and Dad, and that Angus and I went after school one day to meet them there. Angus introduced Sonia to the orphan coats (Gerald, Phoebe, and Tim). He made her shake hands with their sleeves, and she laughed really hard and said two times how lucky I am that a restaurant is named after me. We all stayed for family meal, which everyone working at Beatrice eats together at four o’clock every day, before the dinner rush starts. (Angus loves family meal. He loves that it’s loud, and that you’re allowed to eat standing up.) Then Jesse made a special dessert, just for me, Angus, and Sonia, which turned out to be warm peanut-butter cookies with chocolate chips and whipped cream on top.

Miriam listened.

I told her how every dinner was fun this week because Dad and Jesse came home early and bedtime was “out the window,” and how Sheila brought over some amazing ice cream bars and Sonia and I both ate all the chocolate off ours first. And how we laughed when we realized.

When we had five minutes left, Miriam opened the gummy-bear jar and put it between us on the coffee table. The jar was filled to the very top.

Miriam must have refilled that jar so many times.

“You look a little sad, Bea.” She didn’t take any gummy bears, and neither did I.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m something, but I’m not sad.”

Then I told her about how Sonia cried after she talked to her mother at night, how we listened to Grandpa’s story tapes in my room (our room, I said), and how I wished we talked in the dark sometimes, but we didn’t. We just listened to the tapes.

During the day, Sonia talked to me a lot. But when it was just us, at night, she didn’t.

“Dad says that when you’re homesick, nights are harder than the daytime,” I told Miriam. “Dad was really homesick at camp one summer when he was a kid. Because my uncle Frank didn’t go that year.”

And suddenly I felt a little homesick, for Mom.

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