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like I’m talking to a lost dog.
    She doesn’t say anything, just keeps on shaking the stick and shaking her hand.
    Maybe she’s hard of hearing. Maybe she only speaks Portuguese, like some of the early inhabitants of Provincetown that we learned about last year in social studies.
    “Hi,” I say again, nice and loud and slow. “Do you need me to show you how to get to Route 6?”
    “You know what I need?” Her voice is soft and raspy. She might be crying a little, or maybe it’s just that she’s gotten too much wind and sun and salt spray in her eyes. “I need you to just leave me alone. I’m sorry, but I really need some peace and quiet.”
    She wasn’t signaling me over with her stick; she was waving me away! She was shooing me from my own special spot. I’m a kid and she’s a grown-up, so I have to listen to her. I want to smile a big smile to show her I’m just fine, thank you, but my chin is trembly and my lips feel scrunched up, like I’ve just sucked a lime fished out of Dad’s empty gin and tonic glass. My eyes are watery, and it’s not from wind or sun or salt spray.
    “Have a good day, lady,” I whisper.
    As I walk away I hear her mumbling, “Just a little peace and quiet. Peace and quiet, that’s all I want.” When I know she can’t see me, I start running down the path. I’m Pocahontas, racing through the woods without making a sound. No thuds. No twig snaps. Just peace and quiet. Quiet and peace. I’m the fastest, quietest runner in the world. I run so fast that even the wind can’t keep up with me. I run so quietly that even the ants can’t hear my footsteps.
    Take the left fork in the path.
Peace and quiet. Quiet and peace
. Running this fast, I’ll be home in a flash, a milli-flash, which is one thousandth of a flash. No one will be there yet, so I’ll have four more Fig Newtons and then I’ll feel better. I’m at the beechtree. There must be a speeder on Route 6, because I hear a siren, messing up my peace and quiet. No, it’s not the police on Route 6. It’s an ambulance with flashing lights on Salt Marsh Lane. An ambulance with flashing lights in front of our house. There’s an ambulance with flashing lights in front of our house.
    “Mom!” Rachel screams from the front porch as the ambulance drives away. White lights flashing, and the awful red wail of that siren.

“D O I HAVE TO flip them over?” I ask Rachel.
    “What does the box say?”
    I’m making fish sticks while she makes a salad. I’ve never made fish sticks. I keep checking on them, because the last thing we need tonight is burnt-black fish sticks thrown into the trash.
    “It doesn’t say.”
    “Then you shouldn’t flip them,” Rachel says.
    “Okay.”
    I don’t know how Rachel knows that I shouldn’t flip them when the instructions don’t say that, but I don’t want to fight. She’s working really hard to peel the cuke for the salad just like Mom does, sliding the peeler toward herself instead of away. There are little flecks of green all up and down the cuke.
    “I don’t mind a little skin, you know. It’s got extra nutrition,” I say.
    Rachel gives me a tired smile and shakes her head. “I can do this,” she says to herself. “I can do this.”
    I like the smack of heat when I open the oven door. I’m shivery-bone cold, even though I just took a long, hot shower. Rachel stayed in the bathroom with me the whole time, because we wanted to have a good alibi if Mrs. Morell knocked on the front door and tried to make us come over to her house to eat supper even though we have Dad’s permission to stay here by ourselves until he and Mom come home from the hospital later.
    “Oh, really? We didn’t hear you knock,” we’ll say if Mrs. Morell ever questions us, which probably won’t happen, since, based on my observations, she never leaves her house. Anyway, just in case, we won’t be lying, which is something you don’t do to an adult, even one who has three lousy boys and a yelling