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husband you can hear through the closed windows, and even when you have a good excuse, like you were shooed away from your special spot and your mother got rushed to the hospital when you thought she was at dance rehearsal.
    “What happened to Mom?” I asked Rachel after the ambulance was gone and we were in the front hall with the door closed and no more siren.
    “You’re shivering and it’s warm out,” she said. “You should go take a hot shower.”
    “First you have to tell me what happened to Mom.You have to tell me that right now.” My body wouldn’t stop shaking with scared shivers.
    Rachel stared at me like she was trying to figure out what my words meant. She looked like a troll doll with her bugged-out eyes.
    “Rachel!” I yelled. She blinked her eyes and started talking super fast.
    “Mom forgot her boom box, so she came back home to get it and was walking down the stairs to go back to rehearsal. I saw her fall. All the way to the bottom step. I was just getting home from school. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. She told me to call an ambulance, and they came and they checked her. ‘I can’t feel my left side,’ she said, and they put her on a stretcher and then into the ambulance. They called Dad, and he said that he’d meet them in the emergency room in Hyannis and that we had his permission to stay here, and then you came home with the shivers.”
    “Were they nice to Mom? Was she scared? Was she crying?” I asked.
    Rachel looked at me. She took a big breath. First her eyes got wet with tears, and then her tears spilled over. She sobbed and sobbed, so I took her hand and walked her to the couch. I held on to her and rubbed her head and said, “You don’t have to worry” and “You don’t have to talk,” and because of that she hasn’t told me anything else, not while I showered,not while we’ve been making dinner, so I still don’t know if Mom was scared and crying.
    Fish sticks used to be for when we had babysitters, but clearly our babysitter days are over, because we’re doing a very good job taking care of ourselves. The fish sticks look perfect, golden brown. And if you ignore a couple of green spots on the cukes, the salad looks just like Mom’s, with lettuce and slices of tomatoes and capers. Mom believes in salads every night, because she says they’re the closest thing to eating spring.
    “Wash up?” my sister says, and we stand together at the kitchen sink and wash our hands with Palmolive and dry them on the dish towel.
    “Time—” she says.
    “—for dinner,” I say, and my sister and I sit down at the kitchen table that we’ve already set with two plates and two cups and two forks and two knives and two napkins so we can eat our perfect fish sticks and our almost-perfect salad.

    I have the privilege of reading in the reading corner, since I proved to Miss Gallagher that I understand how the Pilgrims and Indians helped each other out, by getting all of my multiple choices on the worksheet right.
    “Your pick, Naomi,” Miss Gallagher said, smiling,and now I’m sitting by myself on a puffy red pillow on the floor, trying to decide. I’d like to read
The Burgess Bird Book
, but the rule is only reading-corner books, since Miss Gallagher specifically selected them to improve our reading skills.
    “Ten more minutes to finish up your worksheets,” Miss Gallagher says, which means I only have ten more minutes in the reading corner. I’d better get cracking.
    I want to read the book about the girl who runs away and hides out with her brother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sleeps in the fancy beds, but then I can’t read the one about the girl who wants to be a writer. And there are two other books that sound just as good, and that’s not even counting the poetry book about birds and bugs.
    I try spreading the books out in front of me on the rug, closing my eyes, and pointing, but the trouble is that I remember which book is where, and so it’s the