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smirk came loose at one corner of her mouth.
    I shook my head. “I know the health stuff is important, but I think there’s more to getting happy than that.”
    She leaned forward, kind of studying me. I worried that I shouldn’t have said it. Soula actually might have been happy just to have good health.
    “I think you need heroes, too,” I said. I made a little fist for punch.
    “Heroes?” she asked. “Like friends and family?”
    “They can be friends or family,” I said. “Webster’s says—”
    “Webster’s?”
    “The dictionary,” I explained. “A hero is someone who sets themselves apart from others. You know—someone who is strong or shows courage, takes a risk. And I know Webster’s is probably talking about well known heroes. Like from the newspapers and history books. Inventors and athletes and people like Martin Luther King.”
    “Uh-huh.” Soula was still listening.
    “But don’t you think it’s possible . . .”—I twisted up my face—“…that every person is a hero to someone else?” I said.
    Soula sat back. She blinked at me once and said, “Well, Little Cookie, I guess you could be right. Never thought of it myself.”
    “Never thought of what?” Elliot asked as he came through the door. He paused at the cash counter, running one hand through his close red hair and straightening the Quick-Pick sign with his other.
    “Heroes,” Soula answered. “Addie says we’ve all got ’em.”
    “Hope so.” Elliot grinned. “Makes living kinda scary, otherwise.”
    The three of us looked at one another for a second or two. I did a double thumbs up in agreement. Then Soula and Elliot each put up two thumbs with me.
    “Six thumbs up,” I said. “You can’t beat that!”

chapter 9
    tv and toast dinners
    “ I s there dinner?” I asked.
    Mommers flapped a hand at me to make me be quiet.
    “My homework’s done and I already practiced.”
    “I heard, I heard,” Mommers mumbled. She typed furiously and squinted at the computer screen. She read something and typed again.
    “So, do you want me to cook?”
    No answer.
    Truth was I never really liked dinnertime. Breakfast was our best meal because it was the only meal that was normal. What I mean by that is we had either toast or cereal. That’s normal for breakfast—everyone eats those things for breakfast. But we often had cereal or toast for dinner, too.
    I discovered that if I just added tomato and melted cheese to the toast it looked much more like dinner. And if I just heated up a can of condensed soup—tomato or cream of chicken, for example—and didn’t add the water, it tasted pretty good poured over toast. So, toast dinners became my specialty.
    Mommers cooked too. There were nights when something seemed to take hold of her and she’d cook up a storm, making quarts of spaghetti sauce and homemade garlic bread. She’d throw the noodles at the fridge to see if they’d stick and then call me to the table, and we’d eat and eat as if we were bears packing it away for winter. I remembered a time back at the house when she’d roasted a turkey in the middle of July and she’d made the gravy and mashed potatoes. She’d called Dwight at work and had him stop for cranberry sauce. We had Thanksgiving in July out at the picnic table.
    But most nights at the trailer, Mommers was not interested in dinner—not in cooking it anyway. Then I’d scrounge around in the minikitchen—Mommers was not a good grocery shopper—and make something up. Often we’d agree that this meal or that meal hadn’t come out too great. But there were other things besides the food that could ruin dinner.
    Mommers liked to watch the TV and surf the Net at the same time. If she looked at the TV too long, the Internet kicked her off and then she got mad. Sometimes that ruined dinner. And on this night she tuned in her favorite show: Jeanette for the Judgment, which was always on at seven o’clock—dinnertime.
    I hated Jeanette for the Judgment