But the day we got home from a triumph about a missing chicken, Mom wanted to go to Pineapple and Pepperoni for dinner.
Once Mom was working for Tennel & Zeet and we weren’t utterly broke all the time, she used to take Ran and me out for dinner at Pineapple and Pepperoni occasionally. P&P was the local pizza place that advertised EVERYTHING for your pizza and so every family in town with kids would go there and the kids would try to think up stuff they didn’t have. They were pretty high wattage, and people didn’t really want to waste their money on something they wouldn’t eat just to give a pizza place a hard time. (Yes, they had chocolate sprinkles but Mom wouldn’t let us order them.) Although Ran went through a period of liking peanut butter on his pizza. Tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni and peanut butter. They only put it on his third but it was hard even to watch somebody eating peanut butter pizza.
The thing about P&P was that it had started up after Dad died, so when Mom and Ran and I started going there it was our new family ritual, a ritual that said we could still be a family and do silly stuff like order pizza with peanut butter or raisins or potato chips (Mom only let us order that once, unfortunately, it was pretty good), or zombie fingers (breakfast link sausages) or witches’ eyes (green olives) or demon brains (red peppers. Green peppers were toxic sludge and yellow peppers were chicken toes). I think we may have started laughing again when we started going to P&P.
And then Mom married Val and she wanted to take him along when we went out for our pizza evenings. Which meant not only Val, but coming home after dark with Val, even though I wasn’t alone with him. First time I said I had a headache and stayed home—and was tactful enough to be in bed when they got back, although I’d been reading by flashlight, and only turned it out when I heard the car in the driveway. Second time Mom phoned me at the shelter, and I said, more or less truthfully, that Clare had asked me to stay late. She had, but I could have made it home if I’d hustled.
Third time . . . I’d come through the door relatively cheerful and ready to tell everyone about how clever Mongo was. It would give me something to say, you know? It wasn’t like I was having a good time being a sullen teenager not adjusting to her mom’s second husband. It took me a minute to realize that all three of them were standing around like they were expecting to go somewhere. And then Mom said we were going to P&P. After a pause, while I could feel myself deflating like Mongo having been told to stop being a bakayaro and Go Lie Down, I said I wasn’t hungry.
“Maggie,” said my mother with an edge to her voice, “you have never not wanted to eat pizza in your entire life. Except when you have a headache,” she added grimly, “or have decided to stay later at the shelter than Clare asked you to.”
I flinched. I’d tried to keep Clare out of my problems. I stared at my hands, hoping that my stomach wouldn’t choose that moment to growl. I was hungry. I was enormously, takusan hungry, and I hoped they’d leave soon so I could get to the refrigerator before I fainted or something. I’d had lunch but it seemed like several years ago. I would love a pizza. I even started to think about going and making my mother happy. Or less angry anyway. But I raised my eyes and involuntarily met Val’s. He was looking at me with that cautious, wary expression he usually had when he looked at me. His shirt looked like something out of one of the dog beds at the shelter.
He was standing in front of the wall between the kitchen and the front hall, where usually Mom’s grandmother’s quilt hung on a long rail. But she’d taken it down for mending—it was so old it kept trying to disintegrate, but Mom would sew it up again and put it back on the rail. If the quilt had been there I wouldn’t have seen much.
But tonight as I met Val’s eyes this great writhe of shadows erupted up the empty white wall behind him. It was so startling I gasped and stepped back.
“Maggie . . .” began my mother, and she was really angry, because she thought I was faking it. But she must have seen how shocked I really was when I turned to her, and she stopped, and her face changed, and she almost looked like my old, pre-Val mom again. She put one hand on my arm and the other one on my forehead. “Sweetie, are you ill?” she said. “Do we need to get you to a doctor?”
“No,” I said, or mumbled, because the fear spike on top of the too-long-ago lunch was making me feel kind of weird. “I’m fine. It’s just—” And then I couldn’t think of what to say instead of “your new husband is hitodenashi—some kind of monster.” What is the polite alternative? “I’ll be fine. I’ll make myself some scrambled eggs.”
Mom wavered. She’d moved the looking-for-a-fever hand to my other arm. “Maybe we should all stay home,” she said.
“Oh Mom,” said Ran. “She said she’ll be fine.”
My little brother, the soul of unselfishness. But in this case I was totally with him. “I make great scrambled eggs,” I said. “I don’t need help. Or looking after. You should go.”
Mom smiled. “I know you make great scrambled eggs. Right after—before Tennel & Zeet, when I was working all hours, we lived on your scrambled eggs.”
“Hey,” I said. “I learned to cook.”
“You did,” said Mom. “But at first it was scrambled eggs. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“I’m sure,” I said firmly. Mom put her hand on my forehead one last time. It’s a mom thing. You come home covered in blood from beating up (and being beaten up by) the playground bully, or wet, muddy and hysterical because you dropped your knapsack with all your schoolbooks in it in the river and it got dragged downstream a ways before you managed to get it out again, and the first thing your mom does is feel your forehead for fever. “Mongo will take care of me.”
“I’ll leave my phone on,” said Mom. “Call me if you need to.”
“Okay,” I said, and she hugged me, and I almost cried. Before Val, we used to hug each other a lot. . . . I risked a look at Val. There was only one shadow left on the wall behind him and it was kind of saggy and . . . almost like it was sad. Margaret Alastrina, I said to myself, Hit the circuit breaker. Then Val moved . . . and the shadow on the wall was just the shadow of a short hairy guy in a really awful shirt.
I was in bed when they got back again, but this time I was reading by my ordinary table lamp. Mom came in to check on me. She sat on the end of my bed and we talked a little. But there wasn’t really much to say. She was married to Val. And I couldn’t bear to be around him.
Val spent most of the days in his shed. He’d already been tutoring before he met Mom, so now his students came here. Fortunately there was a back gate so we didn’t have a constant stream of losers and dreeps through the house. Mostly he tutored math and science, not philosophy. I knew that Takahiro was going to be doing some kind of hot-wired super-science project with him starting in the fall semester. I was trying not to think about it because Taks was my friend.
It was something, I guess, that Mom hadn’t found a way to cram an office for Val into the house. Our house was way too full already, even after Dad and Mom turned the garage into a dining room. Mom’s cubby at the end of the dining room was pretty well impassable. It was known as the Lair, and Ran always roared or snarled when he mentioned it. There wasn’t room in the living room even for a desk. If Ran and I wanted to do our homework downstairs (the better to torture each other) we did it on the kitchen table. So having Val in the shed was relatively great, as great as anything was about Val.