“No.”
“Don’t you have a mother?”
“Of course. Also a father, and a brother in high school, and an aunt and uncle next door — they’re not really blood relations but I call them that because they give me lots of things, etcetera — and heaps of cousins in Canada and New Jersey.”
“The cousins are too far away to help,” Scott said. “But surely one of the others could put alcohol on your hands for you.”
“I could do it myself if I wanted to.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“It stings.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer a little sting to a big case of blood poisoning?”
Jessie didn’t know what blood poisoning was, but for the benefit of the sixth-grade boys she said she wasn’t the least bit scared of it. This remark stimulated Mary Martha to relate the entire plot of a medical program she’d seen, in which the doctor himself had blood poisoning and didn’t realize it until he went into convulsions.
“By then it was too late?” Jessie said, trying not to sound much interested. “He died?”
“No, he couldn’t. He’s the hero every week. But he suffered terribly. You should have seen the faces he made, worse than my mother when she’s plucking her eyebrows.”
Scott interrupted brusquely. “All right, you two, knock it off. The issue is not Mother’s eyebrows or Dr. Whoozit’s convulsions. It’s Jessie’s hands. They’re a mess and something has to be done.”
Flushing, Jessie hid her hands in the pockets of her shorts. While she was playing on the jungle gym she’d hardly noticed the pain, but now, with everyone’s attention focused on her, it had become almost unbearable.
Scott was aware of this. He touched her shoulder lightly and the two of them began walking toward the back-exit gate, followed by an excited and perspiring Mary Martha. None of them noticed the green coupé.
“You’d better go home,” Scott said, “Take a warm bath, put alcohol on your hands with a piece of cotton, and stay off the jungle gym until you grow some new skin. You’d better tell your mother, too, Jessie.”
“I won’t have to. If I go home at noon and take a bath she’ll think I’m dying.”
“Maybe you are,” Mary Martha said in a practical voice. “Imagine me with a dying best friend.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“That’s the kind of help you ought to save for your best enemy,” Scott said and turned to go back to the basketball game.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the old green coupé pulling away from the curb. What caught his attention was the fact that, although it was a very hot day, the windows were closed. They were also dirty, so that the driver was invisible and the car seemed to be operating itself. A minute later it turned onto a side street and was out of sight.
So were the two girls.
“We could stop in at my house,” Mary Martha said, “for some cinnamon toast to build your strength up.”
“My strength is O.K., but I wouldn’t mind some cinnamon toast. Maybe we could even make it ourselves?”
“No. My mother will be home. She always is.”
“Why?”
“To guard the house.”
Jessie had asked the same question and been given the same answer quite a few times. She was always left with an incongruous mental picture of Mary Martha’s mother sitting large and formidable on the porch with a shotgun across her lap. The real Mrs. Oakley was small and frail and suffered from a number of obscure allergies.
“Why does she have to stay home to guard the house?” Jessie said. “She could just lock the doors.”
“Locks don’t keep him out.”
“You mean your father?”
“I mean my ex-father.”
“But you can’t have an ex-father. I asked my Aunt Virginia and she said a wife can divorce her husband and then he’s an ex-husband. But you can’t divorce a father.”
“Yes, you can. We already did, my mother and I.”
“Did he want you to?”
“He didn’t care.”
“It would wring my father’s heart,” Jessie said, “if I divorced him.”
“How do you know? Did he ever tell you?”
“No, but I never asked.”
“Then you don’t know for sure.”
The jacaranda trees, for which the street was named, were in full bloom and their falling petals covered lawns and side-walks, even the road itself, with purple confetti. Some clung to Jessie’s short dark hair and to Mary Martha’s blond ponytail.
“I bet we look like brides,” Jessie said. “We could pretend—”
“No.” Mary Martha began brushing the jacaranda petals out of her hair as if they were lice. “I don’t want to.”
“You always like pretending things.”
“Sensible things.”
Jessie knew this wasn’t true, since Mary Martha’s favorite role was that of child spy for the FBI. But she preferred not to argue. The lunch she’d taken to the playground had all been eaten by ten o’clock and she was more than ready for some of Mrs. Oakley’s cinnamon toast. The Oakleys lived at 319 Jacaranda Road in a huge redwood house surrounded by live oak and eucalyptus trees. The trees had been planted, and the house built, by Mr. Oakley’s parents. When Jessie had first seen the place she’d assumed that Mary Martha’s family was terribly rich, but she discovered on later visits that the attic was just full of junk, the four-car garage contained only Mrs. Oakley’s little Volkswagen and Mary Martha’s bicycle, and some of die upstairs rooms were empty, with not even a chair in them.
Kate Oakley hated the place and was afraid to live in it, but she was even more afraid that, if she sold it, Mr. Oakley would be able by some legal maneuver to get his hands on half of the money. So she had stayed on. By day she stared out at the live oak trees wishing they would die and let a little light into the house, and by night she lay awake listening to the squawking and creaking of eucalyptus boughs, and hoping the next wind would blow them down.
Mary Martha knew how her mother felt about the house and she couldn’t understand it. She herself had never lived any other place and never wanted to. When Jessie came over to play, the two girls tried on old clothes in the attic, put on shows in the big garage, rummaged through the cellar for hidden treasure, and, when Mrs. Oakley wasn’t looking, climbed the trees or hunted frogs in the creek, pretending the frogs were handsome princes in disguise. None of the princes ever had a chance to become undisguised since Mrs. Oakley always made the girls return the frogs to the creek: “The poor little creatures... I’m ashamed of you, Mary Martha, wrenching them away from their homes and families. How would you like it if some enormous giant picked you up and carried you away?”
The front door of the Oakley house was open but the screen was latched and Mary Martha had to press the door chime. The sound was very faint. Mrs. Oakley had had it muted shortly after Mr. Oakley moved out because sometimes he used to come and stand at the door and keep pressing the chime, demanding admittance.
“If she’s not home,” Jessie said hopefully, “we could climb the sycamore tree at the back and get over on the balcony of her bedroom and just walk in... What’s the matter with your doorbell?”
“Nothing.”
“Ours is real loud.”
“My mother and I don’t like loud noises.”
Mrs. Oakley appeared, blinking her eyes in the light as if she’d been taking a nap or watching television in a darkened room.
She was small and pretty and very neat in a blue cotton dress she had made herself. Her fair hair was softly waved and hung down to her shoulders and she wore high-heeled shoes without any backs to them. Sometimes, when Jessie was angry at her mother, she compared her unfavorably with Mrs. Oakley: her mother liked to wear sneakers and jeans or shorts, and she often forgot to comb her hair, which was as dark and straight as Jessie’s own.