Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(20)

Her father said, “Oh, why…but you’re so good at them, Katherine.”

“I’m sure you can figure them out,” Kate said.

He turned to Bunny. Bunny gave him a bland smile. Then she looked across the table at Kate and raised a fist toward the ceiling. “Go, Katherine!” she said.

Well. Kate had not seen that one coming.

—

Bunny was picked up by a mother driving a crowd of teenage girls who were squealing and laughing and waving wildly out all the open windows. Drumbeats pounded from the radio. “Have you got your phone?” Kate asked, and then, belatedly, “Where will you be?”

Bunny just said, “Bye-yee!” and she was out the door and gone.

Kate finished making her father’s lunch for the next day, and then she turned off the lights in the kitchen and the dining room. Her father was reading in the living room. He sat in his leather armchair beneath a pool of yellow lamplight, and seemingly he was absorbed in his journal, but when Kate crossed the hall there was a certain stiffening in his posture, an awareness. Before he could attempt to start a conversation, though, she took a sharp left turn and climbed the stairs two at a time. She heard the creak of leather behind her, but he didn’t try to stop her.

Although dusk had barely fallen, she changed into her pajamas. (It was tiring, dragging herself around all day.) She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror after she had brushed her teeth; she let her head tip forward till it was resting against the glass and she looked into her own eyes, which from this angle had bags beneath them almost as dark as her irises. Then she returned to her room and climbed into her bed. She propped her pillow against the headboard and adjusted the shade of her lamp and took her book from the nightstand and started reading.

She was reading a Stephen Jay Gould book that she had read before. She liked Stephen Jay Gould. She liked nonfiction—books about natural history or evolution. She didn’t have much use for novels. Although she did enjoy a good time-travel novel, now and again. Whenever she had trouble sleeping, she fantasized about traveling back through time to the Cambrian Era. The Cambrian Era was some 450 million years ago. Just about the only living creatures then were invertebrates, and not a one of them lived on dry land.





Last fall Kate had planted an assortment of spring crocuses beneath the redbud tree in the backyard, and she had been on the lookout for several weeks now but not a one had shown itself. It was puzzling. She checked again on Saturday morning after her grocery trip; she poked around with her trowel, even, but she couldn’t find a single bulb. Was this the work of moles, or voles, or some other kind of varmint?

She quit digging and stood up, flinging back her hair, just as the telephone rang in the kitchen. Bunny was awake, she knew—earlier she’d heard the shower running—but the telephone rang again and then again. By the time she’d made it into the house, the answering machine had swung into its “Hi-yee!” and then her father was saying, “Pick up, Kate. It’s your father.”

Already, though, she had spotted his lunch bag on the counter. She didn’t know how she had missed it before. She stopped just inside the back door and scowled at it ferociously.

“Kate? Are you there? I forgot my lunch.”

“Well, isn’t that just too damn bad,” Kate told the empty kitchen.

“Could you bring it to me, please?”

She turned and went back outside. She tossed her trowel into her gardening bucket and reached for her dandelion weeder.

The telephone rang again.

This time, she made it into the house before the answering machine could click over. She snatched up the receiver and said, “How many times did you think I’d fall for this, Father?”

“Ah, Kate! Katherine. It seems I’ve forgotten my lunch again.”

She was silent.

“Are you there?”

“I guess you’ll have to go hungry,” she said.

“Excuse me? Please, Kate. I don’t ask very much of you.”

“Actually, you ask a lot of me,” she told him.

“I just need you to bring my lunch. I haven’t eaten since last night.”

She considered. Then she said, “Fine,” and slammed the receiver down before she could hear his response.

She went out to the hall and shouted up the stairs: “Bunny?”

“What,” Bunny said, from much nearer than Kate had expected.

Kate turned from the stairs and went to the living-room doorway. Bunny and Edward Mintz were sitting rather close together on the couch. Bunny had an open book on her lap. “Hi, there, Kate!” Edward said enthusiastically. He was wearing jeans so ragged that both of his hairy bare knees poked out.

Kate ignored him. “Father needs his lunch brought,” she told Bunny.

“Brought where?”

“Where do you think? How come you didn’t answer the phone when it rang?”

“Because I’m having my Spanish lesson?” Bunny said indignantly, spreading her palms to indicate her book.

“Well, take a break from it and run over to the lab.”

“Your dad’s in his lab on Saturdays?” Edward asked Bunny.


“He’s always in his lab?” Bunny said. “He works seven days a week?”

“What, on Sundays too?”