Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(21)

“I don’t know why you can’t do it,” Bunny told Kate, speaking over Edward’s words.

“I’m gardening, is why,” Kate said.

“I’ll drive you there,” Edward told Bunny. “Where is this lab, exactly?”

Kate said, “Sorry. Bunny’s not allowed to ride alone with a boy.”

“Edward’s not a boy!” Bunny protested. “He’s my tutor?”

“You know Father’s rule. Not till you’re sixteen.”

“But I’m a really responsible driver,” Edward told Kate.

“Sorry; it’s the rule.”

Bunny snapped her book shut and flung it onto the couch. “There are plenty of girls in my school a whole lot younger than me that get to ride alone with boys every night of the week,” she said.

“Tell Father that; it’s not my rule,” Kate said.

“It might as well be. You’re just exactly like him: two peas in a pod.”

“I’m what? Take that back!” Kate said. “I’m not a bit like him!”

“Oh, so sorry, my mistake,” Bunny said, with a luminous, sweet smile playing at the corners of her mouth. (The smile of all the mean girls Kate used to know in seventh grade.) She stood up and said, “Come along, Edward.”

He stood up too and followed her. “I am the one and only normal person in this family,” she told him. Kate trailed them through the hall. In the kitchen doorway, she had to stand aside because Bunny was already stalking back out, violently swinging the lunch bag. “The other two are crazy people,” she was telling Edward. He followed her toward the front of the house like a pet dog.

Kate opened the fridge and took out a roast beef sandwich she had bought at the deli counter that morning. Already she was feeling meat-deprived, although she hadn’t even assembled her vegetarian meat mash yet.

While she was unwrapping her sandwich, she happened to glance out the window and see the Mintzes’ gray minivan backing out of their garage. Bunny was in the passenger seat, riding high like royalty and gazing straight ahead.

Well, fine, then. Be that way. If their father cared so much about his precious rules, he ought to stick around to enforce them.

“I don’t remember that I wasn’t allowed to ride alone with a boy,” Kate had told him when he announced this particular rule.

“I don’t remember that any boy asked you,” her father had said.

Kate allowed herself a little fantasy: one day Bunny would get old, and she would age in that unfortunate way that blondes so often did. Her hair would become strawlike, and her face would be wrinkly as an apple and ruddier than her lips. She had turned out to be such a disappointment, their father would confide to Kate.

—

A concrete bench stood at the rear of the backyard, mottled and pitted and greenish. Nobody ever sat on it, but today, instead of eating in the kitchen, Kate decided to take her sandwich out there. She settled at one end of the bench with her sandwich plate beside her, and she tipped her head back to stare up into the tree above her. A robin was going crazy on one of the lower branches, hopping about and showering her with agitated chink-chink sounds. Maybe it had a nest up there, although she couldn’t see one. And in the giant oak across the alley, two other birds, invisible, seemed to be having a conversation. “Dewey? Dewey? Dewey?” one was saying, and the other said, “Hugh! Hugh! Hugh!” Kate couldn’t tell whether the second bird was greeting the first one or setting him straight.

After she’d finished gardening she would assemble her mash ingredients in the Crock-Pot, and then she would change all the beds and start a sheet wash.

And after that, what?

She didn’t have any friends anymore. They had all moved on in their lives—graduated from college, found jobs in distant cities and even married, some of them. At Christmas they might come back to Baltimore for a visit, but they had stopped phoning her, for the most part. What would they find to talk about? The only time she got a text nowadays was when Bunny was being kept after school and needed a ride home.

Dewey and Hugh had gone quiet now, and the robin had flown away. Kate pretended to herself that the robin had decided she could be trusted. She took a bite of her sandwich and gazed studiously at a nearby cluster of hyacinths to demonstrate that she had no interest in robbing his stupid nest. The tiers of curly white blooms reminded her of the white paper frills on lamb chops.

“Khello?”

She stopped chewing.

Pyotr was coming out the back door; he was descending the back steps. He wore his lab coat today, and it flapped open over his T-shirt as he walked toward her across the grass.

She couldn’t believe it. She could not believe that he would have the nerve.

“How’d you get into the house?” she demanded as soon as he was close enough.

“Front door was standing wide,” he said.

Damn Bunny to hell.

He stopped when he reached her and stood looking down at her. At least he had the good grace not to attempt any chitchat.

She couldn’t invent a reason for his being there. Surely he must see that she wanted nothing to do with him, even if for some reason her father hadn’t yet told him so. And her father had told him, she sensed. The other times she’d seen Pyotr, he had arrived in front of her with (it struck her in retrospect) a little bounce, a “Here-I-am!” air, but today he was solemn, chastened, and he held himself with an almost military erectness.