Don’t Let Me Go(39)

“That’s OK. I’m really not supposed to drink soda.”

She’d actually been about to say, “That’s OK, I can’t stay.” But then she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Because Mrs. Hinman had nobody, just like Mr. Lafferty, and it wasn’t even her fault, because she wasn’t even mean. Well, not mean compared to Mr. Lafferty. Then again, nobody was mean compared to Mr. Lafferty.

“Here, how about a glass of apple juice, then?”

So Grace said, “Sure, OK,” and sat down at her kitchen table. “I came to say I’m sorry if you felt left out when we had our meeting. I just never thought you’d want to come to it, because you’re not one of the ones who take care of me. I didn’t mean you couldn’t be one of the ones who take care of me, you know, if you wanted to be. It’s just that you said you didn’t want to, and all.”

“It’s not so much that I didn’t want to,” Mrs. Hinman said, setting a glass of juice on the table in front of Grace. “It’s more that I didn’t think I was up to the task. But I was thinking…Oh, where did I put that? Wait, let me find that little catalogue, and I’ll show you what I was thinking.”

Grace sipped the apple juice and was shocked by how good it was.

“Wow,” she said. “I never get apple juice. I should drink this more.”

“Well, you can always come up here for juice,” Mrs. Hinman said. “Oh. Here it is. Let me just show you. I have an old Singer sewing machine. Haven’t had it out in years. Not since my husband died. But I used to be very handy with it.”

She sat down at the table across from Grace.

Grace asked, “What did you used to sew?”

“Clothes. I used to make my own clothes. And Marv’s as well. Here, look at some of these patterns.”

“What’s a pattern?” Grace asked, looking, but not sure how to interpret what she saw. It just looked like drawings of clothes, mostly ladies’ dresses.

“A pattern is something you buy to help you make a dress. You cut out the pattern and pin it to the fabric, and then you know where to cut, and where to stitch, and where the darts and zippers go.”

“Oh. OK. Why am I looking at this again?”

“I just thought you might want to look through it and pick out a couple of dresses, and then I could dust off my old sewing machine and make them for you.”

“Oh, I get it,” Grace said. “So that way you won’t feel left out any more.”

Mrs. Hinman reddened, and she seemed flustered.

“I was just thinking you probably don’t have a lot of nice clothes, and you’re growing fast, and it might be a good thing for your situation to have a few nice dresses, that’s all. It was you I was wanting to help, not myself.”

“I can pick my own dresses?”

“Of course.”

“What about pants?”

“I can do pants.”

“What about tops to go with jeans? Because I mostly wear jeans.”

“There are all kinds of clothes in there,” Mrs. Hinman said. “Why not just look through it?”

So Grace stayed through that glass of apple juice and one-and-a-half refills, and picked out some new clothes.

? ? ?

“Guess what?” Grace shouted to Rayleen as she hit the bottom of the stairs, because Rayleen was standing right out in the hall.

Then she saw the lady.

The lady was wearing a suit with a skirt, in a dark color, and she looked like a business lady, and definitely like she didn’t belong in Grace’s building.

Grace froze in her tracks.

Rayleen said, “Grace, this is Ms. Katz. She’s a social worker, and she came by to see that you’re OK.”

“On a Saturday?” Grace said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Sure, we make visits on Saturdays,” Ms. Katz said, smiling in a way that didn’t look real. “Your babysitter tells me you were upstairs talking to the old woman who lives in the attic apartment.”

Grace took two steps closer, because it seemed safe enough, and she figured she should.

“Yeah. Mrs. Hinman. I went up to visit her because I was worried she might feel left out. She has nobody, and it’s not even her fault. It’s just that she’s eighty-nine, and she lived longer than all the other people she knew.”

“That was sweet of you,” Ms. Katz said.

“And guess what? She sews! She let me go through this pattern book of all the different clothes I can have, and I picked a few out, and she’s going to make them for me. Isn’t that nice of her?”

“Very nice,” Ms. Katz said. “You’re lucky to have such nice neighbors.”

“Oh, I have the best neighbors! Billy is teaching me to tap dance, and Felipe is teaching me Spanish, and Mr. Lafferty bought me wood for a dance floor and new tap shoes — but then he passed away. And Rayleen got me this nice haircut, and look at my nails.” She held her hands out for the social worker lady to see. “Oh, poop, I lost a nail already.”

“I can fix it,” Rayleen said.

“It’s a lovely haircut,” Ms. Katz said. “So you’re doing OK, then?”

“I’m fine,” Grace said, a little worried about what would happen if she didn’t answer just right.