A, My Name Is Ami, page 9
“That’s a new, improved excuse. Get thee to the sink, Cinderella.”
I did about half of the dishes, and all the time I was thinking about Mia and me and feeling worse and worse. Finally I stopped. “Dad? I don’t really want to do this.”
“What’s the matter, Ami? You think it’s child abuse?”
I flung down the scrubber. “Do you think everything’s a joke?”
Dad looked at me. There was a little tomato sauce on his lips. He likes to taste as he cooks. “I didn’t realize we were being serious.”
“Now you do! Why can’t I leave the rest of the dishes for Fred? I never see him do dishes. Why is it always my job?” I didn’t know I was going to say all that. I really surprised myself.
Dad sighed. “Gimme a break, will you, Ami? It’s Friday, end of a long week. Does it matter who does the dishes? We’re supposed to all be pulling together here.”
Suddenly I thought of something else. “Did you tell Mom she couldn’t take me with her?”
“Take you where? Is she going on a trip?”
“No, I mean when she left—” I was going to say home, then I remembered Mom saying, That’s not my home anymore. “— when she went to live in New Castle. Did you say you wouldn’t let me go?”
“Oh, that. Yes.”
“Are you sorry now?”
“In general, no. At this very moment, yes!”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Ami. Another joke.” He hugged me.
After that, I took the phone into the dining room, closed the kitchen door, and called Mia.
“Hello?” she said.
“This is Ami.”
“Oh. Hello.”
“Hello. What are you doing?”
“Taking care of Sara.”
“She’s cute.”
“What are you doing?”
“Not much. Fighting with my father. And I just finished washing a truckload of dishes.”
“Well, Sara’s crying. I better go.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I put the phone down carefully and stood there staring at it. I tried to make up with Mia, and what did she do? Nothing. Got off the phone as quick as she could. Sara’s crying. What a lie. She just didn’t want to talk to me. I better go. Bye. Nothing else to say to me. Bye. Well, that was all right with me. Now I knew the truth, anyway. She didn’t care about me at all.
Fred came in from outside and dumped his books on the couch. He looked at me. “What are you doing, praying over that phone?”
“Fred, did you ever have a fight with Jan and then try to make up and she didn’t want to?”
“Yeah, I’ve made her really mad sometimes.”
“What’d you do?”
“To make her mad? I don’t know. Stuff. She says sometimes I don’t hear her talking, things like that.”
“You don’t listen to her? Why not?”
“Did I say that? I listen to her. Just, sometimes, maybe I’m thinking of something else. Then she starts steaming, and when Jan steams, you can about see the algebraic signs coming out of her ears. Is Dad working on supper?” He went into the kitchen.
The phone rang. Maybe it was Jan, calling Fred. I let it ring. Maybe it was Bill, saying he wanted to come over and play his guitar. Another ring. Or Robert. He’d decided he was madly in love with me. “Ami,” Dad called, “get the phone, will you?” I let it ring two more times, then I picked it up. “Pelter residence.”
“Ami? Hi. I’m not taking care of Sara anymore.”
“Excellent.”
“When you called before, I thought you wanted to make up.”
I started to say something sarcastic. What a brilliant deduction! How did you ever figure that out! I began to feel really bad. I couldn’t even speak.
“Ami? Ami, do you want to make up?”
“Do you want to?”
“I want to, Ami, if you want to. Do you want to?”
“Not if you’re going to hang up on me.”
“Ami, I couldn’t help it. Sara was bawling her head off.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes! Word of honor! I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“Your mother isn’t dead.”
“Well, if she was, I’d swear on her grave. You want me to kill her, so I can prove it to you?”
“Oh, ugh, that’s terrible.”
“I know, it’s awful! It’s sick.”
“And your mother is so nice.”
“No, she isn’t. She’s only nice to you. She’s bizarre! She nags me all the time. She never leaves me alone. I always have to take care of Sara. Which is her work.”
“I want to see you,” I said.
“Can I come over now?”
“Come for supper. You want to come for supper?”
Mia came over about twenty minutes later. We hugged each other and kissed. I said our fight was my fault and Mia said, “Who cares! I missed you.” Then we hugged again and danced around the room until Fred yelled for us to come into the kitchen for supper.
Dad makes great spaghetti; that and pancakes are his two best dishes. “This is fabulous, Mr. Pelter,” Mia said, and Dad tried to look modest.
After supper, Mia said she and I would wash the dishes. “Won’t we, Ami?” I should have said no and made Fred do them, but I was so happy we’d made up, I would have washed ten times as many dishes. We went a little crazy after Dad and Fred left. First, too much detergent. Then we knocked into each other and splashed water over everything.
“We’ll have to wash the floor,” I said.
“And hang ourselves out to dry!”
Every dumb little thing we said made us laugh.
“You know what?” Mia said. “We should do something special to celebrate.”
I dried a plate and tried to think what it could be. We’d had ice cream for dessert. “We could make taffy,” I said.
“Not food,” Mia said. “Something better.” She dipped a glass into the sudsy water. “I know. Let’s call Robert.” And she got a great big smile on her face.
Chapter 18
“You dial,” Mia said.
“But you talk. Remember, first you ask for Robert, then when he gets on, you say, ‘Is this Robert Smith?’”
Mia leaned on my shoulder. “How many times should we let it ring?”
“Hello?” a woman said.
I pushed the phone at Mia.
“Can I, um, speak to, Robert?”
I leaned in close so I could hear.
“Hello?” Robert said.
“Hello, Robert?”
“Yeah.”
Mia looked at me. “Robert? Hi. This is Mia,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. She patted her mouth like she was trying not to burst out laughing.
“Mia?” Robert said, like there were at least forty-two Mia’s in our school.
“Mia Jenson.”
“Oh.”
“I’m, uh, here with my friend, Ami.”
“Who?”
“Ami Pelter. She says hi, too.”
“You mean Foghorn Ami?”
“Yes,” I whispered hoarsely.
“That’s not very nice,” Mia said, rolling her eyes at me.
“No offense,” Robert said. “They call me Carrot Top.”
“Your hair is beautiful.”
I couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to say it. Suddenly, she stuck the phone out to me, right next to my mouth. “Talk!” she whispered.
“Hi,” I said. I mean, I croaked. I sounded just like a frog.
“Hi.”
“This is Foghorn Ami.”
“This is Carrot Top.”
Then I didn’t have anything else to say, so I gave the phone back to Mia. “Hi, it’s me, again,” she said.
“Me, Mia? So, what are you doing, me Mia?”
“Talking to you.”
“That’s humorous.”
“What are you doing?” Mia looked over at me, sticking out her tongue and making faces like she was dying.
“I’m going out to play basketball.”
“Where?”
“In the driveway. We have a light out there.”
“We have a hoop in our driveway, too. So does Ami.”
“Do you like to play basketball?”
“No, I don’t like sports much. I’m terrible at them, anyway. My sister Stacey is good. And so is Ami.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw her playing in gym. I saw you, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Well, I have to go now. Bye.”
“Bye. Ami says bye, too.”
“Bye, Ami.”
I leaned into the phone. “Bye, Robert.”
“Bye, Ami. Bye Mia.”
“Bye bye, Robert,” we both said. Then we hung up.
“I don’t know how you did that,” I said.
“I know! Do you believe me? I didn’t even think, I just did it.”
“Hello, Robert, this is Mia,” I said.
Mia leaned against me. “He’s so nice,” she said. “Wasn’t he sweet, Ami?”
Chapter 19
Saturday morning. Big chores day. Fred and Dad had divided up the shopping and errands. I was stuck with the vacuuming. I did the downstairs, then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d rather wash a bathtub full of dishes than drag the vacuum cleaner around the house.
I went outside to shoot baskets. It was cold, there’d been a frost last night, and the grass was still white.
“Hi, Ami,” someone said. It was Bill. He had his guitar slung over his back. He was wearing a white knit fisherman’s sweater and the curved silver earring. He looked really nice. “Is Fred around?”
“No. He’s doing errands.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Maybe not for a while.”
“I’ll wait.” He put his guitar down. “Want to play one-on-one?”
We played for about half an hour. Bill would make these great leaps, shoot, and the ball would either bang against the backboard or bounce on the rim and come flying off. He just laughed. “I give up. I’m leaving basketball to you, Ami.”
I looked at my watch. I should go in and finish the vacuuming. Or would that be rude? “Well, I guess I’ll go in,” I said.
“You’re going in?”
“Uh-huh.” I dribbled the ball. “I have to do some things, but you can wait for Fred.”
“Out here?”
“Sure, that’s okay.”
“So when did you say Fred would be back?”
“It might be a while.” Maybe I could vacuum the upstairs fast and then come out again and talk to Bill.
“Ahh, Ami.” Bill stood up. “It’s pretty cold out here.” He pointed to his head. “Notice? Left ear, turning red?”
I was embarrassed. I should have told him he could wait inside. “Oh! Come on in, I’m sorry, I thought—”
Bill followed me into the house. “I don’t mind the cold for myself, Ami. But my guitar, he’s a sensitive lad. If he gets too cold, he won’t play nice for me.”
We went into the living room. Some blankets were rumpled up at one end of the couch. I pushed them out of the way. “Well, um, sit down.” I was still holding the basketball.
“Do you sing, Ami?”
“Just in chorus, in school.’”
“You ever try singing solo?”
I shook my head and looked around for someplace to put the basketball.
“You should try it. From your speaking voice, it sounds like you might have a really special singing voice.”
“Some people call me Foghorn Ami.”
“Yeah?” Bill tuned his guitar. He strummed a few chords. “I have a song I just wrote, that’s why I came over. I wanted to play it for someone. You want to work on it with me?”
“Me? How?”
“Can you read music?”
“A little.” Maybe I could drop the basketball into the magazine basket. “I took piano lessons for a while when I was younger.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“They were sort of expensive and, you know, I wasn’t that good.”
“Did you like piano?”
I nodded.
“There. You see. You should have gone on.” He tightened a string. “I don’t know how people live without music. Sit down.” He patted the couch next to him.
I sat down. I was still holding the basketball.
Bill took a sheet of music paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. “Now, see, this is the song I wrote. I’ll sing it for you. Just for the words, first. We’ll work on the phrasing and stuff after we’ve got the words down.”
The song was about a girl “with a sad little face” who worked in a pizza place, and how he used to watch her and think about talking to her. Then he stopped going there for a while, and when he went back, she was gone and nobody knew where, or what had happened to her. “Looking for the girl … looking all over for the one I used to see in Dom’s Pizza Place,” he sang. “Hey! Oh, hey! Why didn’t I tell her, why didn’t I say.… Babe, it’s okay.… Yeah, it’s okay, it’s okay.…”
“So, what do you think?” he said.
“I like it.”
“Yeah? You do?” Bill pulled his guitar around and bent over it. “Not a whole lot, though, huh?”
I was really surprised. He sounded so unsure of himself. I didn’t think he was like that at all. “No. I love it. I think it’s wonderful.”
“Oh. Really?” He smiled.
“Is it true? I mean, the girl—”
“Sure, she worked in Dom’s Pizza. You know the place I mean, on the Boulevard?”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Liked her a whole lot, but just like the song says, I never even talked to her.”
“Why not?”
He struck a couple of chords. “Too … shy.…” He raised his eyebrows at me. “I … confess.…”
“You should have taken your guitar.”
“Hey, that’s smart,” he said. “That’s the only time—how did you know?”
I shrugged. I was embarrassed the way he was looking at me, but I liked it, too. “I know some things,” I said.
“You sure do.” He ruffled my hair. “Okay. Let’s you, me, and that basketball do some singing here.”
Chapter 20
“You should do your nails, Ami,” Mia said.
“These things?” I never took care of my nails and I didn’t like them long.
Mia held out her hands to show me her fingernails. She’d painted them a bluey red. “I did my toes, too. I like it, even if my mother does say it’s a primitive ritual.”
It was the day before Thanksgiving recess, when our school always goes on a picnic to Enoch Falls Park. Three years ago on picnic day, it snowed. Everybody packed into the buses, anyway, and drove to the park. Our principal, Mrs. Giordono, has a picture in her office of people eating their hot dogs with mittens on.
This year, the sun was shining, there wasn’t a cloud around. The sky was the same color as Mia’s sweater. She looked even prettier than usual.
Mr. Cooper yelled through a megaphone for anybody who wanted to play softball to meet over on the diamond. “I’m going over,” I said. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find something.”
“You could play softball.”
“Me?”
“Well … I don’t really have to play.”
Mia gave me a push. “I know this is going to come as a shock, but I can exist for an hour without you, Ami.”
“Okay, then. Bye!” I ran toward the diamond.
“Ami Pelter. Good.” Mr. Cooper waved me over to one side. “You play outfield for the Enoch Fallers.”
“Good old Coop. He always has to have cute team names,” somebody grumbled in my ear. It was Miles Hammond, Robert’s friend. He had a scowl on his face.
“Good old Miles,” I said, “you always have to have a scowl.” It just popped out.
I thought he’d be mad, but, instead, he laughed. “Good old Ami, always there with the truth.”
“At least I made you smile.”
“At least I made you talk.”
Then Mr. Cooper blew his whistle and the game started.
The game was still going on when Mia came over to where I was playing outfield. “Ami! I need you. Come here!”
“Mia—” A ball bounced across the field toward me. Everyone yelled and screamed. I ran, putting out my mitt, fell, but somehow caught the ball and threw it in.
“Yaaay, Ami,” Miles cheered. That was nice. When he got up to bat and made a base hit, I clapped for him.
The minute the game was over, Mia pulled me away. “I did something! You have to help me. I put a note in Robert’s pocket.”
“In his pocket?”
“Don’t ask me why I did it! The idea came to me and I did it. It was so easy, Ami. I walked by him casually and slipped the note in his pocket.”
“What did you write?”
“‘Meet us at two o’clock, at the cave on the red trail, for a special surprise.’”
“What’s the surprise?”
“I don’t know! We’ll figure something out.”
“Did you sign the note?”
“You mean, my name? I’m not that far gone.”
“Mia, why’d you pick the red trail?”
“Does it make any difference? Maybe because red is for love.”
“It’s the longest trail in the park, Mia.”
She waved her hand. “Trifles, trifles. What are we going to do, Ami? Just go there, or what?”
I thought about it. “How do we know he’s even read the note?”
“Because I watched him. He put his hands in his pockets, he found the note, and then he read it.”
“Well, if you didn’t sign it, maybe we don’t have to do anything.”
“I did sign it. I wrote, ‘Two people who love you.’” Her face was pink. “What do we do now, Ami?”
“Eat. I’m hungry.” I went over to the table where I’d left my lunchbag and took out my sandwiches. I ate one and put one in my pocket.
Mrs. Giordono walked by us, her arms full of bags of marshmallows. “Going to join the marshmallow roast, girls?”
“In a couple minutes,” Mia said politely. “So?” She shook my arm. “What are we going to do?”
“Let’s watch Robert to see what he does. Only we can’t let him know we’re watching him.”
