my homework tonight,” she says.
“You don’t need Travis to help you read a book, Deena.”
“Actually, I don’t need to read that stupid book. That’s what I don’t need.”
“You’ll need it to graduate.”
She looks out my window, frowning. It is almost spring, but a winter storm moved in last week, covering the ground with a watery snow that has already frozen into hard clumps, caked with dirt from passing cars. The landscape of Treeline Colonies has not improved much, and in the winter, I get depressed just looking outside, at the leafless hedges planted by the doors, the frozen drainage ditch by the highway.
“You know we’re going to move far away from here when we get married,” she says. “Somewhere warm. By the ocean. Maybe Florida, or California. We’re not even going to tell my grandmother or anyone else where we’re going. But I’ll tell you. You can come visit us.” She rolls over and leans her head off my bed, her face upside down, her dark hair hanging to the floor in a way that makes me think of the tiny trolls attached to key chains for sale in the Kwikshop. She closes her eyes and smiles. “No more snow and no more cold.”
She reaches over to pick at a strand of my hair, and I know she is doing this to check for split ends, the damage done to my hair from the terrible perm she tried to give me, which is only now starting to relax. I pull my head away. “Deena, you might want to double-check those plans with him again.”
She rolls back up on her stomach, and I watch the color drain out of her face, down her neck, her hoop earrings falling back into place. “Why? Did he say something to you?”
“I just…I’m not supposed to say anything. I just think he’s been thinking.”
Her eyes stay on mine. “Evelyn? What did he say?”
I hesitate. I am not supposed to tell, but I feel bad for her. She shouldn’t be whiling away her days dreaming about the life she and Travis are going to have by an ocean somewhere when he is thinking about college and Australia. I’m doing her a favor, although looking at her now, I can see she doesn’t think I am.
“I just think he’s going to keep his options open,” I say.
“When did you talk to him?”
“A few days ago. Don’t tell him I told you, or he won’t ever tell me anything again.”
She is still looking at me, eyes narrowed. I find it hard to look back. I have watched my mother long enough to know that there are all kinds of ways of being smart. Just because Deena reads slowly doesn’t mean she can’t see the little part of me that is happy about what I am telling her now.
“I’m only telling you this so you don’t get too carried away, Deena.”
But she’s looking over my head now, out the window, past the ice-covered parking lot to Travis’s dark window, though his shade is pulled all the way down.
My grandfather will turn sixty this February, and Eileen wants us to come to the party. There will be balloons and cake, she says. It won’t last long. And it will mean so much, she adds, to him.
My mother’s right eyebrow goes up. “Did he say that?”
Eileen nods, avoiding my mother’s eyes. For her New Year’s resolution, she is trying to quit smoking, and already she has bitten off all the white of her fingernails. “He said he’d be glad to have you, Tina. You and Evelyn and little Sam.”
My mother frowns, looking down at Samuel. Now that he has learned to use a spoon, she is upping the ante: he has to answer her questions. She has attached a tray to his wheelchair, with a green circle taped to one side that reads YES and a red square on the other side that reads NO.
“Sam, we’re going to have some ice cream,” she says, speaking directly into his ear. “Would you like a bowl?” She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the green circle. “Yes?” she asks. She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the red square. “Or no?”
We wait, watching his hand slowly slide across his tray to the YES, like an oracle on a Ouija board. When his finger touches YES, Eileen claps. My mother scoops out two bowls of ice cream—one chocolate, one vanilla. “I have to offer him choices,”