Heart Like Mine A Novel - By Amy Hatvany Page 0,10

that he was criticizing her; I didn’t want to get her in trouble.

“I’ll talk with her,” he said, but I don’t think he ever did. Now that they were divorced, they only talked to each other when they had to, and when they did, it was with short, hard sentences that seemed more like weapons than words.

“When are you bringing them back?” Mama asked him when he picked us up every other Saturday. She never did quite look directly at him, either. Her eyes drifted just over his right shoulder.

“Five o’clock tomorrow,” my dad told her, sometimes even shifting his feet a little, like he couldn’t wait for her to stop moving her mouth. “Like always.” He stood in the entryway, not coming all the way into the house while we got ready to go with him.

“Just making sure,” my mom would say, her voice quavering a little, and the muscles in my dad’s face would tighten even more. It was hard to imagine they ever loved each other enough to get married. I knew they had; I’d seen their wedding picture. Mama dressed in a white princess ball gown, her glossy hair piled on top of her head in messy coils. Daddy tall and handsome in a black tuxedo, feeding her cake and trying to kiss her at the same time. They were laughing.

Now, standing next to our car, as Max finally sped down the front steps and toward us, making a sound like a jet airplane, my mom reached over and clutched my hand. “What would I do without you, baby girl?” She pulled my hand up to her mouth and kissed it.

I smiled at her, my insides shaking, not wanting to say that I sometimes wondered what she might do without me, too.

* * *

“Do you have to go to your dad’s this weekend?” Bree asked me during second lunch. At Seattle Academy, first lunch was for the kids up through fifth grade; second was for sixth through eighth. Bree and I sat together at a small table by the window, away from the other eighth-grade girls. We each had a big slice of pepperoni pizza and a chocolate milk. That was the best thing about going to a private school—the hot lunches were actually decent. The worst thing was that my brother went there, too. Occasionally, he’d see me in the hallway or when he had recess and he’d wave, do a little dance, and start singing, “Ava-Ava-bo-bava, banana-fanna-fo-fava . . . Ava!” I seriously couldn’t wait for next year, when high school would start and I wouldn’t see that little weirdo until we got home. I loved him and all, but man, could he annoy the crap out of me.

I pulled a piece of pepperoni off the slice and popped it in my mouth. “Yep,” I told Bree as I chewed. “Our dad picks us up tomorrow morning.”

“With Grace?” she said, crossing her eyes and making her lids flutter at the same time. Bree was the funniest girl I knew and wasn’t afraid of other people laughing at the things she did, which was part of why she was my friend. She had short, wispy blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and she didn’t need to wear a bra yet, but she didn’t seem to care about being like the popular girls. The girls with really rich parents and their own iPads. The girls who went behind the gym, let their boyfriends feel them up, and didn’t care who knew. The girls that part of me wanted to become.

I laughed. “Yes. I keep hoping they’ll split up. But it looks like she’s staying.” Bree’s parents were divorced, too, another reason I liked to hang out with her. She got how weird it was to have two houses to live in, two sets of rules, and parents that might have loved us but couldn’t stand each other. Her dad was a corporate lawyer, so he had to pay her mom a ton of child support for Bree. My dad gave my mom a check every month, too, but he definitely didn’t make as much money as a lawyer. He was a great cook, though, which I thought was kind of a bonus.

Bree didn’t say anything more, knowing that my dad’s girlfriend was far from my favorite subject. He had met Grace at the end of last summer and waited a couple of months to introduce us, which I guess is better than if he’d made us meet