Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,11

I think Eddie did his homework or something.”

Donald was in one corner, holding a sandwich in his hand and pulling at his lip with the other. He waved with the sandwich.

“Were you scared?” he said.

“Why?” I said. “You can swim as well as I can.” My father had made sure I could swim when I was so little that I couldn’t really remember it except the first time I tried diving and got water up my nose. Donald’s grandfather taught him, and Donald had such long arms now that he was always ahead of me if we went to Pride’s Beach and swam out to the foam bobbles that kept us netted in, away from the deepest part.

“That’s just stupid, Mimi. That’s not the kind of water you can swim in. The current was strong enough to suck you under. You should have been scared.” He stuffed the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, so his one cheek puffed out like a chipmunk’s.

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t be so mean.”

“Where are your parents?”

“They stayed at the house.”

“And you’re not even a little bit worried?”

“Where are your grandparents?” I asked, and then I could tell by the strange, pinched look Donald got that that was why he wasn’t acting like himself.

“They took a different boat. There wasn’t room in the one boat for them and me and Taffy, so I took Taffy and they took the next boat.”

“You brought Taffy here?” Donald’s grandparents had an old beagle who breathed like she was gargling gravel. Donald’s grandfather said he didn’t know what his wife would do if anything happened to her, but my mother said that was the kind of dog that lived forever, that lived so long she forgot her housebreaking and made everyone miserable.

“They made me put her in the choir room. There’s a goat there, too, and a cat in a cage.” Donald looked at the door. “My grandparents should be here soon.”

“Maybe they stopped at our house and they’re upstairs with my mother and father playing cards,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You want to play cards? I bet somebody has a deck. Or checkers. I’m pretty sure there’s a set in the supply room.” Donald liked to play games and I figured it would take his mind off his worries. He was really attached to his grandparents. The couple of times I tried to get him talking about his life away from Miller’s Valley, his other school, his other friends, his mother, he hadn’t said much and I just let it go. I didn’t even know what his mother looked like. His grandmother had a heart-shaped locket she wore all the time, but the only picture in it was one of Donald.

“Mimi!” LaRhonda yelled.

LaRhonda’s father and mother were setting up the big steel dishes they used at the restaurant for wedding receptions and christening parties. LaRhonda’s father let me and LaRhonda light the little candles underneath, that kept the chipped beef and the mashed potatoes warm. “Who eats chipped beef?” LaRhonda said.

“I like chipped beef,” Donald said, just like I knew he would. He and LaRhonda, oil and water, as my mother liked to say.

The older men were already digging in, ladling chipped beef on slices of toast. “There’s more where that came from,” Mr. Venti said to each one. Everyone was suspicious of him; he’d blown into town after the Second World War to visit a buddy and just stayed on. “Like he fell from the sky,” Donald’s grandfather liked to say, shaking his head, as though the sky was a bad place to be from. Besides, there weren’t any other Italians in Miller’s Valley. There weren’t really any new immigrants in Miller’s Valley at all. You could tell by their last names that people who lived in the area were originally from Germany or Poland or some of the Slavic countries, but they’d been Americans long enough to have flat vowels and made-up minds. When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all.

Maybe that was what annoyed them about LaRhonda’s father, too, that it looked like Mr. Venti had showed up out of nowhere and pulled off that American dream. He’d opened a