Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,62

me through the gates of CocoPlum to the stucco house with the terra-cotta porch. “See ya,” she said to Margo as she scooted out of the car. “Don’t forget to ask.” She slammed the door.

I waited to drive away until Trisha was inside. I tried to meet Margo’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but she was studying her fingernails. “Ask what?” I said.

“Trisha’s birthday is Saturday. She’s having a sleepover.”

“You can go. What time does it start?”

She shrugged, so I asked about the school day, and then she chatted a little about the softball unit in gym class. We arrived home, and together we walked into the house and found Dennis standing in the kitchen in his boxer shorts, drinking milk from the carton. “Enough,” I said. “You need to find a job.” I was mostly joking.

“Done,” he said, spreading his arms. “I start Monday.”

He’d been hired by a small firm that specialized in immigration and admiralty law. It was law, yes, and there was less money in it than in other areas of practice, but it was a close-knit and casual office, and he believed he could be happy there. Over the years, this would prove true.

We celebrated by going out to an Italian restaurant on Miracle Mile. “Patience is a virtue,” said Dennis, raising his glass. “Right, Margo?”

“I was invited to a sleepover,” she said uncertainly.

“Well done!” said Dennis. We toasted.

That Saturday afternoon, Margo came into the living room, where Dennis was watching basketball and I was reading the newspaper. “Mom,” she said. She gestured for me to get up. I put down the paper and followed her to her bedroom.

“All packed?” I said.

It had been almost a year since Margo had attended a sleepover. She looked miserable. She slumped on her bed, her hands wedged between her knees. Through my mind flashed a memory of her standing on the sidewalk outside Mr. Oxley’s classroom, looking confident and charming, and my gut clenched. “I have a problem,” she said.

I tried to sound capable and maternal. “Let’s try and solve it.”

She looked around the room, avoiding my eyes. I knelt in front of her. “What’s wrong?”

Her arms looped around my neck and her head found my shoulder. I felt the hard chill of an earring on my skin. “Trisha shaves her legs,” she said. “And so does Melanie, but she won’t be there tonight because she’s still sick. Beverly Jovanovich does, too, and Sonia Rodriguez.”

This had always been a cross-the-bridge-when-we-come-to-it issue, and here we were. It seemed as if Margo had just turned eleven—though she’d really turned eleven six months earlier—but her classmates were twelve and thirteen. She’d skipped a year of school, of development, of everything. Fourth grade was simultaneously one year and two grades in the past. For the purposes of this conversation, Margo wasn’t eleven at all. The math was confounding.

“Once you start,” I said, “you never get to stop.” After a certain point, I wanted to tell her, your whole life will be like this—more or less the same forever, the same sadnesses and joys returning again and again. But Margo did not need to know that her mother had difficulty distinguishing between the trivial and the all-encompassing, that a person could so easily sidestep from shaving to despair.

Margo’s eyes were clear, her face still and serious. “I know,” she said, and in that moment I believed she did.

“Not today,” I said, and though she scowled, I suspected she was relieved. “Wear pants and take your pj’s—no one will know.”

“When?”

“When you turn twelve,” I said. I almost said, “When you’re home from camp,” but I remembered that Margo wasn’t returning to summer camp. She was going to take tennis lessons at the Youth Center instead, then she and I would drive up and spend a week in Georgia with my mother, who wanted to teach Margo to knit and take her strawberry picking, and then in August we were planning a road trip to Washington, D.C. Dennis wanted Margo to see the Capitol.

“A birthday present?”

“Sure thing,” I said, thinking, Just you wait. The stubble burn, the red bumps, the never-ending chore. “I wanted to tell you something.”

Her arms dropped. “What?”

I spoke carefully. “One reason your father and I believed you should move ahead a year was because you’re more mature than most girls your age. Physically, I mean.”

She avoided my eyes. “OK.”

“So even though I don’t want you to start shaving your legs so young, I’m happy that your new friends are so mature, because