Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Anne Tyler Page 0,10

be a good idea. Maybe they hadn’t considered; maybe it had been a case of mindless passion. But that was even harder to imagine. At any rate, the second pregnancy had brought to light some defect in Thea Battista’s heart, or perhaps had caused the defect, and she was dead before Bunny’s first birthday. For Kate, it was hardly a change from the absence she’d known all her life. And Bunny didn’t even remember their mother, although some of Bunny’s gestures were uncannily similar—the demure tuck of her chin, for instance, and her habit of nibbling prettily on the very tip of her index finger. It was almost as if she had been studying their mother from inside the womb. Their aunt Thelma, Thea’s sister, was always saying, “Oh, Bunny, I swear, it makes me cry to see you. If you aren’t the image of your poor mother!”

Kate, on the other hand, was not in the least like their mother. Kate was dark-skinned and big-boned and gawky. She would have looked absurd gnawing on a finger, and nobody had ever called her sweet.

Kate was una bitcha.

—

“Katherine, my dear!”

Kate turned from the stove, startled. Her father stood in the doorway with a shiny smile on his face. “How was your day?” he asked her.

“It was all right.”

“Things went well?”

“Semi-okay.”

“Excellent!” He continued standing there. As a rule, he returned from his lab in a funk, his mind still occupied with whatever he had been working on, but maybe today he’d had a breakthrough of some sort. “You walked to work, I guess,” he said.

“Well, sure,” she said. She always walked, unless the weather was truly miserable.

“And you had a nice walk home?”

“Yup,” she said. “I ran into your assistant, by the way.”

“Did you!”

“Yup.”

“Wonderful! How was he?”

“How was he?” Kate repeated. “Don’t you know how he was?”

“I mean, what did you talk about?”

She tried to remember. “Hair?” she said.

“Ah.” He went on smiling. “What else?” he asked finally.

“That was it, I guess.”

She turned back to the stove. She was reheating the concoction they had for supper every night. Meat mash, they called it, but it was mainly dried beans and green vegetables and potatoes, which she mixed with a small amount of stewed beef every Saturday afternoon and puréed into a grayish sort of paste to be served throughout the week. Her father was the one who had invented it. He couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t follow the same system; it provided all the requisite nutrients and saved so much time and decision-making.

“Father,” she said, lowering the gas flame, “did you know Bunny’s arranged for Edward Mintz to be her Spanish tutor?”

“Who is Edward Mintz?”

“Edward next door, Father. He was over here this afternoon when I got home from work. Here in the house, incidentally, which you’ll recall is against the rules. And we have no idea if he’s any good as a tutor. I don’t even know what she told him we would pay him. Did she ask you about this?”

“Well, I believe she…yes, I seem to recollect she said she wasn’t doing well in Spanish.”

“Yes, and you said she should go ahead and find a tutor, but why didn’t she get in touch with that place that’s supplying her math tutor and her English tutor? Why did she hire a neighbor boy?”

“She must have had good reason,” her father said.

“I don’t know why you assume that,” Kate told him. She banged her spoon against the side of the pot to dislodge the clump of mash that was stuck to it.

It always amazed her to see how ignorant her father was about normal everyday life. The man existed in a vacuum. Their housekeeper used to say it was because he was so smart. “He has very important matters on his mind,” she would say. “Wiping out worldwide disease and such.”

“Well, that shouldn’t mean he can’t have us on his mind besides,” Kate had said. “It’s like those mice of his matter more to him than we do. Like he doesn’t even care about us!”

“Oh, he does, honey! He does. He just can’t show it. It’s like he…never learned the language, or something; like he comes from another planet. But I promise you he cares about you.”

Their housekeeper would have thoroughly approved of Mrs. Darling’s Something Nice rule.

“When I mentioned Pyoder’s visa the other day,” her father was saying, “I’m not sure you fully understood the problem. His visa is good for three years. He’s been here two years and ten months.”

“Gee,” Kate