trowel into her gardening bucket and reached for her dandelion weeder.
The telephone rang again.
This time, she made it into the house before the answering machine could click over. She snatched up the receiver and said, “How many times did you think I’d fall for this, Father?”
“Ah, Kate! Katherine. It seems I’ve forgotten my lunch again.”
She was silent.
“Are you there?”
“I guess you’ll have to go hungry,” she said.
“Excuse me? Please, Kate. I don’t ask very much of you.”
“Actually, you ask a lot of me,” she told him.
“I just need you to bring my lunch. I haven’t eaten since last night.”
She considered. Then she said, “Fine,” and slammed the receiver down before she could hear his response.
She went out to the hall and shouted up the stairs: “Bunny?”
“What,” Bunny said, from much nearer than Kate had expected.
Kate turned from the stairs and went to the living-room doorway. Bunny and Edward Mintz were sitting rather close together on the couch. Bunny had an open book on her lap. “Hi, there, Kate!” Edward said enthusiastically. He was wearing jeans so ragged that both of his hairy bare knees poked out.
Kate ignored him. “Father needs his lunch brought,” she told Bunny.
“Brought where?”
“Where do you think? How come you didn’t answer the phone when it rang?”
“Because I’m having my Spanish lesson?” Bunny said indignantly, spreading her palms to indicate her book.
“Well, take a break from it and run over to the lab.”
“Your dad’s in his lab on Saturdays?” Edward asked Bunny.
“He’s always in his lab?” Bunny said. “He works seven days a week?”
“What, on Sundays too?”
“I don’t know why you can’t do it,” Bunny told Kate, speaking over Edward’s words.
“I’m gardening, is why,” Kate said.
“I’ll drive you there,” Edward told Bunny. “Where is this lab, exactly?”
Kate said, “Sorry. Bunny’s not allowed to ride alone with a boy.”
“Edward’s not a boy!” Bunny protested. “He’s my tutor?”
“You know Father’s rule. Not till you’re sixteen.”
“But I’m a really responsible driver,” Edward told Kate.
“Sorry; it’s the rule.”
Bunny snapped her book shut and flung it onto the couch. “There are plenty of girls in my school a whole lot younger than me that get to ride alone with boys every night of the week,” she said.
“Tell Father that; it’s not my rule,” Kate said.
“It might as well be. You’re just exactly like him: two peas in a pod.”
“I’m what? Take that back!” Kate said. “I’m not a bit like him!”
“Oh, so sorry, my mistake,” Bunny said, with a luminous, sweet smile playing at the corners of her mouth. (The smile of all the mean girls Kate used to know in seventh grade.) She stood up and said, “Come along, Edward.”
He stood up too and followed her. “I am the one and only normal person in this family,” she told him. Kate trailed them through the hall. In the kitchen doorway, she had to stand aside because Bunny was already stalking back out, violently swinging the lunch bag. “The other two are crazy people,” she was telling Edward. He followed her toward the front of the house like a pet dog.
Kate opened the fridge and took out a roast beef sandwich she had bought at the deli counter that morning. Already she was feeling meat-deprived, although she hadn’t even assembled her vegetarian meat mash yet.
While she was unwrapping her sandwich, she happened to glance out the window and see the Mintzes’ gray minivan backing out of their garage. Bunny was in the passenger seat, riding high like royalty and gazing straight ahead.
Well, fine, then. Be that way. If their father cared so much about his precious rules, he ought to stick around to enforce them.
“I don’t remember that I wasn’t allowed to ride alone with a boy,” Kate had told him when he announced this particular rule.
“I don’t remember that any boy asked you,” her father had said.
Kate allowed herself a little fantasy: one day Bunny would get old, and she would age in that unfortunate way that blondes so often did. Her hair would become strawlike, and her face would be wrinkly as an apple and ruddier than her lips. She had turned out to be such a disappointment, their father would confide to Kate.
—
A concrete bench stood at the rear of the backyard, mottled and pitted and greenish. Nobody ever sat on it, but today, instead of eating in the kitchen, Kate decided to take her sandwich out there. She settled at one end of the bench with her sandwich plate beside her, and she tipped her head back to