Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Anne Tyler Page 0,67

aunt Thelma said he looked so much like his dad that it was comical, but Louie didn’t see what was comical about it. Was she talking about he didn’t have big arm muscles like his dad’s arm muscles? But he was getting there.

He put two slices of bread in the toaster oven, and then he hauled the stepstool over to the food cupboard and reached down a can of sardines. He wasn’t all that crazy about sardines, but he liked opening the can with its little tin key. After he’d done that, he took a banana from the bowl on the counter because bananas were miracle food, and he peeled it and cut it into disks with a silverware knife. Then he went out on the landing and called, “Have we got any kidney beans?”

“What? No!” his mom called from his parents’ bedroom.

“Too bad,” he said, mostly to himself. He often ate kidney beans when he went to his grandpa’s house, mashed up with a lot of other stuff. He liked the sourness of them.

“What on earth do you want with kidney beans?” his mom called, but then she added, in a lower voice, “I still don’t see why I can’t just wear pants.”

“This is official occasion, though,” his dad told her. “I myself am wearing suit.”

“You try wearing a dress sometime. I look like a pet dog decked out by some demented child.”

Louie went back to the kitchen and climbed up on the stepstool again and reached down the squeeze bottle of ketchup. Red would go good, he figured. Red, silver, and beige: ketchup, sardines, and bananas. “Where would be the green?” his dad always liked to ask, but his mom would say, “Oh, give it a rest. I’ve known kids who ate nothing but foods that were white until they left for college, and they were perfectly healthy.”

Most times Louie’s grandpa was his sitter, now that Aunt Bunny had married her personal trainer and moved to New Jersey. His grandpa owned a very old and faded book called Curious Science Facts for Young Folks, and when he came to sit he brought it along to read to Louie, which made Louie feel important and cared for even if he didn’t exactly understand every single word. But tonight his grandpa would be going to Washington too, and so would Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay and Uncle Theron, so Louie was staying downstairs with Mrs. Liu. That was okay, though. Mrs. Liu let him drink Coca-Cola, and her friend Mrs. Murphy had these cool objects in her glass-fronted cabinet: a paperweight with gold stars swirling inside it instead of snowflakes, and a bright red berry with a top that opened to spill out a herd of microscopic white elephants, and a weather-house made of tan wood with a brown wooden roof. A tiny man or woman would come to one of the doors of the house—the woman if it was going to be sunny, the man if it was going to rain. Just about always it was the woman, though, holding her eentsy watering can, while the man stayed back in the shadows under his fingernail-size umbrella even when it was pouring. Louie’s dad said it was a very inexact science.

Mrs. Liu wouldn’t let his parents pay her for babysitting because she was Louie’s auntie, she said. When he was little, Louie had thought she really was his aunt, on account of they had the same name, almost, but then his mom explained that Mrs. Liu was just an honorary aunt. And so was Mrs. Murphy, because this was her house they were living in even though Louie’s grandpa wanted them to move in with him. But Louie’s mom said she wasn’t about to move. She said she’d lived here eleven years now and she was perfectly content, and what did they need more room for; it would only be more to vacuum, and his dad said she was absolutely right.

Louie took the toasts from the toaster oven and laid them on the counter. He covered one toast with banana disks and over those he laid sardines, all lined up, and then he drizzled ketchup on everything in a zigzag pattern. Finally he set the second slice of toast on top and pressed down hard, and he put the finished sandwich in a Tupperware sandwich box he got from a drawer. Smushing the sandwich had caused a little of the ketchup to squirt across the countertop, but not very much.

When his dad and his grandpa got their prize, last winter, it was in a whole other country and so Louie had had to go too. The ceremony was so boring that his mom let him play video games over and over on her cell phone. He wasn’t sorry they were leaving him behind this time.

He licked his fingers off where he had smeared ketchup on them, and he tugged the dishtowel from the rack to wipe away as much as possible of the ketchup on his T-shirt. Meanwhile he could hear his parents’ voices on the landing. “Don’t let’s stay a minute longer than we have to,” his mom was saying. “You know how I hate chitchat,” and then the two of them showed up at the kitchen door. His mom’s long black hair was flaring out around her shoulders, and she wore her surprising red party dress with her two bare legs sticking out. His dad had his blue suit on and his pretty purple tie with the yellow lightning marks. “How do we look?” his mom asked, and Louie said, “You look like the weather-house people.”

But then he saw that they didn’t, really. It was true they were standing in a door, but they were both in the one door side by side and very close together, neither one in front or behind, and they were holding hands and smiling.

What’s next on

your reading list?

Discover your next

great read!

* * *

Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

Sign up now.