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By Root 674 0

Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.

They passed the house with all the statues in the yard—elves and baby deer and a row of ducks. Agatha wished their own yard had statues, but her mother said statues were common. “Right now,” she said, “the last thing I can afford is looking common.” She talked a lot these days about what she couldn’t afford. Danny hadn’t left them well provided for.

They passed the house that said MRS. GOODE, PALMIST—FORTUNES CHEERFULLY TOLD, but their mother didn’t stop. Agatha was glad. Mrs. Goode was gray all over and her parlor smelled of mothballs. They came to where the shops began, shoe repairs and laundromats. At Luckman’s Pharmacy Thomas and Agatha slowed hopefully, but their mother said, “We’ll go to Joyner’s this time.” She rotated her drugstores because she didn’t want people thinking she bought too many pills. It was a pity, though. Luckman’s had one of those gumball machines with plastic charms intermingled. Thomas and Agatha let their feet drag and sent a longing gaze backward.

Traffic in this area was busier, and the bus exhausts made the heat seem worse. Thomas wore a smudgy mustache of sweat. Each click of their mother’s heels shot something like a little sharp paring knife straight through Agatha’s head.

On Govans Road the long, low front of Rumford & Son’s Office Equipment took up nearly half a block. They stood facing it across the street, waiting for the light to change. Thomas said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if typewriter stores had gumball machines?”

“Well, they don’t, and I don’t want you asking,” their mother said.

“I wasn’t going to ask!”

“Just be very, very quiet, so I won’t be sorry I brought you.”

In the olden days, she didn’t have to bring them places. She’d say, “Oh! I’m going stir-crazy, I tell you.” Or, “I’m getting cabin fever.” She would ask Ian or Mrs. Myrdal to baby-sit, because back then she could afford it. She would go out all afternoon and come home happy and show the children what she had picked up for them—candy bars and lollipops, sometimes even toys if they were small enough to fit in her bag. But now she had to take the three of them everywhere. She took them to her doctor, even, and when she was called inside Agatha had to watch the other two. “Can’t we go back to having sitters?” Agatha would ask, already knowing the answer. The answer was, “No, we can’t. Face the facts, sweetheart: we’re in the Department of Reality now.” Their mother’s favorite thing to say. Agatha hated hearing that and she would cover her ears like Thomas, but when she took her hands away her mother would still be talking. “You think I like having you with me every single second? Think I wouldn’t rather just leave on my own any time I get the notion?”

Their mother loved them, but they kept trying to make her not love them. That was what she told them. “You want me to walk out on you,” she told them, “but I refuse to do it.”

Whenever she said that, Thomas would take hold of some little part of her clothing, down near the hemline where she didn’t notice.

The light turned green and they crossed the street. Their mother’s heels sounded daintier now. When they stepped inside the store, cold air washed over them—lovely, cold, blowing