Happily Ever Emma (5 page)

Usually, she’s in the bathroom when I say, “
She can’t come to the phone.
”

Every kid knows that you never say,
“My mother is gone, gone, gone! And who knows when she’ll be back? I am all alone here, and totally unprotected!”
when some stranger calls on the phone.

I don’t have the nerve to choose numbers one, two, three, or four, so I panic and choose number

five, which my mom would say was the right choice to make. “I’m sorry, but Maggie can’t come to the phone right now. May I take a message?” I look around for paper and a pencil. I can’t find either, but who cares? It’s not like I’m really gonna write anything down.

“Is this Emma?” the voice asks, all friendly and jolly. He knows my name after
one date
with my mom? This is too much!

“It all depends,” I tell him in my frostiest voice.

“Well, okay,” he says, sounding a little confused. “This is Dennis Engelman. And it’s a complicated message, so I’ll go slowly. Are you ready to write it all down?”

“Sure,” I say, trying to hold the phone and peel a banana—fruit, Mom!—at the same time. I also practice winking one eye, which makes the clock on the wall seem to jump back and forth. Cool.

“It’s about this coming Wednesday night,” he tells me slowly, so I can supposedly get every detail of the message right. “I can’t make it up to Oak Glen that night after all. My out-of-town client is arriving in San Diego a day early, and I’m going to have to take him out for a big seafood dinner. So I have to cancel my date with your mom.”

“But I’m hoping we can change our date to Friday,” the man—Dennis Engelman—continues. “Maybe we can meet at that Italian restaurant she likes in Escondido. At, say, seven thirty. And you’re welcome to join us, Emma. If this is Miss Emma McGraw to whom I am speaking,” he adds in a jokey way, speaking like someone in an old movie.

“I’m writing it all down,” I fib, not giving anything away. The man sighs. “So ask Maggie to call me at home tonight if there’s a problem with the change, okay? Or if she just wants to talk,” he adds, sounding a little lonely all of a sudden. “Sure. Okey-dokey. I’ll tell her,” I say through a mouthful of banana—because this strange-man-who-knows-my-name does not deserve my very best manners.

And he is
not
going to have a second date with my mom. “Thanks,” the man says. “Well, good-bye, young lady. Whoever you are!”

“Bye,” I say, and I hang up the phone as hard as I possibly can.

My mother is a lot calmer than before when she comes back upstairs from doing the laundry. “How’s the homework coming, Emma?” she asks, balancing the laundry basket on one hip. “Were there any phone calls?” She sounds shy.

Aha! So she
thought
he might call. And she didn’t even tell me about going out next Wednesday night. She was going to spring it on me!

“Nope,” I say, feeling only a little bit guilty. “My homework’s finished, and it’s been pretty quiet, except for when I ate a banana. Can I watch TV before bedtime?”

“For half an hour,” Mom says, nodding. “If we can agree on the show. And then you can read in bed a little, and then it’s nighty-night, sleep tight.”

“Nighty-night,” I agree, looking away. “Sleep tight.”

Maybe
Dennis Engelman
won’t sleep tight tonight, though—because Mom’s not going to call him, no matter how lonely he is.

“Did he sound tall, Emma?” Annie Pat asks me the next day, Tuesday, during lunch.

“How does a person sound tall? That doesn’t even make any sense,” I say. A cool breeze ruffles my curly brown hair, and Annie Pat’s pigtails quiver. I take a bite of my bagel sandwich.

“Well, what about handsome? Did he sound
handsome
?” she persists, nipping off the corner of her tuna sandwich and looking at me with her navy-blue eyes.

My friend Annie Pat is very romantic. She is trying to remain loyal to me by not liking the man my mom went out with on a date, but at the same time, she wants that man to be wonderful.

“Did
who
sound handsome?” Kry Rodriguez says, plopping down next to me on the bench and opening her lunchbox, which she decorated herself with stickers and sequins. And it looks great, that’s how cool Kry is.

I wanted this talk with Annie Pat to be private, but we both like Kry a lot. Kry is fun to be with
and
to look at, because her shiny black hair falls over her shoulders like a waterfall. Also, Kry’s bangs are so long that Annie Pat sometimes wonders how

she can see. But I know that Kry can see perfectly well—the way Yorkshire Terriers can see, even though their long, silky fur may be flopping way over their eyes.

Spread your fingers apart, hold your hand in front of your face, and then stare through your open fingers at something in the distance. That’s what it must be like for hairy dogs, and for Kry.

Annie Pat nudges my ribs with her elbow and looks sideways at me, silently asking whether she should answer Kry—because this whole thing about my mom going on a date is supposed to be a deep dark secret.

But what Annie Pat doesn’t know is that I am keeping some things secret even from
her.
For instance, I did not tell her about Dennis needing to cancel his date with my mother on Wednesday night. And I didn’t tell Annie Pat that he is expecting my mom to meet him for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Escondido on Friday.

Of course, I didn’t tell my mother those things, either, which will make Wednesday night at our house bad, bad, bad for my mom, and Friday night at the restaurant extremely strange and sad for Dennis.

I
hope.
Because maybe then he’ll give up.

But all this drama is giving me an unfamiliar, funny feeling inside, somewhere between my stomach and my throat. Is this what guilt feels like?

Hey, Annie Pat is sitting on one side of me, and Kry is on the other, and I am stuck in the middle. It’s a guilt sandwich! Because Annie Pat and Kry are really nice, the way I used to be.

I still think I did the right thing about that phone call, though. But even if I didn’t, it’s too late to make it right. And it’s not as if I told my mom a big fat lie. I just didn’t tell her one small skinny truth, that’s all.

“Is
who
handsome?” Kry asks patiently.

I decide that I might feel better if I tell Kry some of what has been happening. After all, her mom is divorced, too, so maybe she’ll understand. “My mother went out on a date with some random guy a week ago,” I say, trying to say it in a way that is fair, but that will make Kry see everything my way. “And she just
shouldn’t
have, that’s all. But her date called last night when Mom was downstairs doing the laundry, and I forgot to give her the message. Only it’s for her own good,” I add, believing the words the second I say them.

It
is
for my mother’s own good—because look at how miserable she was when she got divorced! I was only four years old, but even I could tell that she was pretty sad. She cried a lot, and she forgot how to have fun for a long time, and she told her friends she couldn’t talk about it, and then she talked to them about it on the phone for hours.

It was
boring.

She even packed the wrong day-care snack for me—more than once, too.

How could she even
think
of dating again?

“Whoa,” Kry says, her sandwich frozen halfway to her mouth. “You’d better tell her he called, Emma,” she advises. “You have to tell grown-ups when they get a phone message, or—or—”

“Or an emergency could happen,” Annie Pat says, her eyes wide as she finishes Kry’s sentence.

“Yeah,” Kry agrees, nodding solemnly. “And you might not be allowed to answer the phone any more.”

“Who cares?” I say, shrugging. “It rings too much anyway.”

Kry sighs. “I wish
my
mom would start dating again,” she announces to Annie Pat and me.

“No you don’t,” I tell her.