Page 20 of The Dutch House

“Never once.”

I shook my head. “Me neither. That’s strange, isn’t it? That we never thought about Mr. Smith, how he died?”

“What makes you think he’s dead? I always thought he puther out on the curb with the kids, and Dad must have driven by at just the wrong moment, offered them a ride.”

“I feel bad for Norma and Bright over there by themselves.”

“May they rot in hell.” Maeve stubbed her cigarette out on a saucer. “All three of them.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said. “Not the girls.”

My sister reared back with such ferocity that for a split second I thought she meant to hit me. “She stole from us. Do you not understand that? They’re sleeping in our beds and eating off our plates and we will never, never get any of it back.”

I nodded. What I wanted to say, what I did not say, was that I’d been thinking the same thing about our father. We would never get him back.

Maeve and I set up housekeeping together. We found a secondhand dresser at the Goodwill and stuck it in the corner of the bedroom so I could put my clothes away. I still didn’t like taking the bedroom, but every night, Maeve went to the couch with her stack of blankets. I wanted to ask her about finding a bigger place, but seeing as how it was all on her—our food and our shelter—I thought better of it.

When everything was all set up, we called Sandy and Jocelyn to come and see what we’d accomplished. Maeve brought home a white box of cookies from the bakery. She arranged the cookies on a plate and threw out the box, as if we were going to fool them. I straightened up the cushions on the couch, she put away the glasses that were in the drainboard. When the bell finally rang we threw open the door and the four of us exploded with joy. What a reunion! You would have thought it had been years since we’d seen one another.

It had been two weeks.

“Look at you,” Sandy said, reaching up to put her hands on my shoulders. I thought her hair was grayer. There were tears in her eyes.

Sandy and Jocelyn hugged us and kissed us in a way they never had at home. Jocelyn was wearing dungarees and Sandy had on a cotton skirt with cheap tennis shoes. They were regular people now, not the people who worked for us. Still, they handed over one big jar of minestrone soup (Maeve’s favorite) and another of beef stew (mine).

“You can’t feed us!” Maeve said.

“I’ve always fed you,” Jocelyn said.

Sandy took a skeptical glance around the living room. “I could come by every now and then, help you keep things up.”

Maeve laughed. “How could I not keep this clean?”

“You have a job,” Sandy said, looking down and running the toe of her shoe across the floor. “You don’t need to worry about keeping house on top of everything else. Anyway, how long could the whole thing take me, an hour?”

“I can do it,” I said, and the three of them looked at me like I was suggesting I make my own clothes. “Maeve won’t let me get a job.”

“Stick to basketball,” Sandy said.

“And making decent grades,” Jocelyn said.

Maeve nodded. “Let’s just wait for a little bit, see how we do.”

“We’re doing fine, really,” I said.

Sandy disappeared into the bedroom and came back five seconds later, looking at me. “Where do you sleep?”

“Does he know how to take care of you?” Jocelyn asked my sister.

Maeve waved her hand. “I’m fine.”

“Maeve,” Jocelyn said. It’s a funny thing to say but she was being stern. Sandy and Jocelyn were never stern with Maeve.

“I take care of everything.”

Jocelyn turned to me. “I have found your sister passed out cold on more than one occasion. Sometimes she forgets to eat or she doesn’t take enough of her insulin. Sometimes it’s nothing she’s done wrong but her sugar goes off all the same. You’ve got to keep an eye on her, especially when things are stressful. She’ll tell you stress has nothing to do with it, but it does.”

“Stop,” Maeve said.