A Happy Catastrophe

Also, she just thought of this stomachache thing when it was time to put on her coat.

Believe me, I may be a rookie at this mothering an eight-year-old business, but I do know some things.

“So what’s really wrong?” I say. “Tell me the truth, and I promise to try to understand. Why don’t you want to go to school? Really?”

She looks like she is going to fake-cry. “Because my stomach hurts so much, and I probably have to throw up, and also I have a fever, and Blanche was sick yesterday and I played with her on the climbing thing, and it was too cold to be outside, and you can get sick if you get too cold. That’s what Lola told me. She said to come in when it’s cold, and I forgot.”

“See? I’m going to be honest with you. That is too many things. When you’re not telling the exact truth about something, and you want to be convincing, you need to limit it to just one really dazzling airtight excuse.”

“What does airtight mean?”

“It means why don’t you really want to go to school? What’s going on?”

To my surprise, she slips off the chair and falls to the ground and rolls herself into a little ball. “I can’t go to school! My tummy is killing me. If you make me go, I’ll just be in the nurse’s office throwing up all day, and they won’t let me stay at school, and then you will look like a very bad mom.”

“But you don’t look sick.”

“But I am. My mom would have let me stay home. So don’t be mean to me.”

“Here, stand up. Let me feel your forehead.” I don’t know what I’m feeling for, but she is now making herself look like a nineteenth-century waif who has lost the will to live.

“All right,” I say at last. “You can stay home.”

She brightens. “Tomorrow, too?”

“Tomorrow, too? What? Wait a minute. What’s this all about, Fritzie Peach?”

“Nothing. I just think I’ll still be sick tomorrow. I might not be well yet. If this is the flu, I definitely won’t be well.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t have the flu. What is this all about?”

She traces a line in the floral pattern of the tablecloth, getting up to follow it all the way to the other side. She won’t look at me.

“I’m on your side, you know. You and me. Against all the forces of evil.”

Then she says in a low voice, “Josie says I stole some money.”

I feel my heart sink at this news. Mostly because I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do is. I want to press pause on this conversation and go off to google “WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN YOUR CHILD IS ACCUSED OF STEALING MONEY?” Do I automatically take her side, or start sussing out whether or not she did do something wrong? Why would she steal money? Is this the acting out that we’ve been waiting to see?

“That must be very hard,” I finally say. “Why does she think that?”

“Well, she thinks that because I was the person collecting the money for the book fair. I was the one picked to take the money to the office, and when I got there, the money wasn’t in my pocket anymore.” She holds out her hands, in the universal gesture of what-the-hell-could-have-happened-here.

“Oh.” I feel a little bit relieved. “So did you drop the money along the way, do you think? Did it fall out of your pocket maybe?”

“Maaaay-beeee.”

“And somebody else possibly came and picked it up and didn’t know where it belonged, and so they . . . took it home with them?” I say, like the good enabler that I am.

“Yes!” she says, brightening. “I bet that is what happened. Will you tell my teacher that that’s what happened?”

“Hmm. Why don’t we check with Maybelle? Maybe it’s in the Lost and Found right now. Wait. How much money are we talking about?”

She shrugs, darkening again.

“You don’t know? Why don’t I email your teacher and ask her? Maybe we’ll just replace it. This is so fixable, Fritzie. It is not a big problem at all. We all lose things or drop them sometimes. We’ll just explain what happened . . .”

“It is a big problem,” she says under her breath.

“I’ll go email Josie right now,” I say, and I get out my laptop from underneath the pile of mail on the counter. But oh dear, as soon as I power it up, I see there’s an email in my inbox from Josie, with the heading, “Can you and Patrick come in?” And then it goes on from there: “There’s a situation I need to bring to your attention concerning Fritzie. We are truly enjoying her liveliness and her inventiveness and her generosity to all her classmates, as I communicated at the teacher conference we had in October. But recently some disturbing things seem to be happening with missing money in our classroom, and each time, Fritzie has been the common denominator.

“We have reason to believe she’s taking money from the other kids, and from the book fair envelope, and we think she may be giving it to another child she’s become friends with. If you and Patrick could come in sometime with Fritzie, I’d like to handle this privately, if possible. How about after school tomorrow?”

“Fritzie,” I say, looking up from the laptop. She’s staring at me from across the table.

“I want my mommy.”

“I know, and we can call her tonight if you want. But for right now, tell me what’s going on. Please.”

Her face crumples. “I want to call her right now. I didn’t talk to her in a long time.”

“We can call her tonight. So tell me—what happened?”

Her voice rises. “Are you going to believe the teacher, or are you going to believe me? My mommy would totally believe me, you know. But you probably don’t believe me because I’m not your real kid.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I can’t help but laugh. “Holy moly! Don’t pull that ‘not your real kid’ stuff before you even tell me what it is. Just tell me this: Are you giving money to another kid?”

“What she says is wrong.”

“What is she saying that’s wrong?”

She puts her head down in her arms on the table.

“Miss Peach. Are you giving money to another child?”

From her face, still buried in her arms, comes this: “Did you know there is a kid at my school who has to live in a shelter? He’s homeless. Like the guy in the subway.”

“And . . . ?”

She lifts her head and starts sniffling, so I hand her a tissue and wait. She looks away and traces her finger on the tablecloth again.

“Fritzie?”

“Ohhhkayyy,” she says. “Well, Laramie told me on the playground that he wanted to tell me a secret, and the secret is that he lives in a shelter with a bunch of other families and . . . and . . . his dad is working somewhere far away and can’t come home, and his grandma is trying to send them money because his mom can’t get a job because she’s got little kids and nobody can babysit them. And Laramie is so sad, and I told him it’s not fair that other kids have so much money. Marnie, they have money that just falls out of their pockets sometimes. It falls on the ground even, and he doesn’t even have any good sneakers. The ones he has have holes in them.”