Thomas Ellington Jr. was the best friend I had. I don’t remember when I’d given him that distinction, but by the time I was ten, he was the only person I cared to play with. Other girls my age made me uneasy. My life looked different from theirs—their Easy-Bake Ovens, their homemade hair bows, their proper socks. Their mothers. I learned very early on that being different from them didn’t feel good.
But the Ellingtons made me feel good.
The thing about Mrs. Ellington’s invitation was that she must have somehow known my mother had left. Because my mother no longer allowed me to attend dinner at the Ellingtons’. At some point she had decided I needed to be home by a quarter to five every night, although there was nothing to come home to: the oven was always cold and the fridge was always empty. By then, most evenings my father and I ate instant oatmeal. He’d bring home small packets of brown sugar for the top, ones he stuffed in his pockets from the cafeteria at the hospital, where he managed the cleaning staff. He made decent enough money then, by local standards at least. We just didn’t seem to live that way.
I had somehow learned that it was polite to bring a gift when invited to a nice dinner, so I had clipped a fistful of hydrangeas from our front bush, although late September had turned most of the white petals to a crispy dusty pink. I tied the stems with my rubber hair elastic.
“You’re such a thoughtful young woman,” Mrs. Ellington had said. She put them in a blue vase and placed them carefully on the table in the middle of the steaming dishes.
Thomas’s younger brother, Daniel, adored me. We played trains in the living room after school while Thomas did his homework with his mother. I always saved mine for after eight o’clock, when Cecilia either went to bed or was gone for the night to the city. She did that often—went to the city and came back the next day. So doing my homework then gave me something to do while I waited for my eyes to get tired. Little Daniel fascinated me. He spoke like an adult and knew how to multiply when he was just five years old. I would quiz him on the times tables while we played on the Ellingtons’ scratchy orange rug, amazed at how clever he was. Mrs. Ellington would pop in to listen and always touched each of our heads before she left. Good job, you two.
Thomas was smart, too, but in different ways. He made up the most incredible stories, which we’d write in the tiny spiral notebooks his mother bought us at the corner store. Then we’d draw pictures to go along with every page. Each book would take us weeks—we painstakingly discussed what to draw for each part of the story and then took our time sharpening the whole box of pencils before we began. Once Thomas let me bring one home, a story I loved about a family with a beautiful, kind mother who became very sick with a rare form of deadly chicken pox. They go for their last vacation together as a family to a faraway island, where they find a tiny, magical gnome in the sand named George, who speaks only in rhymes. He grants them the gift of one special superpower in exchange for bringing him home in their suitcase to the other side of the world. They agree, and he gives them what they wish for—Your mom will live forever, until the end of time. Whenever you get sad, just sing this little rhyme! The gnome lives inside the mother’s pocket for eternity, happily ever after. I’d drawn the family carefully on the pages of this book—they looked just like the Ellingtons, but with a third child who didn’t look anything like them: a daughter with Crayola-peach skin like mine.
One morning I found my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, flipping through the book, which I’d hidden deep in my drawer.
“Where did this come from?” She spoke without looking at me and stopped on the page where I’d drawn myself as part of the Black family.
“I made it. With Thomas. At his house.” I reached for the book in her hands, my book. The reach was pleading. She yanked her arm away from me, and then tossed the book at my head, as though the spiraled pages and everything about them disgusted her. The corner clipped my chin and the book landed between us on the floor. I stared at it, embarrassed. Of the pictures she didn’t like, of the fact that I’d been hiding it from her.
My mother stood up, her thin neck erect, her shoulders back. She shut the door quietly behind her.
I brought the book back to Thomas’s house the next day.
“Why don’t you want to keep it? You were so proud of what you two made together.” Mrs. Ellington took it from my hands and saw that it was bent in a few places. She smoothed the cover softly. “It’s okay,” she said, shaking her head so that I didn’t have to answer. “You can keep it here.”
She put it on the bookshelf in their living room. When I was leaving that day, I noticed she’d opened the book to the last page and faced it out toward the room—the family of five, me included, our arms around one another, an explosion of tiny hearts coming from our smiling mother who stood in the middle.
At the Sunday dinner on the night my mother left, I offered to clean the kitchen with Mrs. Ellington. She clicked on a cassette tape and sang just a little as she cleared the table and wiped the counters. I watched her bashfully from the corner of my eye while I rinsed the dishes. At one point she stopped and picked up the oven mitt from the counter. She looked at me with a playful smile, slipped it over her hand, and held it up beside her head.
“Miss Blythe,” she said in a funny high-pitched voice, her hand moving in the puppet. “We ask all of our celebrity guests here on the Ellington After-Dinner Talk Show a few questions about themselves. So. Tell us—what do you like to do for fun, hmm? Ever go to the movies?”