Charlie waved a hand through the air, a signal I recognized to mean
“Sure. I’ll light the grill?”
In a robot voice, Ella said, “I will not eat a burger, please, thank you.” She was still on Charlie’s lap, and she poked the end of his nose. Could she not tell what a wretchedly bad mood he was in, or was it that her father’s moods were beside the point, subordinate to her own? In moments like these, I envied her.
“Cut it out,” Charlie said, and Ella-as-robot replied, “Will not cut it out. Do not know what
Charlie looked at me. “Can you do something?”
“Ella, I need your help.” I extended my hand, and she slid off Charlie and took it. Even standing that close, I did not kiss or embrace him, he did not kiss or embrace me, and I felt the shadow of my conversation with Jadey pass over us like an airplane on a sunny day. To Ella, I said, “Will you set the table?”
I DROPPED ELLA off at school the next morning, and I easily could have parked and walked over to see Nancy Dwyer—the admissions and financial aid office was down the hall from Ella’s classroom—but I didn’t want to go in without an appointment. Back at home, Charlie had left for work (he hadn’t planned to tell Arthur, John, or the rest of his family about his plans with the Brewers until the deal was final, a decision that seemed smart now). I went upstairs and took a seat at my desk in the second-floor hallway. As I dialed Nancy’s number, the ropy branches of a weeping willow outside stirred in the breeze, an enlarged reflection of the papier-mache Giving Tree on my desk, and when Nancy answered, I said, “It’s Alice Blackwell. Am I catching you at a bad time?” The next day would be the last of the school year, though I knew that people in more administrative jobs tended not to abide by the same schedule as the teachers and students.
“Not at all,” Nancy said. “What can I do for you?”
“I hope this won’t seem too odd, but I—we—have some family friends, and there’s a girl who’s just finishing sixth grade—her grandmother is very close to Charlie’s family—and she’s quite smart, clearly a strong student, and I’m wondering if there’d be any way of squeezing her into the seventh-grade class for this fall.”
“You mean this fall as in three months from now?” Nancy laughed, but not unkindly. She and I didn’t know each other well. We had met when Ella was applying to Biddle as a three-year-old, an application that was a bit ridiculous in that it mostly entailed our confirming that she was potty-trained and wouldn’t bite other children, and also in that John was head of the board of trustees. Charlie joked that Ella would have had to make a bowel movement on the floor of Nancy’s office not to be accepted, and even then they probably still would have taken her.
“I realize it’s a long shot,” I said.
Nancy said, “But not necessarily impossible.”
“There’s more,” I said. “I suspect she’d need full financial aid, or close to it.”
“Oh, jeez, Alice.”
“She’s African-American,” I added. “I’m imagining that might help? But really, she’s just incredibly bright and nice, a leader in her church’s youth group, she’s on student council, and she’s a voracious reader. She’s graduating from Harrison Elementary, and she’s supposed to enter Stevens, and, Nancy, between you and me, the thought of this really promising girl—”
“No, I know,” Nancy said. “It’s heartbreaking.” She exhaled a long breath. “Let me have a think and get back to you. What I can already see that we’ll run up against is the financial-aid factor. Even though the incoming seventh grade will be big, we can usually make room for another. But the aid was allotted months ago, and it’s tight as a drum.”
Biddle’s endowment, I knew, was five million dollars, and I understood why it would be unwise to start draining it, but it was hard to imagine that fifty-five hundred dollars—the tuition for seventh grade—would make a difference.
“We could make her a top-priority candidate for the fall of ’89,” Nancy was saying. “But if the chance we can come through with aid is so slim this year, I’m hesitant to set the application process in motion—I don’t want to get her to campus only to turn her away.”
“No, of course,” I said. “I appreciate you even considering the possibility.”
“Give me her name.” I could hear Nancy rustling through pieces of paper.
I said, “Jessica Sutton,” going slowly enough for Nancy to spell it out.
“Now, Alice, I don’t mean to be forward, but the obvious person to talk to about this is your brother-in-law John. Have you spoken with him?”
“I wanted to run the idea by you first.”
“I’ll be honest. On the one hand, I don’t feel hopeful, given the timing. On the other hand”—Nancy chuckled a little—“we at Biddle do love the Blackwell family.”
BIDDLE’S LAST DAY of school officially ended at noon, at which point the children in each class were loaded onto buses and shuttled off to their respective end-of-the-year parties. For the third-graders coming to our house, I’d gotten hamburger meat—not Blackwell brand—and a sheet cake that said HAVE A GREAT SUMMER! in unnatural-looking red icing, several tubs of ice cream, and balloons in maroon and navy, which were Biddle’s colors. When I went to the party store to pick up the balloons, the clerk told me I was the second person that morning to request this color combination. Back at home, I called Jadey, who was hosting the seventh-grade party for Winnie’s class, and said, “Did you also get blue and maroon balloons from Celebrations?”
She laughed. “As I was placing the order, I even thought of doubling it and giving half to you.”
Two other mothers, Joyce Sutter and Susan Levin, came over to help with the party, bringing chips and condiments and two-liters of pop, and we unrolled the Slip ’n Slide in the backyard. Joyce positioned the hose nearby as Susan scooped the ground beef into hamburger patties. I was a little surprised to discover that neither of them knew how to grill, so I doused the charcoal in lighter fluid and dropped in a match myself.
We all hurried to the front lawn when we heard the bus, and we found third-graders everywhere, boisterous and disheveled. One boy tore his shirt off, shouting, “I call first on the Slip ’n Slide.” Many of the children were
