Final Appeal

again. There are only twenty possible answers; it shouldn’t take that long to get the answer I want, and I am a patient woman. I shake the ball and look at the bottom.

It is certain.

Where are all the negative answers? Must be defective. I listen to the stone silence coming from Maddie’s room. She’s boycotting me because I won’t let her invite her grandfather to her class play. Should I invite him? I shake the ball and turn it over.

Most likely.

Hmmm. I’ll rephrase the question; I didn’t go to law school for nothing. Should we never see Maddie’s grandfather again? I shake the ball harder, then rotate it.

My reply is no.

“Damn!” I say aloud, and Bernice raises her head. “Why don’t we take him, Bernice? He and Grandma could duke it out in the auditorium. You bring the camcorder. We’ll be on Funniest Home Videos.”

I set down the Eight Ball next to the card my father sent Maddie today, which started this whole thing. A short hello, then a list of Italian words, with their meaning. Girl: ragazza. Dog: cane. Cat: gatto. Seems that Emedio “Mimmy” Rossi and his grandaughter got to talking about languages at recess that day. Now Maddie is convinced she wants to learn Italian.

Love: amore. I have to admit, it’s a pretty language.

“Mom?” Maddie calls faintly from upstairs. Bernice looks toward the stairway at the sound.

“What?”

“Can you come up?”

“Sure.” I put down the card, and since Bernice is still cane non grata outside the kitchen, I climb over the gate. It catches me neatly in the crotch. Either Bernice goes free or I get taller.

I head up the stairs to Maddie’s door, which is plastered with stickers of butterflies, frogs, porcupines, and metallic spiders. Here and there is a much-valued “oily,” the goopy stickers that are all the rage with the younger set. Me, I had crayons, eight in all. “Did you want me, Mads?”

“You can come in,” she says grudgingly.

“Good.” I turn the knob, but the door doesn’t move much.

“Maddie, is something blocking the door?”

“Wait a minute.” I hear her dragging things around inside. She must have barricaded the door again with her Little Tikes chairs; they never show that particular use in the catalog. “Okay,” she says. “You can come in now.”

I open the door and it shoves aside the clutter behind it, including a chair, a white stuffed gorilla, and about three hundred multicolored wooden blocks. “So, how are we doing up here?”

She holds out her palm. “Look.”

In the center of her hand is an ivory nugget. I pick it up in wonder. The front edge is the bevel I recognize and the other end is a fragile circle tinged with blood. “Wow! Your first tooth, Maddie.”

“It didn’t even hurt.”

“How’d it come out?”

“I pulled it out.”

I recoil. “Really?”

She nods.

“Let me see your mouth. Smile.”

She snarls in compliance, and sure enough, there’s an arched window where her front tooth used to be. Then she snaps her mouth shut like a baby alligator. “I’m still mad, you know. This isn’t a make-up.”

“I understand. Let’s get the tooth ready for the Tooth Fairy.”

“I’ll take care of it. It’s mine. Give it back.” She holds out her hand.

“Don’t be fresh.” I put the tooth in her palm.

“Thank you,” she says, and walks over to her play table. It’s covered with play lipsticks, plastic jewelry, art supplies, and old scarves I’ve given her for dress-up. She plucks a blue paisley scarf from the pile and wraps the tooth up in it. Then she writes with a crayon on a scrap of pink construction paper.

“What are you doing, honey?”

“I have to write a note.”

“No, you don’t. You put the tooth under your pillow, and the Tooth Fairy leaves you some money.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

So cute. My daughter’s first tooth and we’re not on speaking terms. “That’s quite enough, miss. Would you like a time-out?”

“Well, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to myself.”

“Fine, but you may not be rude.”

She turns around in her bare feet and thrusts the paper at me. It says, in wobbly red letters: I DON WAN $. T R T G RD. THAN YU. “I don’t do lower case.”

“It’s very nice. What’s this part say?”

“It says, I don’t want money.” She points to the end. “Thank you.”

“Why don’t you want money?”

“I want her to bring my grandfather to the play.”

I sigh in the martyred way my mother taught me. “Why, Maddie? Why does it matter so much?”

“Because everybody else will have a daddy there and I won’t. Everybody else will have a grandpop there and I won’t. Everybody else has sisters and brothers and I don’t.” Her lower lip trembles. “All I have is stupid old red hair and freckles that everybody makes fun of.”

I look down at her blue eyes, on the verge of welling up. There’s nothing in the book about this.

Suddenly, I hear a rustling down in the kitchen, then the click-clack of nails on the stairs. I turn around just in time to catch Bernice before she plows into Maddie. She must have jumped the gate.

“She’s out!” Maddie screams, backing up against her play table.

“I got her. So you busted out, huh, Bernice?”

“Put her back in the kitchen!”

I hold Bernice by her new ten-dollar collar with its gold electroplate heart: G. ROSSI, it says. The dog wriggles with joy at her liberation from the kitchen. Her tail wags so hard that her hindquarters go with it, a living example of the tail wagging the dog.

“Aw, Maddie, let’s leave her out a little. She’s sick of the kitchen. She wants to be with us.”

The dog swings her head from me to Maddie. It may be my imagination, but Bernice’s expression is as close to hopeful as a draft horse can get.

“She’s staring at me again,” Maddie says. “Why does she have to stare?”

“She wants you to be her friend.”

“I can see her teeth.”

“So she has teeth, Maddie. You have teeth, she has teeth. Dogs lose baby teeth too. Did you know that? Just like you.”

“So what?”

A tough nut. “Why don’t you ask her to sit, like Miss Waxman taught her?”

“She won’t do it for me.”

“How do you know? You never tried. Give her a chance.”

Maddie looks at me, then at Bernice. “Now you sit!” she shouts.

Miraculously, Bernice sits. Right on the spot. Her tail goes thump thump thump on the hardwood floor.

“She did it!” Maddie says.

“She’s a good girl. Ask her to do something else. What else did Miss Waxman teach her, do you remember?”

Maddie locks eyes with an excited Bernice. “Roll over!”