“Daddy…”
“Don’t go making excuses for me. I won’t have you doing that anymore.” He put a finger to her lips. “Listen to me now. When…when your mom was still alive, she made me so happy, she filled up my life with so much light and sweetness-back then, I could work any job, handle any kind of junk, just so long as I had her to come home to. But ever since…since…”
The red bird, a cardinal, was uncertain as a spark, flitting from fence to ground and back again.
“Life’s not going to wait for you. If there’s one thing losing her taught me, that’s it. The world just keeps barreling forward, ready or not.” He slipped an arm around her. “I need to start over, Mo. I’ve got to take hold of things. I need to leave the bad things behind and make something new for all of us.”
Her father never talked like this. A small door, a door she hadn’t even known was there, not to mention shut, creaked open inside her.
“I lay awake a lot of nights, and you know what? I’m convinced she’d think it was the right thing to do. She couldn’t stand any of us hurting. Any time you cried, she’d cry too. I remember when you got your first haircut, she-”
“No!” Mo buried her face against his chest. The door swung wider, letting in a hot rush of pain. “Please, Daddy. I don’t want to move. It’s too far away. We don’t know anybody here! Who’d cut my hair? Who’d tutor Dottie? What about the Den? What about Starchbutt?”
Mr. Wren laughed. “Whaaa?”
“Daddy, I’d miss Mercedes too much!”
“It seems far, but it’s really just ten miles. I’d drive over and pick her up anytime you wanted. I promise.” He lifted her chin. “You trust me, don’t you?”
Looking away, Mo watched the cardinal settle on an overhead wire.
“I’ve finally got the perfect name for our place,” Mr. Wren said softly. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before. You ready?”
She shook her head.
“The Wren House. Get it? We’ll decorate with bird-houses and feature one on our sign.”
“That’s stupid!” The door inside her slammed shut.
Mr. Wren let her go. The lines between his eyes, the trunk of the tree that arched up and disappeared in the shadows of his baseball cap-those lines seemed to grow deeper, harsher, even as she looked. All the joy drained out of him now. He cast his eyes down as if he could see it on the ground, a puddle of lost happiness.
“Too bad,” he said. The cardinal began to sing, its silvery song tumbling all around them. “I was hoping you’d be more open-minded. Maybe even glad.”
“That Buckman’s a creep!” Mo cried. “He wants to knock our house down!”
Mr. Wren’s face darkened. “A house is just four walls and a roof. You can put a price on a house the same as a car or a baseball team or a pedigree poodle. And when that price all of a sudden skyrockets, you’d be a fool not-”
“How come you’re the only one on the street who knows what Buckman’s doing?”
“There’s such a thing as asking too many questions.” He was scowling now. “You know when a chance like this is going to come our way again? Never, that’s when. ‘I hit big or I miss big.’ Babe Ruth, not Shakespeare, but it works for me.”
A single forgotten beer bottle lay near the building’s foundation. Mr. Wren nudged it with the toe of his sneaker. “Believe me, Mo. I wish I could tell you life was always fair.”
“You want to buy this place and so you’ll do anything! You’ll make a sleazy deal. You’ll betray everyone else. You’ll ruin my life. You don’t care!”
The cardinal broke off its song midnote, and the bird arrowed out of sight. The yard grew cemetery quiet.
“This conversation’s over.” Mr. Wren pulled his cap low over his face. “I’m the one making this decision. Your job’s to get used to it.” With that, he strode toward their car.
Mo grabbed the beer bottle and hurled it at the side of the house. The sound of it smashing zapped her like an electric shock.
“No!” she shouted. “I don’t trust you! And I never will again, as long as I live!”
Wild currents shot through her. At her feet glittered bits and pieces no one could ever put back together.
Traitor, Part 2
IT WAS A CHALLENGE, living in a house as small as the Wrens’ and refusing to speak to someone else who lived there, but Mo was determined. For the next three days, she wouldn’t even meet her father’s eyes, much less answer his questions or acknowledge his lame jokes. If she absolutely had to communicate with him, she put it in writing.
Messages and replies written in fury:
Meanwhile, Mercedes’s father troubles were thickening, too.
“It’s like a surprise attack! Except he warned us!” Her eyes were wide. “He’s coming! Tomorrow!”
“She’s the one who should come.”
Mercedes drew a deep breath. Her next words fell one by one, like medicine from a dropper. “She is. She’s coming.”
“Your mom’s coming to Fox Street?”
Here it was, something Mo and Merce had wished for so many years: Monette coming home. Only now, it was far from the happy occasion they’d always dreamed about. Now it was a water-main break. A summer-long drought. A disaster.
“She says she has something to tell me.” Mercedes’s golden eyes were wide. “Something big.”
Mo grabbed a broom. “We’ve got twenty-four hours to get this house looking beautiful.”
She took the kitchen, which was in the worst shape, while Mercedes started in on the dining room. Someone from church had taken Da grocery shopping, so she couldn’t protest or get insulted as they scoured her house. Mo pulled the vegetable drawer out of the refrigerator and filled it with hot, soapy water.
“We’ll show him,” she reassured Mercedes, who was dusting the dining room. “We’ll whip the place into shape, and he’ll see it’s perfectly fine for Da to stay here.”
A rainbow-kissed bubble drifted up from the sink. Watching it rise made Mo feel strangely off balance, as if one leg had grown shorter than the other. All at once she saw herself in the kitchen of Corky’s Tavern, loading the dishwasher, Dad flipping an omelet, the two of them attempting harmony-
“What did you say?” called Mercedes from the other room.
“All Da needs is someone to come in and clean once in a while.” Taking a deep breath, she recommenced scrubbing with all her might. “And I bet her church would help with meals if she let them. Don’t you think?”
Mercedes appeared in the kitchen doorway, dust rag in hand. Her nose wrinkled and her eyes shut and she pulled her head back against her neck as if someone were trying to kiss her, but the sneeze changed its mind.
“I can’t…”
The sneeze changed its mind again.
“Aa…aa…aaaa!”
