Maggie

It had been another one of those days. With fury and determination firing through her bright green eyes, Maggie stomped out of the two-story school building precisely at 2:47 without bothering to go to her locker. She stomped the three blocks over and two blocks down to the dilapidated house – if you could call it a house – which she shared with her uncle. She had a few more hours to devise her plan until 5:12 when she needed to go in the house and start creating the evening meal for the two of them. She rarely stopped to think that other fifth-graders had adults at home who made dinner for the kids. She merely accepted her place in Uncle Harvey’s house, because she didn’t have a choice. There weren’t any other places for her to live.
Today, as she stomped home, she pulled her long, brown hair back into a ponytail as she did. Maggie didn’t stop to think about that other day, three years ago, when her younger, sweeter, more innocent self had learned the word ‘implode’. She had felt that her world imploded when her parents were killed at the railroad crossing. “I feel like my insides are going to explode,” the eight-year-old had said to her uncle Harvey, the only family member who stood next to her at the funeral home, the other relatives too distant or too busy to attend the ceremony of rest given in honor of her parents. “Implode,” he answered. “That’s what happens when it explodes on the inside and no one sees it.”
It was a word Maggie enjoyed knowing, showing it off when the city decided to demolish the formerly revered landmark of the local Woolworth’s. The building had become an institution, with families telling stories of the good-ol’-days as they walked by. Now, they told fewer of those stories as they gazed upon a city block of broken concrete. “They’re going to implode Woolworth’s!” she announced at school, proud to be the bearer of such important news. Her classmates were not intrigued by this fact – they went back to trading baseball cards and reading the latest in the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is an unfortunate event, she remembered thinking, that something exciting and important is finally happening in this town, and no one really cares.
It was precisely this type of apathy that sent Maggie stomping home this particular day. The injustice in the world was once again getting the best of her easily ignited temper and she was on her way home to devise a plan to resolve it. “What good is the news if they’re only going to tell me the bad stuff and not share their plan to fix anything? Are the newscasters really just saying, ‘Oh well, the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and we’re here to tell you about it’? Do I have to do everything around here?” (She often felt that she did more than her share of chores around the house, and often asked Harvey if it was she who had to do all of the housework when trying to get him to help. She asked Uncle Harvey this question so often that it occasionally crept into her ranting and raving about the global problems that she felt it her duty – no, they were her moral obligation to resolve.)
Leaving her virtually empty knapsack at the base of the tree, Maggie pulled out her notebook and climbed the forty-two boards nailed to the south trunk and ascended into the leafy lair, determined to add yet another item to her list of things to do before she died – solve world hunger.
No one knew where Maggie got these ideas, that it was her duty to heal the ills of the world. Her parents had been average, ordinary, everyday parents. Spencer and Sorina Lollindorf went to work at their average jobs, picked up Maggie from Latchkey, and they all came home at five-thirty and fixed dinner. During dinner, they would share the relatively mundane events of their days, and then retire to the den for another evening of prime time network television. Maybe it was because her parents had died so young that Maggie was determined to not make the same mistake and die without leaving her mark on the world.
For an eleven-year-old, Maggie was awfully preoccupied with death and personal accomplishments that must precede that inevitable event. Harvey thought this only natural after the death of her parents – which happened tragically and simultaneously – when she was such a young age, and he thought that she’d grow out of it. He wasn’t at all concerned with her bizarre obsession with death.

Up in her tree, the place Maggie thought of more often as her office than her tree house, and armed with notebook, pen – blue, never black – and her precious world atlas, she set out to discover exactly where this new place was where the children were starving and didn’t even have crayons to color their skies blue and their houses red. She wasn’t even sure which she was most upset about: that they couldn’t color their pictures or that they would probably never taste a delightfully crunchy, perfectly steamed stem of asparagus. Her mouth watered at the thought. She checked the small Timex watch on her right wrist and saw that she still had another thirty-eight minutes of intense global planning time before she needed to start fixing supper. Uncle Harvey would expect it – supper that is, not another of her crazy schemes to save the world.
As she studied her atlas, looking longingly at the countries in Africa that she hoped to visit one day. She hoped that by the time she got there, there wouldn’t be any starving children. While she was planning her imaginary future safari, she heard Mr. Kolinker’s voice creep back in her head, an echo of their earlier conversation. “Who can find the country at _____ degrees latitude and ____ degress longitude?” Maggie’s hand was in the air even before Mr. K. finished the sentence. She loved geography – it was her favorite subject. She could locate any country on the atlas by latitude and longitude in a manner of seconds – in less time than it took most of her classmates to find the right page. But Mr. K ignored her and waited an appropriate amount of wait time before calling on another student. How Maggie hated that wait time! Life was too short to spend it waiting around. She was a person of action! On her long list of things to do was studying become a teacher. Not because she wanted to be one – she had more global ideas for her future career – but because she was curious about all the strange things that her teachers had done to her. She wanted to find out if they were actually learning crazy things like wait time in college.
After the dreaded waiting time was over, and Stuart named the wrong country again, Mr. K. called on three more students before calling on Maggie, whom he knew had the right answer in the first place.
“Botswana!” she had replied gleefully. She loved her atlas. It was the most worn one in the room. She studied it whenever she could. Here it was November, and the atlases on the other desks in the room looked as though they were hardly ever used, even during geography class. Maggie doubted that anyone took one out and studied it whenever they had a few free minutes, like she did.
“Now, who can tell me which continent Botswana is on?” Mr. K. had asked. Maggie could. She knew the continent, the capitol of the country, the major imports and exports and their economic and political structures. She could name their ruling head of state and explain how that person came to be elected or appointed. She knew this about most countries in the world, and she knew that her teacher felt a certain inexplicable compulsion to call on four other students before calling on Maggie.
She didn’t have any friends in her class. The other kids thought she was strange. They’d never had anyone in their class before who didn’t have parents. Stuart lived with just his mom; his dad had moved to Cincinnati last year. Janna also lived with only her mom; no one ever talked about where her dad was. Whenever anyone asked Janna, she’d throw her hands up, palms stretched upwards as if to say, “I don’t know” then she’d give an icy stare from her cold blue eyes, toss her blond braids over her shoulders and walk away. Neil lived with only his dad, but that was cool because his mom was a famous actress in Hollywood. So Maggie was the only fifth-grader who didn’t live with either of her parents, and that made her different.
The only person who acted as if he might be her friend was Zak, the seven-year-old from across the street. He was mean. He bullied the whole neighborhood, even the big kids. Maggie liked him, though. Not because of how he treated other kids. For that, she thought he was horrible. But they had interesting conversations, and he wasn’t afraid to climb the forty-two steps to her tree house to talk. Those long talks in the tree house were the only times Maggie had ever seen him sit still. If you caught him during a still moment, and he was quiet at the same time, you might guess him to be about three or four. But if he was in full-Zak mode, full speed ahead, legs and lungs at full throttle, bossing the other kids around, you might guess that he was ten or eleven. In his grungy, dirt-streaked orange and blue striped t-shirt, which may or may not have started the day tucked in to his much-too-long Family Dollar store jeans, he zipped around, oblivious to his untied shoes, giving the speed of light some competition in a race while never tripping over his shoelaces. He was the king of the playground. He was the captain of both basketball teams. He chose players for each side. He called all the plays, and everyone listened.
The day that Maggie met him, she was on the swing set in the park. She was the only one on the swings. Everyone else was playing basketball. As she watched the basketball court from her swing, she heard Zak calling out the plays for the second half of the basketball game. The game was interrupted when a shiny new car pulled up to the court. The teams recognized it as the new kid’s car. Never mind that he’d already lived there for three years, everyone knew him as ‘the new kid’ – even Zak who was only in first grade.
The new kid clearly didn’t want to get out of the car. Despite the glare of the sun on the car’s windows, Zak’s teams watched as an adult arm reached over the front seat in a way that only contortionists and parents can manage and opened the back door. First one sparkling white cross-trainer and then the other gingerly emerged below the open car door. Neither foot touched the ground. Just visible between shoes and door were two inches of green and orange polyester plaid pants.
The game stopped. Zak held the ball. Everyone watched the car, waiting for Stanley’s dad to push him out, towards their sharp and eager talons, waiting to grasp and hold their new prey in discomfort. A new playground game was about to begin.
“What’s new, Stanley?” Zak had greeted his newest playground victim as the shiny new trainers hit the ground and the door was pushed open wider by the contortionist/parent from the driver’s seat.
“I have a new sweater.” Stanley’s mouth dropped open in shock and horror. He looked as if he couldn’t believe he said that out loud. It just made him look like more of a dork. Maggie knew that he couldn’t help feeling proud the first new items of clothes he’d had in forever. As long as she could remember, Stanley had worn clothes that had been saved for him – from his older brother, who was now in college. The styles were 15 years too old, but five years too new for the next time around. But five years ahead of the times didn’t mean anything when you were a ten-year-old boy.
“I have a new sweater,” mimicked Zak. The basketball teams laughed.
“No, you don’t,” answered Stanley. “I do.” He was confused. Zak wasn’t wearing a sweater. He had on his signature orange and blue striped polo shirt, covered in layers of dirt.
“No, you don’t,” Zak mimicked again.
Stanley suddenly caught on to the game. “Stop that!” he said.
Again came the echo: “Stop that.” Zak imitated Stanley’s whine.
“I’ll tell my dad,” Stanley threatened, hoping his father hadn’t pulled away yet.
“I’ll tell my dad,” chimed in the center for the other team. Stanley didn’t look to see which kid had joined Zak’s game. He didn’t care. He wished desperately for that large hole in the ground to open up and swallow him so he could fall through to China or the Land of Oz or another land where having a name like Stanley made you a king.
“You’re such a creep,” Stanley sneered at Zak. It was the worst insult he could think of.
“I know,” Zak beamed. “It’s fun!”
Maggie had watched from the swing set until the game was over. After Zak’s team had been declared the winners, a few kids stuck around to play horse while the others wandered home for dinner. When the streetlights came on, giving off the first purple glow, the rest of the kids went home. That was their curfew – those purple lights. But Zak had stayed – shooting baskets and running his own drills.
Maggie knew Zak had earned his reputation in school last year, as a kindergartener. She’d been in the office one day for an ice pack after the softball hit her in the arm during gym. (She’d been picking dandelions in the field instead of watching the game.) The kindergarten teacher had marched this tiny little waif of a boy into the principal’s office by the ear, demanded that the secretary call his parents, and she left without explaining the current situation. Maggie just watched him as he sat and kicked his little legs, together, then the left, then the right, then together again. Anyone who walked in the office walked carefully out of Zak’s leg-range to avoid being kicked. He wasn’t kicking in anger; it was merely something to do until he was asked to leave that seat and take another one in the all-too-familiar principal’s office. He looked at Maggie and smiled. He was the first person who had looked at her in any sort of friendly way since she had started Gannon Elementary School at the end of her second grade year.
Zak had caused all sorts of trouble during the rest of his kindergarten year and hadn’t changed this year. Now he had all day at school, which just gave him more time and more opportunity to cause trouble and occasionally get caught. Even the fifth graders knew about Zak. He had this amazing stealth-like approach to his mischief. If the toilets were stuffed with paper towels and then flushed to overflow, it had to have been Zak – even if it was the girls’ bathroom. If the fourth graders took their desks to lunch, it was because Zak had left a layer of superglue on each seat while the fourth graders were in art. Everyone knew, but he was rarely caught.
On the playground, after everyone else had left, Maggie approached Zak cautiously. She felt he was her only ally at Gannon Elementary, but this was only in her imagination from a smile they had shared last year in the office. She wanted to have a friend. “Why were you so mean to Stanley?”
“Who?” Zak turned around, poised as if to shoot the basketball at Maggie instead of the basket.
“Stanley – the new kid?”
“Oh. It’s part of the ritual.”
“What ritual?” Maggie asked.
“If he cries, he’s not worth spit. If he doesn’t, then he can play on the B team.”
“Which one is the B team?”
“The one that I’m not on,” Zak grinned. “Hasn’t anyone ever asked, ‘Did you bring your A game with you?’ Well, I am the A game, along with those who are worthy enough to play on my team.”
Maggie was confused. She thought she understood, but she wasn’t really into sports to get it. The only thing running though her mind was that this was the longest conversation she’d had with a kid – someone other than a teacher, the principal, or her uncle – in the three years that she’d lived in Gannon.
“Hey, aren’t you the kid without parents?” Zak asked.
“I have parents!” she said, immediately on the defense. “Well, I had parents…”
“That’s what I thought. They’re dead, right?”
Kids these days have no tact, thought Maggie. She didn’t think of herself as a kid, really. “Yes, they died when I was eight.”
“Both of them died together? Cool!”
“What?” Maggie was confused.
“I dunno… how’d it happen?”
Zak was honestly curious, though not very polite about her deceased parents.
“They were taking a murder mystery trip on a dinner train. Just before they figured out whodunit, a drunk driver crashed through the railroad crossing sign and into the train. Everyone on their side of the car died that night.”
“You mean they were trying to solve a fake murder mystery and they were murdered?” Zak’s big brown eyes were looking up, as if he were trying to picture the scene.
“Yep.”
“Cool!” Zak’s smiled widened.
“Why?”
“You don’t have anyone to tell you to make your bed or tie your shoes or eat your vegetables. You don’t have anyone to tell you to go to bed or brush your teeth or do your homework. That’s cool.”
“I live with Uncle Harvey!” Maggie said defensively.
“Yeah – Harvey. Everyone knows about him. He’s crazy. Does he remember to make his bed or tie his shoes or eat his vegetables.”
“Of course he does!” Maggie saw her first chance at a friendship floating quickly away, speared on her cloud-fork. Oh well… “Wait – what do you mean that everyone knows Uncle Harvey is crazy?”
“Well, before you moved in, he used to do all kinds of weird things.”
“Like what?” Maggie asked, curious about this peek into her uncle’s past, before she occupied his home.
“He’d stay out all night long…” Zak began.
“He worked the night shift at the Pet Heads factory!”
“The what?”
“Pet Heads - those crazy gooey heads on the black pedestals. The ones you’re supposed to smash with your fist when you get stressed at work,” she patiently explained.
“He makes those?”
“Yep – he used to, until I came along. There weren’t any day shifts available, so he got a job in the post office factory.” The small town of Gannon had more factories per capita than any other town in the U.S. This was just one more random fact that Maggie knew that no one else seemed to care about.
“What does he do there?”
“He’s the guy who mixes the special formula to put the self-adhesive on the stamps.”
“He invented that? Cool!”
“No, he didn’t invent it. He just makes it.” Maggie hated to say anything that might endanger Harvey’s cool-status with Zak. She so wanted a friend that she didn’t want to scare him away. “So, working at night isn’t so strange. What else did he do to make people call him crazy?”
“He used to control the birds.”
“What?! Now you’re crazy,” Maggie told Zak.
“He did! We’d see him in his backyard, with the little remote control box with the antennae on it. He’d point it around the sky and birds would fly wherever he pointed it.”
“Those are remote-control airplanes!” Maggie was losing her patience, and her interest in this conversation.
“Remote control airplanes?”
“You’ve heard of remote control cars, right?”
“Sure – I have three,” Zak bragged.
“They also make remote controlled airplanes.”
“I know that, but I thought those were kids’ toys. Why does Harvey fly them?”
Maggie patiently explained, “He builds the planes. He makes the pieces and paints them himself. He even builds the engines and puts them together.”
“Then what’s he doing working in the stamp factory? He could be building planes that we could use to blow up the school, and the White House, and–“
“What?!” Maggie shrieked. “What are you talking about? Why do you want to blow up the White House?” Given his less than stellar track record in the academic institution they attended, she could empathize with his desire to have an excuse to not attend school. What kid hasn’t wished at one point or another that something would happen to the school building to prevent them from attending for several weeks or even months? But she was shocked by his desire to blow up the White House. Kill the president? And possibly his wife and dog? Why would anyone want to do that? Maybe Zak was more disturbed than she had originally thought. Suddenly she felt very uncomfortable with this conversation. Just as she opened her mouth to make an excuse to leave, Zak looked as if he’d suddenly remembered something important.
“Hey – how’s your tree house?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Maggie asked.
“I used to ride by on my scooter while you were building it. I was pretty impressed that you did that all by yourself.”
“It’s cool,” Maggie replied, hoping that Zak would notice that she was adopting his limited vocabulary of adjectives in an attempt to continue the conversation.
“Why’d you make it up so high?”
“Why not?” Maggie retorted.
“I dunno… just seems like it would have been easier if you’d built it between the first split of the tree trunks.”
Of course it would have been, Maggie thought, but that was hardly the point. She needed a challenge – something to keep her busy, and that’s not where she wanted her tree house anyway. Part of the charm of that particular tree was the many trunks of the tree. Just at the base, the oak trunk split into two, and then two feet above the split, the east trunk split into two again. During the years when Maggie was just a visitor at Uncle Harvey’s, she called it the triple-tree. As a resident of that yard, she’d developed a much closer relationship with the tree and named it Tyler.
“Well, I have to get back and make dinner,” she said.
“Make dinner? But you’re a kid!” Zak was surprised.
“I have to make dinner,” she repeated. “It’s my turn,” she offered, as a way of explanation. She didn’t feel that she wanted to explain that it was always her turn to make dinner.
“Okay – see you around,” Zak grinned.
It was official. Maggie had her first friend.

Finally in the safe branches of the tree, Maggie was alone and had time to think. She pulled out the notebook that she kept in her tree house and started making a list of the countries in Africa. She heard frequently on the news that people were starving there, but it was a big continent with 54 countries. She felt that she would be more effective if she started off by picking just one, and then working on her plan to feed the people of Africa, one country at a time. Swaziland was the smallest with, so she figured that was a good place to start.


Digging through her supply box, she found a blue highlighter and colored in the country of Swaziland in her atlas, with the cracked spine and bent cover. She then turned back to her notebook to orchestrate her fundraiser plan when she heard a shout from below the tree.
“Hey, Zippy! I’m home!”
Oh no! Uncle Harvey was home already, and she hadn’t fixed dinner. She threw her highlighter into the center of the atlas and folded it closed, the pen marking the page of the lower African countries. She scrambled down the ladder and ran to greet him.
“Why do you still call me Zippy?” she asked.
“I dunno… Do you want me to stop?”
“No, I guess not. Just not around my friends, okay?” she pleaded, with the desperate look of someone who does not want to be embarrassed by a silly, childish nickname.
“Sure. No problem,” Harvey answered. He wondered when the day would come when Maggie did have friends around, hanging out in their living room and leaving popcorn kernels in the couch, and climbing up and down from the tree house during all hours of the summer days. He hoped that day would come soon. Harvey remembered what it was like to be a kid, and being a kid meant hanging out with your friends more often than hanging out alone, or with your crazy bachelor uncle. Maggie didn’t seem unhappy, except for the rare twinges that he saw in her eyes occasionally. On the contrary, she seemed to be an average, normal kid – all except for the lack of friends.
“Let’s make dinner together,” Harvey suggested as they walked from the tree house to the back porch. He carefully avoided the sagging and broken bottom step as they climbed the four stairs to the back door.
“But you hate to cook!” Maggie was surprised.
“Actually, I have a confession to make,” he started, making his serious face, the one that Maggie knew from experience was far from serious. “I don’t hate cooking. I just like having my dinner made for me.”
“Sure, who doesn’t?”
“Chefs!” was his immediate reply, and he burst out laughing at his own joke.
“Whatever, Uncle Harvey. What are we going to make?”
“There’s always Bisquick. How about a crazy kind of pizza?”
Maggie had learned all about the food pyramid in second grade. She knew how many of each of the food groups that she and Uncle Harvey should eat every day. She was quite good at planning their meals to make sure that they each stayed healthy. After all, if Uncle Harvey didn’t work, he didn’t get paid, and Maggie hated to miss a day of school. But Maggie loved pizza as much as most kids who love pizza, so she readily agreed and went rummaging in the pantry for the other ingredients.
“Tomato sauce?” Harvey asked, as she stepped into the pantry.
“Check!” was the reply.
“Cheese?” Harvey called, taking a place at the counter and pulling an old apron of his mother’s out of the drawer.
“Check!” said Maggie, pulling it out of the frig and handing it to him.
“What have we got to put on it?”
“This is where we have to get creative. There’s a can of pineapple, a jar of mushrooms, and a couple slices of leftover ham.”
“Hawaiian pizza it is! Get me the barbecue sauce, please, and put away the tomato sauce.”
“Uncle Harvey! What are you doing to our dinner?”
“Trust me, kid. You’ll love it…”
When Maggie closed the frig to hand Uncle Harvey the barbecue sauce, she noticed that he had put on a pink flowered apron.
“Uncle Harvey? What are you wearing?” she asked, suspiciously.
“This is my special cooking apron. My mother used to wear it whenever she invented new recipes.”
“But Grandma used to wear that all the time,” Maggie protested.
“Yep – she never made the same thing twice. That woman was amazing,” Harvey sighed wistfully.
“Then why did she make macaroni and cheese every time I came to lunch?”
“It was her specialty, and she never made it the same way twice. Sometimes she’d cook the macaroni and then she’d add the cheese, and sometimes she would melt the cheese and then add the macaroni.”
“Uncle Harvey, you’re crazy,” Maggie laughed, finally realizing that he was pulling her leg.
He just smiled and got to work, creating Maggie’s first-ever Hawaiian pizza.
Maggie wrote “Hawaiian pizza night” on the calendar that hung inside the pantry door. She used it to keep track of their meals, so that they didn’t eat the same things too often. When she first suggested it, Harvey wanted to have the same dinner for each night of the week: Meatloaf Mondays, Tuna Helper Tuesdays, Sloppy Joe Saturdays, and Spaghetti Sundays. Maggie vetoed the idea before he finished planning the other three meals a week. She knew she needed more variety than that. Uncle Harvey seconded her veto when she suggested that Any Day was Asparagus Day. It was hard for her to get her uncle to eat his vegetables, but she did her best.
As they sat down to dinner, the doorbell rang. “Hello????” called Mrs. Gilbert through the open window.
“I wish we could put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign during dinner,” Harvey sighed.
“I’ll get it,” Maggie volunteered.
Mrs. Gilbert was their next-door neighbor. She was the one who did all of Harvey’s grocery shopping. She started doing this when Harvey was switched to the night shift and couldn’t get to the grocery store when it was open. She claimed that she owed Harvey a huge debt after her husband collapsed, and Harvey gave him CPR. Mrs. Gilbert claims that Harvey saved his life. Mr. Gilbert said the same, until he died in his sleep, four years after the CPR incident. Maggie had never known Mr. Gilbert; this all happened before she moved in. But Mrs. Gilbert still did their grocery shopping for them, claiming that Harvey didn’t have much time on his hands now that he had Maggie to take care of. What Mrs. Gilbert didn’t know was that his house was cleaner than it had ever been before she arrived, and that he’d never eaten more vegetables, not even when his own parents were forcing him to clear his plate.
“Hi, sweetie,” she greeted Maggie, who tried hard to not cringe at the endearment.
“How are you, Mrs. Gilbert?” Maggie asked politely.
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”
“Fine.” Again, Maggie answered politely. She had no desire to tell Mrs. Gilbert the truth – that school had been awful, again, that children were still starving in Africa, and that she’d lost track of time and not had dinner ready when Uncle Harvey got home. “We were just sitting down to dinner. Would you like to join us?” Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t, she wished fervently. Maggie was appreciative of everything that Mrs. Gilbert did to help them out, but she didn’t wish to have her as a guest for dinner. Mrs. Gilbert never stopped talking, even when she was enjoying a meal.
“Oh, no. I just finished up the last of the stew I made last Tuesday.”
Whew, thought Maggie.
“I was just dropping by to see if Harvey had the grocery list ready. I told him yesterday that I needed to go tonight. My granddaughters are arriving in town tomorrow for the summer, so I was hoping to get our houses stocked so that we can survive while they are here.”
“You have granddaughters?” Maggie asked in surprise. Most grandmothers kept pictures of their grandchildren everywhere, and never stopped talking about them. She had been to Mrs. Gilbert’s house a few times, and had never seen a picture of a child.
“Well, it’s a long story and I’ll have to tell you some other time. Is the grocery list ready?”
“I’ll check,” Maggie said, and she walked to the small corner of the living room that she and Harvey called the office. It held the desk and the computer that Maggie had rescued from her parents’ home. Harvey wanted to sell everything but Maggie’s clothes, but between Maggie and her neighbor Mr. Melvin, they were able to convince Harvey that it was better to hang on to the computer. They’d never be able to afford to replace it when Maggie got to high school and really needed it. She knew she needed it now, but as a second-grader, it was harder to justify needing a computer to do homework since they rarely got any.
Maggie located the weekly shopping list in the printer, as if it had been printed and forgotten. She took it to the kitchen to show Uncle Harvey. “Is this the right grocery list?” she asked.
“What’s on it?” he answered, looking at her and not at the paper.
She read him the items, and he nodded. He chewed and swallowed his pizza (like Mrs. Gilbert wouldn’t have, thought Maggie) and then asked why she needed to know.
“Mrs. Gilbert is here, and she wants to do the shopping early this week. Her granddaughters are coming to visit!” Maggie couldn’t help it. Her eyes sparkled at the thought of granddaughters visiting next door. She hadn’t thought to ask how old they are, how many there are, or what they like to do. Those details seemed too trivial to give to much attention. She had them pictured in her mind. They would be perfect – one a year older and one a year younger than Maggie. They would like all the same things and they would help her with her summer lemonade stand. They would sit in the tree house and look at the atlas and count the money to send to the starving kids in Africa.
“Sounds good,” Harvey nodded and pulled another piece of pizza from the pan in the center of the wobbly round table.
Maggie rushed back to the front door and handed Mrs. Gilbert the list. “Here you go. Thank you so much for helping us this way. We really appreciate it.”
“All children should be as polite and sincere as you are, Maggie,” Mrs. Gilbert smiled, took the list, and said that she’d be back with the groceries in a few hours.
Maggie turned to go back inside and finish her pizza. She complimented her uncle on his fine culinary creation, and then asked him if he knew anything about Mrs. Gilbert’s granddaughters. “Nope.”
“Well, do you know anything about her children?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know anything about her?” Maggie was growing exasperated with her uncle. She wanted information and thought that he should be able to provide it.
“She’s Mrs. Gilbert. She was married to Mr. Gilbert, but he died before you moved in. She’s lived here longer than I have. She knows everything about everyone in this town. And she does our grocery shopping for us,” he concluded, as if this was the end of the discussion. “Now, what are your plans for the evening?”
“After the news, I need to return to my tree house. I’m in the middle of a project.”
“It’s a good thing Daylight Savings Time has started so that you get more time up there.” Harvey may have been naive about lots of thing about raising kids but he understood her need for her tree house.
“Then I need the computer for a while to do my homework, and then I’ll work on the bills. Did you remember your paycheck stub?” she asked, as if she’d turned from the child to the adult sometime during that sentence.
“Yes, I did,” he said, pulling the folded and crumpled paper from his back pocket, not noticing that her tree house project and her homework were two different things.
“Thank you. Since I’m working on the books, can you do dishes tonight?” She tilted her head sideways and smiled her most winning smile, the one that almost never got turned down.
“Don’t I always?” he retorted, as if this was a huge sacrifice.
“You always do them when I don’t,” she replied. This was a familiar dialogue. They’d worked out a pretty good system for the kitchen chores: whoever cooked didn’t have to do dishes. She wasn’t sure if she could get off the hook completely since they’d both made dinner, but tonight it worked.

Her parents had always told her to eat her vegetables and admonished her when she tried to leave any on her plate. “There are children starving in Africa,” one or the other would say. Her parents called the police one day after she’d been missing for an hour. She was only five then, and she’d managed to get the rest of her brussel sprouts from her dinner plate into a box. She was found walking to the post office, trying to mail a box of brussel sprouts to ‘hungre kids who dont hav Vejtabals in affrika”.