Promise Me A Rainbow (5 page)

“My name is Mary Frances D’Amaro. You bought the gnomes,” Fritz said in a rush. “We want to buy them back. Sometime when it stops raining and we get the money,” she added, because she felt she owed Ms. Holben the truth. She waited, and it seemed to Fritz that they were
both
waiting.

“You want to buy it back,” Ms. Holben said finally, looking again at the wrinkled card. “You and the D’Amaro Brothers.”

“Me and Joe,” Fritz said. That wasn’t exactly the truth. She wasn’t sure whether Joe really wanted to buy back the gnomes or not. She was sure about Della and Charlie, though. Della liked money better than gnomes, and Charlie didn’t care about either, only computers.

“You were here earlier, weren’t you?”

Fritz didn’t want to say. If she said yes, Ms. Holben would be reminded that she’d heard all about Jonathan and Ellen Jessup, the very thing Joe said had made her upset.

“Yes,” she said anyway, because she was supposed to tell the truth, and she couldn’t see any way out of it.

“Are you by yourself?”

Fritz nodded. “Could I . . . see Daisy and Eric?” she said before Ms. Holben asked any more questions.

Ms. Holben stood back. “Come in. What did you say your name was again?” She turned on a lamp behind her.

Fritz looked around the room. It was a nice room, she decided. Just big enough, with not much furniture. She could dance in this room, turn a cartwheel and not break anything if she aimed herself just right. Her room at home was too small, too crowded because she had to share with Della. She couldn’t walk without bumping into things, and Della hated having her underfoot no matter how quiet and tiny she tried to be. She knew that Joe wanted a bigger place for them, but that was somewhere “down the road,” down the same road as buying back the gnomes.

“Mary Frances,” Fritz said. “But I like Fritz. Everybody calls me that. Except the sisters. They call me Mary Frances.”

“Fritz,” Ms. Holben repeated. “Is that because you couldn’t say Mary Frances when you were little?”

She looked at Ms. Holben in surprise, wondering how she had guessed that. “Yes. Joe says all I did was spit, and Fritz is what it sounded like.”

“I’m Catherine, but I guess the lady at The Purple Box already told you.”

“No,” she said. “But I heard Jonathan.”

“Jonathan?”

“On the stairs. You don’t like him to call you Katie,” Fritz reminded her.

Ms. Holben smiled slightly. “Oh, yes. Jonathan.”

Fritz looked at her gravely. Joe had been right about the card and the explanation; he was probably right about not bothering Ms. Holben, too. She stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Ms. Holben to show her the gnomes and wondering if she really could call her by her first name. She’d never had the chance to call a grown-up woman by her first name before. Brenda, the girl from the construction office who went with Joe to the movies, had said to call her Brenda, but Joe had never brought her home with him again.

“Daisy and Eric are in that box,” Ms. Holben said. “Let me take your raincoat.”

Fritz gave up the poncho, but she was immediately cold without it. She couldn’t keep from shivering. “Why don’t you sit over there,” Ms. Holben said, pointing to the flowery couch.

Fritz hesitated, then went and sat down where Ms. Holben had pointed.

“Cover up with this until you get warm,” she said, helping Fritz pull an afghan off the back of the couch. The afghan was white with pink crocheted flowers on it. She handed Fritz the box and went into another room—the kitchen, Fritz could tell when she leaned forward. She expected Ms. Holben to come right back but she didn’t, and after a moment Fritz turned her attention to the box. She glanced again in the direction of the kitchen. It must be all right for her to look into the box. Ms. Holben wouldn’t have given it to her otherwise. She waited a moment longer, then reached in and parted the newspapers. Daisy and Eric were in there. She lifted them out and put the box aside, letting them sit on the afghan on her lap. Daisy was still smiling, and Eric was still falling asleep.

She looked up to find Ms. Holben watching.

“Do you like hot chocolate, Fritz?”

“I like it a lot.”

“I think I’ll make us some then. It’s nice on a rainy day.”

“I know how to help,” Fritz offered.

“Are you still cold?”

“Not that cold.”

“Good. Come on, if you’re warm enough. And bring Daisy and Eric. You can tell me about them.”

Fritz slid off the couch, taking the time to try to rearrange the afghan with one hand while she held on to the gnomes with the other. As she came into the kitchen, Ms. Holben was taking down two cups from a china cabinet filled with blue dishes.

“I always use the Blue Willow mugs when I make chocolate,” Ms. Holben said. She took down a Blue Willow plate as well. “Would you get the milk out of the refrigerator?”

Fritz carefully set Daisy and Eric in the middle of the kitchen table, then brought the milk. Together she and Ms. Holben worked to make the hot chocolate—Fritz handling the measuring and Ms. Holben heating the milk on the stove. Fritz watched her closely, comparing her, as she did all women, to the framed picture Joe had of Lisa in her wedding dress. Ms. Holben looked older than Lisa. Her hair was dark and short and curly, not long and blond like Lisa’s. And she didn’t have blue eyes. She wasn’t like Lisa at all, but she was still nice.

“I almost forgot,” Ms. Holben said as she poured the hot chocolate into the mugs. “We need one more thing.” She went to the refrigerator and got out a container of vanilla ice cream, then put a big spoonful into each cup. “Do you ever put ice cream in your hot chocolate?”

“Just marshmallows sometimes.”

“You’ll like this, I think. When I was a little girl and went shopping with my mother, we used to stop in this little drugstore by the bus stop. In the winter, we had hot chocolate with ice cream in it. In the summer we had fresh limeades. I don’t think you can get either one anymore, unless you make them at home. She sat down at the table. “Tell me about Daisy and Eric—I forgot the cookies,” she said, getting up again. She brought a tin of plain butter cookies and put some out on the Blue Willow plate. “Did you have Daisy and Eric long?”

“Joe got them when I was a little kid. He won them at the PTA. I like them because I like things with mothers.” Fritz let the ice cream bump her upper lip as she sipped the chocolate. Ms. Holben was right. She did like it, and she liked Ms. Holben telling her about when she was a little girl.

“I like things with mothers, too. Is Joe your brother?”

“No, he’s my father. I call him Joe because I don’t want him to die.” She slurped her chocolate loudly, but Ms. Holben didn’t seem to mind. “Lisa died,” she added. She looked down at the mug of chocolate, losing herself for a moment in the Blue Willow pattern on the sides, imagining herself with Koong-Shee and Chang escaping over the little bridge as she braced herself for the question she knew would follow.

“Lisa is your mother?”

She avoided Ms. Holben’s eyes. “I don’t have a mother . . . Do you know the story of the Blue Willow on the mug and the plate?”

“No. Tell me.”

Fritz glanced at her to see if she meant it. She shouldn’t have said why she had to call Joe by his name. It was a secret, the kind of secret that made grown-ups upset, and she had never told anybody. She just couldn’t be sure about grown-ups. Sometimes she sensed that they wanted her to talk because they felt sorry for her—because she was a motherless child, not because they wanted to listen. And sometimes they wanted to talk so that they could really find out something else. Like Aunt Margaret asking her about school and Della and Charlie when she really wanted to know about Joe and Brenda. She had seen Aunt Margaret kiss Joe one time in the kitchen, kiss him hard while she hung on to him as if she thought he’d run away. And Joe did want to run away. He kept turning his face and trying to pull Aunt Margaret’s arms from around his neck. And he kept saying, “For God’s sake, Maggie, don’t! Michael’s my brother!”

But Ms. Holben
was
listening—as if she knew Fritz had just told her something she hadn’t meant to tell.

Fritz moved the cookies off the plate and pointed to the people on the bridge. “This is Koong-Shee here in front with a staff. This one in the middle is her true love, Chang,” she recited solemnly.

“And who’s this?” Ms. Holben said, pointing to the third figure. Her fingers were long and her fingernails short and polished with clear polish. Fritz liked fingernails like hers, like a mother’s when she wanted to be special and not every day, like the mothers who came to the Parents’ Tea at the Catholic school. She didn’t like fingernails long and painted shiny red like Aunt Margaret’s. She liked shiny red just on cars and trucks.

“That’s Koong-Shee’s father. He’s carrying a whip because he’s mad.”

“Why is he mad?”

“Because Koong-Shee is running away with Chang. Chang is her father’s secretary. He’s very poor, and her father wants her to marry another man—a
rich
man.”

“Does she?”

“No, she escapes with Chang. They go and live in the little house there across the lake, and for a while they’re very happy.” Fritz hesitated, thinking of Lisa and Joe. They hadn’t been happy for very long, either.

“Then what happened?” Ms. Holben asked quietly, as if she knew something bad was coming.

“The rich man was very angry when he couldn’t marry Koong-Shee. He set fire to the little house across the lake. And they died.” She gave a soft sigh. “The end.” She looked at Ms. Holben. Ms. Holben was looking at the plate.

“No, I don’t think that’s the end,” she said. “See here? These two birds flying high over the lake? I think those are Koong-Shee’s and Chang’s souls. I think they’re changed now, but they’re still happy and they’re free.”

Fritz looked at the birds again. “That’s not what the lady in the China Room at the museum said.”

“Maybe she didn’t know that part of it.”

Fritz looked at the birds again. Maybe she didn’t. And it made sense. Why else were those two big birds there?

“I’ll have to think about it,” Fritz said, and Ms. Holben smiled. “While you’re thinking, maybe you’d better tell me how much trouble you’re in.”

She looked at Ms. Holben guiltily, but she didn’t answer.

“Does Joe know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Don’t you think you ought to tell him?”

“He’s working on the interiors at the Allen site. I can’t bother him. It’s been raining. He’s got to do the inside work so he can get some money.”

“If he thinks you’re lost someplace, I doubt he’s getting very much work done.”

“I’m not lost.”

“He doesn’t know that, does he? Maybe all he knows is that you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

Fritz thought about this. “I can call Della and Charlie,” she decided.

“Who are they?”

“My sister and my brother.”

“I think you should do that.”

Fritz looked at Ms. Holben closely. She wasn’t angry; she was just using the kind of voice that meant Fritz had better do it.

“I know you wanted to make sure Daisy and Eric were all right. But it’s not good to worry people who love you if you can help it.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Fritz said. “I wanted you to have a card with Joe’s name on it.”