Maybe This Time Read online

  Tauruses like things, Flo had said, and even though astrology was a crock, Andie thought, Books.

  “I’m going out to shop,” she told him. “Want to come along? There’s a bookstore.”

  “There’s no bookstore in New Essex,” he said without looking up.

  “Is that the little town at the end of this road? There was a shopping center I passed on the highway about half an hour before I got to New Essex. It had a bookstore.”

  He stopped reading. “Grandville?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and went back to his book, and Andie took that for assent and went upstairs to find Alice, wondering what sequined promise would lure a little Scorpio out of the house.

  Alice was in the nursery with her Walkman, dancing and singing “Gloria” at the top of her voice. She caught Andie watching and stopped, her colorless skin and straight white-blond hair making her look like a little ghost herself, almost translucent in the morning sun.

  “I’m going to town to shop,” Andie said. “If you come along, I’ll get you a new bedspread. With sequins.”

  “No,” Alice said automatically.

  “Carter’s coming.”

  “No he’s not. We don’t leave here.”

  Andie came into the nursery and sat down on the ancient rocker near the TV. “Why?”

  “We belong here.”

  “Alice, it’s just for the day. We’ll be back for dinner.”

  “That’s what she said,” Alice snapped, her stolid little face growing grimmer.

  “She who?”

  “Nanny Joy. She said we’d just go for the day and then she kept driving and driving and driving, and when Carter said where are we going, she said we were going to a new home.” Alice’s hands were curled into fists now, her face even whiter than before. “I’m not going. I’m not going! I’m NOT GOING! NO NO NO NO NO NO—”

  Andie said calmly, “Alice, all my stuff is here. I wouldn’t leave my stuff.”

  “NO NO NO NO NO NO—”

  “All my clothes are in my room,” Andie went on. “Boxes of your school supplies. My sewing stuff. I didn’t bring all of that here yesterday to leave it today.”

  Alice closed her mouth and regarded Andie darkly.

  “Do you want to see the boxes?”

  Alice thought about it and nodded.

  “Okay then.” Andie stood up and held out her hand to the little girl who ignored it to march toward the door to Andie’s room. She wrenched open the door and stalked in, and Andie followed her in and opened the closet door. Alice came closer to stare inside, suspicion in every cell of her body. “I’m unpacked,” Andie told her. “Why would I do that if I was going to take you away?”

  Alice ignored her to kick the sewing box.

  “So do you want to come with Carter and me to go shopping?”

  Alice set her lower teeth in her upper lip, thinking hard. Then she turned and marched back into the nursery.

  Andie grabbed her purse and keys and followed her into the nursery in time to see Alice go out of the nursery and slam the door. “Wonderful,” she said, and was trying to think of something else to bribe the girl with when Alice came out with her blue Jessica doll under her arm.

  “I want a blue bedspread with sparkles,” she said, “and it should flutter. Like butterflies. Or dancing.” She headed for the door out of the nursery and onto the gallery and beyond that, presumably, the stairs and Carter.

  “Hold it,” Andie said, and Alice turned around, a dark look on her face. “We have to comb your hair.”

  If possible, untangling Alice’s hair was worse than Andie had anticipated since Alice screamed through the whole thing, loud enough that Carter came up to see what Andie was doing to her. “You’re next,” Andie told him over a shrieking Alice, and he left and came back five minutes later with his hair combed, in time to see Andie pull Alice’s hair up into a topknot and tie it with one of her scrunchies.

  Andie sat back to survey her work. Except for the fact that Alice was still screaming, tears streaking down her contorted, red face, she looked pretty good. “Alice, I’m not doing anything to you. Stop screaming and go look at yourself. You look cute.”

  Alice screamed louder, directing the volume directly at Andie, so Andie went into her room and got a hand mirror and brought it out to her. “Look.”

  Alice stopped in mid-scream, possibly because she realized she looked god-awful with her mouth open like that, possibly because it had been so long since she’d seen her face without hair sticking out all around it. “I hate it,” she said, but she said it instead of screaming it, so Andie counted it as progress.

  “That’s my girl,” she said, standing up.

  “I’m not your girl,” Alice said, and stalked out the door past Carter, clearly fed up with Andie and life in general, although she gave grudging approval to Andie’s yellow Mustang when she saw it.

  The ride to Grandville was uneventful except for the one bad moment when Andie drove through New Essex and turned onto the highway, and Alice thought she was being kidnapped again. She screamed until Carter, sitting beside her in the back seat, said, “Chill, it’s the next town,” without taking his eyes off his comic book. Alice stopped. Evidently if Carter said it, it was fact.

  “Thank you,” Andie said to him, looking in the rearview mirror to see his face.

  He ignored her.

  When they got to the mall in Grandville, he got out of the car and headed for the bookstore. Andie and a silent, glowering Alice went to a bedding store for a blue comforter for Alice and a red-striped one for Carter. When Alice objected to hers, saying, “It doesn’t have sparkles,” they went to a fabric store for some blue sequined chiffon and thread, and after that an office supply store where Alice picked out a sketchbook for Carter, and a set of markers, a big pad of quarter-inch grid paper, some pencils with skulls on them, and a pencil sharpener, all without interacting with Andie in any way until Andie offered her a set of Hello Kitty pencils. The scorn on Alice’s face was searing.

  They moved on and bought T-shirts and black-and-white-striped leggings and a stretchy black jersey flounced skirt for Alice who made gagging sounds, but once they began on Carter’s clothes, the little girl got serious, meticulously choosing what he needed. Shopping therapy, Andie thought, and dragged her to a home store where she bought white paint to take the pink out of Alice’s room. “I want black,” Alice said, the first thing she’d said since they’d left the car, and Andie said, “You can draw on the white with your markers,” and watched Alice almost smile. It was a little ghoulish. Then they went to the bookstore.

  “Is that your kid?” the store clerk said, when she walked in. He was pointing at Carter, so she said, “Yes.” “And you’re going to buy all these books?” the clerk said, pointing to the stacks on the counter. Andie sorted through them and saw comics and books on drawing and books on drawing comics. “Yes, I’m going to buy all these books,” Andie said, flashing North’s plastic, and a few minutes later Alice came up with two books on butterflies, and Andie added them to the pile.

  When they were done and had everything loaded into the car, Andie said, “Groceries,” and Alice started to scream, “No, no, no, NO, NO, NO,” until Carter said, “Chill. We have to eat.” Any illusion Andie had of them picking out meals together was dashed when Carter got in the car, and Alice followed him. Andie moved up and down the grocery aisles with speed and precision and was back in the car in half an hour.

  “Now,” she said when she got in the car. “Home.”

  She turned on the car and the tape player kicked in, startling her. She recognized the song and turned to the back seat as “Somebody’s Baby” bounced out of the speakers. “Did you put this tape in?”

  Carter shrugged.

  “There’s a whole thing of them,” Alice said, scowling. “Right here. Nobody was using them. I didn’t hurt anything. It’s your tape.”

  Andie craned her neck and saw an old box under Alice’s feet, the tape ca