Don't You Trust Me? (9 page)

This seemed entirely reasonable to me. In fact, I could not imagine what Brooke could see wrong in this; it's how the world works. Brooke thought that her father had a generous nature because he was generous to
her,
when, really, he was generous to her because she belonged to him. She had his genes; she was an aspect of him that would live on into the future after he was dead. He was really being good to
himself
when he saved up for her college education. He was ensuring that a part of him would survive and thrive.

Even Aunt Antonia's buying spree for me had been based on the same thing. Okay, she and Janelle didn't share any genes, but her husband and Janelle did, so it seemed right to her to spend his money on his sister's child, especially since there was lots to go around. If she'd had any idea who I really was, do you think she'd have showered me with all those lovely clothes? Not a chance. She'd have called the cops, more likely. I was like a parasitic cowbird's egg that had been laid in a finch's nest. If the finch mother had recognized me for what I was, she would have pushed me out and let me go
smash!
on the stones below.

Parents care about their kids because it's their chance at immortality. At least, that's the only way I can make sense of parents sacrificing for their children. If
I
had a kid, I don't know how generous
I'd
be. Don't worry; I'm not planning on becoming a mother, in either the near
or distant future. But I guess it's reasonable that parents want their kids to do well in the world, if you look at it that way.

“Mom,”
Brooke was protesting. “You know that Dad is better than that! Stick up for me!”

“Your father is both a successful businessman and a decent human being, Brooke. He talks that way because he worries that you are too openhearted. He's afraid it makes you vulnerable to all the wickedness of the world.”

“Mom! Dad! I'm not some little toddler anymore!” Brooke caught my eye, sitting quietly at my place at the table, and blushed, probably realizing that she sounded exactly like some little toddler. “And I don't believe that there
is
that much honest-to-goodness wickedness in the world,” she said defiantly. “I think that if you could see into the inmost heart of a person who has done something really, really wrong, you would find that they were just—just misguided. It was because they had an awful childhood or something.”

Well, if Brooke could see into my inmost heart, I supposed she would think I was doing something wrong by being here at her dinner table. And I couldn't claim to have had an awful childhood, so I had to beg to differ.

Uncle Karl was girding up his loins to march into battle again, when Aunt Antonia apparently decided that she had had enough of the subject. In any case, she headed him off by asking, “Morgan, where did you get
that pretty gold chain? I don't remember seeing that before.”

I glanced down at the chain around my neck. “Oh, I've had it for years,” I said vaguely. “Could you pass the butter, please?”

Brooke looked surprised, either because I had just helped myself to some butter or perhaps because on the day after I arrived, she had, in her innocently curious way, looked over every single item Janelle had packed in her luggage. There had been no gold chain then. However, she evidently concluded that neither mystery was worth solving. I mean, a gold chain is a small thing, which might easily escape notice. She was soon diverted by a discussion about debate team, which her mother was anxious she join.

However, I can sense that
you,
my reader, may not be satisfied by my explanation.
You
remember what I said about that gold chain. I implied that Aunt Antonia had bought it for me. I also implied that because she was so generous, I had stopped taking things that didn't belong to me.

Well, it certainly wasn't
my
fault. We had gone into the jewelry store because Aunt Antonia'd had a repaired piece to pick up—a gruesome old-timey brooch. There were two clerks. One had brought a small rack of gold chains out to the counter to show to a customer. The customer tried a necklace on and moved to the mirror
to admire it, and the clerk followed her. The other clerk went back behind the scenes to get Aunt's brooch, and Aunt's eyes were on her, not on me. One discarded necklace was lying on the counter, sitting in a ray of that high-intensity light that jewelry stores use, with nobody paying any attention either to it or to me. It
glittered
at me.

I mean, I don't know how anybody could have expected me
not
to snag it.

There was a camera mounted on the ceiling, of course—there always is—so I put my purse and one of my shopping bags on the counter, blocking the stray necklace from the camera's line of sight. Then I moved slowly down the line of glass cases, looking at the goodies inside. When Aunt Antonia finished up her business and looked at me, I “came to” out of my distraction. I hurried back to her, scooping up my belongings, and incidentally the necklace, as I followed her out of the store.

So I lied. Big deal.

“HOW ARE YOU GOING TO
get your hours?” Emma asked me, forking a green bean into her mouth.

It was lunchtime on Friday, the first week of school, and Emma, the horsey girl, had settled down to eat with Brooke and me. I raised inquisitive eyebrows.

“Hours?” I said.

“Lebanon Hill High School makes you do twenty hours of community service before you can graduate,” she explained. “I'm going to work for the food pantry this afternoon. You two want to come?”

“Oh, I'd love to,” Brooke said. “I volunteered at the homeless shelter last summer, but my father made me quit.” She made a face. “He said he didn't care for the quality of people you meet at a homeless shelter.”

Emma snorted into her milk carton. “No, I s'pose he wouldn't.”

“Volunteer?”
I said. As in, work without pay? Then it came back to me. They were doing the same thing in LA. You had to “volunteer” or you couldn't graduate. I nearly opened my mouth to assure them that I didn't have to worry about it yet, as I was only a sophomore, but I remembered in time that Janelle, and therefore
I
, was a junior.

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” I said hastily, trying to cover up for my indignant query. Whoop-de-doo. A food pantry. Cans of brown and orange food. Reminders of how close my family had occasionally come to needing a bag full of free food at the end of the month.

“Actually, it is, kind of,” said Emma. “Lots of hauling stuff around, but everybody's in a good mood, and the time goes fast. Sometimes we sing, you know, in rounds, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,' if there are little kids there volunteering, or a cappella, if there are people who can sing.”

“Oh, I can't hold a tune, but I'm sure it's great,” said Brooke. “My dad wants me to volunteer at something cultural, like the museum or symphony. That's nice too, but I don't feel like I'm really helping people who need it.”

“The pantry needs it, for sure. Donations are down, and we have to stock it up again. That's what we're doing today, actually, not working in the pantry itself but going
around looking for donations. People almost always have extra stuff they don't need on their shelves. Sometimes it's, like, chocolate-covered ants or something, and we don't take it, but there's a ton of unopened food sitting around unused.”

Not in
my
family's cupboards. There was never anything left over at our house. Now that I thought about the dreary round of scrimping and make-do that was so commonplace in my former home, it was odd that my parents could have afforded to send me away to school. I suppose they must have taken out a second mortgage on the house. Considered in that light, I had done them a big favor by disappearing the way I had. With me gone, they wouldn't have to pay. My folks had kind of slipped my mind lately—there had been too much else going on—but I found myself feeling a little pleased to think they were better off now too. See? I'm not that bad a person. I can have generous thoughts.

Brooke's Miata was not ideal for the job at hand, which required seating three people and hauling a lot of canned goods, so Emma followed us home after school in her mom's Subaru wagon. Once we'd dropped off the car and our school stuff, we drove to Emma's neighborhood. There had been flyers distributed a few days before, announcing the food drive, and a few houses here and there had plastic bags hanging from doorknobs, or
mailboxes with jars and boxes inside. We drove slowly around picking these up and packing them into the car.

Pretty soon we ran out of houses with bags outside. Emma heaved a big sigh and started complaining. “People are so
cheap
! Everybody in this neighborhood is making, like, a bazillion dollars a year, and they can't be bothered to put out a few cans of food
that they don't even want
, for charity. For people who don't have enough to eat!”

Naturally, Brooke was quick to defend Emma's neighbors.

“Emma, they probably forgot, that's all. We'll go back to my neighborhood and distribute flyers there. I'll bet we'll get
lots
of stuff.”

To my amazement, I realized that Emma was actually in tears over this situation. I admit I didn't get it, but I was growing bored with the drama and the whole scene, so I decided to get some actual results.

“Wait here,” I said, and climbed out of the car. I walked up to the last house we'd gotten a bag from and rang the doorbell. This time of day, four p.m., was a bit of a toss-up. Everybody might still be at work, or, on the other hand, not. However, I could see a car in the garage, so I figured it was worth a try.

Eventually my patience was rewarded.

“Yes?” The door opened wide enough so that I could see a late-forties-ish woman peering out at me.

I produced a winning, confident smile.

“Hi! I stopped to pick up your donation for the food pantry. We appreciate your generosity.”

The woman's gaze dropped to the doorknob where the bag had been five minutes ago.

“But—but didn't you see the bag there on the knob?”

I made my face look confused: wrinkled brow, worried eyes.

“Well . . . yeah, I thought I did when we drove to the other end of the street. That's why I stopped. See, we parked down there, and we've been working our way back this way, picking up donations. I thought maybe you brought the bag back in to add some more stuff to it?” I smiled hopefully.

“No . . . no, I didn't. There wasn't much, just some soup my husband hates and some kind of Alfredo sauce that I never used. But I thought I saw somebody picking it up a minute ago. Somebody was on the porch, anyway.”

This time my face crumpled with dismay. My whole body sagged. My mouth dropped open, and I willed moisture into my eyes.

“You mean—you mean somebody
stole
it?”

The door opened a little wider.

“I'm sure nobody would steal a bag with two cans of soup and a jar of Alfredo sauce. It was probably another of your helpers, and you didn't notice.”

I shook my head. I pointed at Emma's car, two houses
down the road. Emma and Brooke obligingly stuck their heads out the windows and looked at me with puzzled expressions, not sure what I was up to. Their faces were little more than pink ovals from here, so the woman wasn't about to recognize either of them.

“None of us took it. Oh, that is so awful! People can be so awful!” I wailed. I allowed my voice to crack a little on the last “awful.” “You can't trust
anybody
!”

“Well, what a shame. You poor thing! Here, why don't you come in for a moment?” She stepped out onto the porch and waved reassuringly at Emma and Brooke. I also turned and smiled at them before being ushered into the house.

“Look, I'm sure I can rustle up some more things for you. Really, I'm a bit ashamed I gave so little. When I think about you girls out on your own time doing volunteer work like this—you
are
volunteers, aren't you?”

“Yes, ma'am. We're students at the high school. We want to do our part for the community. There are people our age who won't have anything to eat for dinner tonight. I think about that when I'd rather hang out with my friends or go clothes shopping, you know?”

The woman, who was dressed like she did plenty of shopping herself, looked stricken. “Honestly, you're making me feel absolutely terrible. Here, I think I have a cardboard box we can use. Come into the pantry. Let's see what we can spare. Look, there're lots of things, now
I consider it. Hmm . . . these cans of salmon and tuna would be good, wouldn't they? And here are some wonderful soups. I love the lobster bisque and the mock turtle, myself. Oh, and do you think anyone would like some smoked oysters? It's kind of an acquired taste, I suppose, but it
is
protein, isn't it?”