So B. It: Chapters 10–23

Fifty-two Wilinskys were gathering in Salt Lake City; it probably seemed only fair for me to have one measly grandmother.

When I’d lied to Bernie about going to buy my ticket, I had felt guilty the whole time. This was different. Easy. And I didn’t feel guilty, more like giddy.

“I was going to bring this to the reunion, but Lord knows with all the jouncing around it’ll be the worse for wear by the time I get there. How would you like to sample my strawberry rhubarb right here and now?” She pulled an aluminum pie tin out of the bag.

October Wilinskys. I felt another jealous pang. I looked at Alice and wondered—would she understand if I told her about my birthday?

The thought of all those Wilinskys, running around happily naming their babies after each other, made me antsy, and again I felt driven to bend the truth like a soft twig.

“Heidi,” she finally said, “like I told you, I’m a big Shirley Temple fan. I think I’ve seen every one of her movies at least a dozen times, which is why I happen to know she hasn’t made a new one since A Kiss for Corliss, back in the late 1940s. She’s an old lady now, almost eighty years old. Into politics. A staunch Republican. She doesn’t tap-dance in your kitchen any more than I do.”

A large red-faced man stopped right in front of me to light up a thick black cigar. He puffed on it a few times, then puckered his lips and blew out the match.

“Want a Violet?” Georgia asked at one point during a lull in the conversation.

She rummaged in her purse, then held out a roll of candies wrapped in silver foil.

“My dad showed me once. There are all these moving parts. Gears and cogs and screws and springs, and they all have to work together perfectly or it won’t keep time right.”

She didn’t say much as we got on the bus together, but she had a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies with her that she shared with me once we sat down. I ate one, but my stomach was too queasy to handle more.

There was a grimy pay phone bolted to the wall of a grocery store with boarded-up windows.

I clutched the phone, weeping inconsolably.

The sky was an ominous dark gray, but the ground was still dry.

It smelled old and musty, like Bernadette’s medicine cabinet when you first slid it open.

I felt uncomfortable standing out in the hall like that, eavesdropping,

There was a separate alcove off the little office, with a patterned rug on the floor, several plants in heavy clay pots, and a red armchair that sat with its high back toward me in front of a nice big window, overlooking a wooded hill.

“Wouldn’t fool a bee, but it does the trick for me,” she’d say as she spritzed them with the old atomizer with the faded pink squeeze ball that had belonged to her grandmother.

“Sooooof…” he said in a strange, soft, guttural voice, “soooooooof...”

He ignored her, still staring at me intently as if I was some sort of puzzle he was trying to work out.

“She’s no slouch in the kitchen,” he said.

“And this is the scrawny Santa Claus—” I stopped mid sentence.

A flock of dark birds was moving across the wide expanse of blue sky.

In all the commotion nobody notices the panicked young woman with the wide-set blue eyes clutching her crying baby to her chest and hurrying down the street toward an empty apartment.

I wondered if my grandmother Diane DeMuth used Jujyfruits to coax Mama to do things the way Bernadette and I used to.