The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

next day. So doing my homework then gave me something to do while I waited for my eyes to get tired. Little Daniel fascinated me. He spoke like an adult and knew how to multiply when he was just five years old. I would quiz him on the times tables while we played on the Ellingtons’ scratchy orange rug, amazed at how clever he was. Mrs Ellington would pop in to listen and always touched each of our heads before she left. Good job, you two.

Thomas was smart, too, but in different ways. He made up the most incredible stories, which we’d write in the tiny spiral notebooks his mother bought us at the corner store. Then we’d draw pictures to go along with every page. Each book would take us weeks – we painstakingly discussed what to draw for each part of the story and then took our time sharpening the whole box of pencils before we began. Once Thomas let me bring one home, a story I loved about a family with a beautiful, kind mother who became very sick with a rare form of deadly chicken pox. They go for their last vacation together as a family to a faraway island, where they find a tiny, magical gnome in the sand named George, who speaks only in rhymes. He grants them the gift of one special superpower in exchange for bringing him home in their suitcase to the other side of the world. They agree, and he gives them what they wish for – Your mom will live forever, until the end of time. Whenever you get sad, just sing this little rhyme! The gnome lives inside the mother’s pocket for eternity, happily ever after. I’d drawn the family carefully on the pages of this book – they looked just like the Ellingtons, but with a third child who didn’t look anything like them: a daughter with Crayola-peach skin like mine.

One morning I found my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, flipping through the book, which I’d hidden deep in my drawer.

‘Where did this come from?’ She spoke without looking at me and stopped on the page where I’d drawn myself as part of the Black family.

‘I made it. With Thomas. At his house.’ I reached for the book in her hands, my book. The reach was pleading. She yanked her arm away from me, and then tossed the book at my head, as though the spiraled pages and everything about them disgusted her. The corner clipped my chin and the book landed between us on the floor. I stared at it, embarrassed. Of the pictures she didn’t like, of the fact that I’d been hiding it from her.

My mother stood up, her thin neck erect, her shoulders back. She shut the door quietly behind her.

I brought the book back to Thomas’s house the next day.

‘Why don’t you want to keep it? You were so proud of what you two made together.’ Mrs Ellington took it from my hands and saw that it was bent in a few places. She smoothed the cover softly. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, shaking her head so that I didn’t have to answer. ‘You can keep it here.’

She put it on the bookshelf in their living room. When I was leaving that day, I noticed she’d opened the book to the last page and faced it out toward the room – the family of five, me included, our arms around one another, an explosion of tiny hearts coming from our smiling mother who stood in the middle.

At the Sunday dinner after my mother left, I offered to clean the kitchen with Mrs Ellington. She clicked on a cassette tape and sang just a little as she cleared the table and wiped the counters. I watched her bashfully from the corner of my eye while I rinsed the dishes. At one point she stopped and picked up the oven mitt from the counter. She looked at me with a playful smile, slipped it over her hand, and held it up beside her head.

‘Miss Blythe,’ she said in a funny high-pitched voice, her hand moving in the puppet. ‘We ask all of our celebrity guests here on the Ellington After-Dinner Talk Show a few questions about themselves. So. Tell us – what do you like to do for fun, hmm? Ever go to the movies?’

I laughed awkwardly, not sure how to play along. ‘Uh, yeah. Sometimes?’ I hadn’t ever been to the movies. I also hadn’t ever talked to a puppet. I looked down and shuffled some dishes around in the sink. Thomas came running into the kitchen squealing, ‘Mommy’s doing the talk show again!’ and Daniel flew in behind him. ‘Ask me something, ask me!’ Mrs Ellington stood with one hand on her hip and the other hand chatting away, her voice squeaking from the corner of her mouth. Mr Ellington popped his head in to watch.

‘Now, Daniel, what is your very favorite thing to eat, and you can’t say ice cream!’ said the puppet. He jumped up and down while he thought of his answer and Thomas shouted options. ‘Pie! I know it’s pie!’ Mrs Ellington’s oven mitt gasped, ‘PIE! Not rhubarb, though, right? That gives me the toots!’ and the boys screamed over each other in laughter. I listened to them carry on. I’d never felt anything like this before. The spontaneity. The silliness. The comfort. Mrs Ellington saw me watching from the sink and called me over with her finger. She put the oven mitt on my hand and said, ‘A guest host tonight! What a treat!’ And then she whispered to me, ‘Go ahead, ask the boys what they’d rather do. Eat worms or someone else’s boogers?’ I snickered. She rolled her eyes and smiled, as if to say, Trust me, they’ll love it, those silly boys.

She walked me home that night, which she had never done before. All the lights in my house were off. She