Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

“No homework on Fridays,” she said. “But I want to eat supper and wash the dishes before Donny and Marie comes on.”

They never spoke of his plans for the evening, much less the stakes involved, but after such encounters Sofia went home and hid whatever she could. She longed to advise her mother to do the same, but it was understood that they never spoke of her father’s winning and losing, much less the consequences for the household.

“I bought it for you, didn’t I?” her father had told her younger brother, Brad, wheeling the ten-speed bicycle with the banana seat out of the garage. Brad had owned the shiny Schwinn for all of a month. “Why’d I ever think we needed fancy candlesticks like these?” her father grumbled, taking the grape-bedecked silver stems from the sideboard, as if his only problem was a sudden distaste for their ornate style. One Saturday morning, he came into Sofia ’s room and tried to grab her guitar, purchased a year earlier after a particularly good Friday, but something in her expression made him put it back.

Instead he sold the family dog, a purebred collie, or so her father had said when he brought the puppy home three months ago. It turned out that Shemp had the wrong kind of papers, some initials other than AKC. The man who agreed to buy Shemp from them had lectured her father, accusing him of being taken in by the Mennonite puppy mills over the state line. He gave her father twenty-five dollars, saying: “People who can’t be bothered to do the most basic research probably shouldn’t have a dog, anyway.”

Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s car-she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp-chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites. She imagined them ringed around a poker table, solemn bearded faces regarding their cards. Mennonites would probably be good at poker if God let them play it.

Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of temperature outside his control. “I was hot,” her father crowed coming through the door Saturday morning, carrying a box of doughnuts. “I’ve never seen a colder deck,” he’d say, heading out Saturday afternoon after a long morning nap on the sofa. “I couldn’t catch a break.”

You just can’t bluff, Sofia thought. But then, neither could she. Perhaps it was in her genes. That was why she had to outrun the boys on the other team. Go long and I’ll hit you, Joe told her, and that’s what she did, play after play. She outran her competition or she didn’t, but she never tried to fool the other players or faulted anyone else when she failed to catch a ball that was thrown right at her. She didn’t think of herself as hot or cold, or try to blame the ball for what she failed to do. A level playing field was not a figure of speech to Sofia. It was all she knew. She made a point of learning every square inch of the vacant lot-the slight depressions where you could turn an ankle if you came down wrong, the sections that stayed mushy long after the rain, the slope in one of their improvised end zones that made it tricky to set up for the pass. With just a little homework, Sofia believed, you could control for every possibility.

Sofia ’s stubborn devotion to football probably led to the onslaught of oh-so-girly gifts on her next birthday-a pink dress, perfume, and a silver necklace with purplish jewels that her mother said were amethysts. “Semiprecious,” she added. There were three of them, one large oval guarded by two small ones, set in a reddish gold. The necklace was the most beautiful thing that Sofia had ever seen.

“Maybe you’ll go to the winter dance up at school, Fee,” her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.

“Someone has to ask you first,” Sofia said, pretending not to be impressed by her own reflection.

“Oh, it’s okay to go with a group of girls, too,” her mother said.

Sofia didn’t know any girls, actually. She was friendly with most of them, but not friends. The girls at school seemed split about her: some thought her love of football was genuine, if odd, while others proclaimed it an awfully creative way to be a tramp. This second group of girls whispered that Sofia was fast, fast in the bad way, that football wasn’t the only game she played with all those boys in the vacant lot behind Gordon’s Tavern. What would they say if she actually danced with one, much less let him walk her home?

“I’d be scared to wear this out of the house,” she said, placing a tentative finger on the large amethyst. “Something might happen to it.”

“Your aunt would want you to wear it and enjoy it,” her mother said. “It’s an heirloom. It belonged to Aunt Polly, and her aunt before her, and their grandmother before that. But Tammy didn’t have any girls, so she gave it to me a few years ago, said to put it away for a special birthday. This one’s as special as any, I think.”

“What if I lost it?”

“You can’t,” her mother said. “It has a special catch-see?”

But Sofia wasn’t worried about the catch. Or, rather, she was worried about the other catch, the hidden rules that were always changing. She was trying to figure out if the necklace qualified as a real gift, one that her father couldn’t reclaim. It hadn’t been purchased in a store. It had come from her father’s side of the family. And although it was a birthday gift, it hadn’t been wrapped up in paper and ribbons. She put it back in its box, a velvety once-black rectangle that was all the more beautiful for having faded to gray. Where would her father never look for it?

Three weeks later, Sofia awoke one Saturday to find her father standing over her guitar. Her father must not have known how guitar strings were attached because he cut them with a pocketknife, sliced them right down the middle and reached into the hole to extract the velvet box, which had been anchored in a tea towel at the bottom, so it wouldn’t make an obvious swishing noise if someone picked up the guitar and shook it. How had he known it was there? Perhaps he had reached for the guitar again and felt the extra weight. Perhaps he simply knew Sofia too well, a far more disturbing thought. At any rate, he held the velvet box in his hand.

“I’ll buy you new ones,” he said.

He meant the strings, of course, not the necklace or the amethysts.

“But you can’t sell it,” she said, groping for the word her mother had invoked so lovingly. “It’s a hair-loom.”

“Oh, Fee, it’s nothing special. I’ll buy you something much better when my luck changes.”

“Take something else, anything else. Take the guitar.”

“Strings cut,” he said, as if he had found it that way and believed it beyond repair. “Besides, I told this fellow about it and he said he’ll take it in lieu of…in lieu of debts owed, if he finds it satisfactory. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of pawning it.”

“But if you don’t pawn it, we can’t ever get it back.”

“Honey, when did we ever redeem a pawnshop ticket?”

This was true, but at least the pawnshop held open the promise of recovering things. If the necklace went to a person, it would be gone as Shemp. Sofia imagined it on the neck of a smug girl, like one of the ones who whispered about her up at school. A girl who would say: Oh, my father bought me this at the pawnshop. It’s an antique. My father said the people who owned it probably didn’t know it was valuable. But Sofia did and her mother did. It was only her father who didn’t value it, except as a way to cover his losses.

“Please don’t take it,” she said. She tried to make her face do whatever it had done the day he had backed down before, but it was dim in her room and her father was resolved. He pocketed the beautiful box and left.