Susan Pfeffer: This World We Live In

“A lot better than last week,” Matt said. “Almost no ice.”

“We biked the whole way,” Jon said. “I bet we won’t have any problems getting to the river.”

“All right,” Mom said. “You can leave tomorrow morning after breakfast. But no traveling after dark, and I’ll expect you home by Friday.”

“Saturday,” Matt said. “That way we’ll have three days if the fishing is good. We’ll leave first thing Saturday morning.”

“Saturday, then,” Mom said. “Before then if there aren’t any fish. Or if either one of you doesn’t feel well. No heroics. And no traveling separately. If one of you leaves, you both leave. Is that clearly understood?”

“Clearly,” Matt said, but he was grinning, and Jon could hardly keep still, he was so excited.

I don’t blame them. If I got to go away for five whole days, I’d be landing triple axels on the living room floor.

Mom made Matt and Jon eat an extra can of spinach for breakfast, and then we helped them load the bikes.

Matt remembered a folding grocery cart in Mrs. Nesbitt’s cellar, so he ran over there and brought it back. He rigged it to the back of his bike to hold the fishing equipment and the sleeping bags. They both wore their backpacks, which Mom had filled with food and bottles of rainwater.

“We’ll bring back trash bags full of shad,” Matt promised us. “Everything’s going to be better once we get back with food.”

“Wear your face masks,” Mom said. “And boil your drinking water. Matt, you have to be really careful.”

“We will be, I promise,” he said. He and Jon kissed Mom good-bye, and then Matt bent over and gave me a good-bye kiss, too.

I didn’t like that. It felt too final.

We walked out with them and watched as they began their ride down Howell Bridge Road. The air is so bad you can’t see too far ahead of you, but I bet they tore off their face masks a half mile down the road.

I was reading Romeo and Juliet (Mom figures it must be in the curriculum somewhere) and Mom was working on one of her illicit crossword puzzles when the electricity came on. We jumped into action. We put all our pots and pans in the dishwasher, threw in detergent and buckets of rainwater, and hoped for the best.

“I had a thought,” Mom said, which always means More Work for Miranda. “If we could find another electric heater, we could put one in the kitchen and one in the dining room.”

“The firewood’s in the dining room,” I said. “Besides, why would we want to eat in there?”

“We wouldn’t,” Mom said. “But if we stored the firewood in the pantry and had heaters for the kitchen and dining room, then Matt and Jon could share one room and you and I the other. Both rooms have windows that face the sunroom, from when it was the back porch, so they get a little bit of heat from the woodstove. Between that and the heaters and our sleeping bags, we would be warm enough.”

“We’d need someone to check on the woodstove during the night,” I said. “Maybe we should keep one mattress in the sunroom, and we could take turns sleeping in here.” I pictured that, sleeping alone in the kitchen. Even sleeping alone in the sunroom, waking up every few hours to put in another log, sounded like heaven.

Mom and I emptied out the pantry (which didn’t take very long, even with the extra food we got yesterday) and carried in all the remaining firewood. The dishwasher kept churning, and naturally we did some laundry at the same time.

Mom washed the kitchen floor while I swept every piece of bark and leftover twig from the dining room. The electricity held out long enough for us to vacuum.

“Should we move the mattresses in?” I asked once the dining room met with Mom’s approval.

“Not yet,” she said. “All this is dependent on having electricity fairly regularly, especially at night. That may never happen.”

Great. I exhausted myself lugging firewood for a fantasy.

Mom burst out laughing when she saw me scowl. “Things will get better,” she said. “I promise.”

I wanted to ask how. Did she mean we’d get electricity regularly, or the sun would start shining again and we could have a vegetable garden, or Matt and Jon would come back with enough fish to last us a lifetime, or we’d move someplace with food and running water and junior proms? Senior proms, I guess, since I’d be a senior by the time there was a prom. Assuming I ever finish reading Romeo and Juliet.

But I didn’t ask. Instead I put the second load of laundry into the dryer, throwing in one fabric softener sheet. Horton, who’d run upstairs at the sound of the vacuum cleaner, came back down and sat on my lap while I pretended to read Shakespeare by lamplight, all the while thinking about food and water, blue skies and proms.

I don’t know if Horton doesn’t like the food Matt found for him, or if he’s holding out for the shad Matt and Jon say they’ll be bringing back, or if he just misses Jon. But he hardly ate a thing.

Mom says when he’s hungry he’ll eat.

We’d almost run out of cat food before Matt brought home that bag, and I’d been worrying about what would happen when we did. In the olden days people fed their cats table scraps or the cats found some mice to nosh on.

But Horton would have no interest in leftover canned peas, assuming we had any left over, which we don’t. And with the cold and the drought and the snow and the ice and the complete lack of sunlight, the mice have all died out.

I was six when Dad brought Horton home. Horton seemed to think Jonny was a kitten, too, because the two of them played together all the time. Horton became more Jonny’s cat than anyone else’s, but we all love him, and I hate the thought of life without him. He’s eleven now, and he doesn’t do much more than sleep and eat and sit on our laps, but he’s still the blue and green and yellow in our lives.

I hope he develops a taste for his new cat food. I hope we can find some more for him or there’s enough shad to go around.

I told Mom I was going to bike up and down Howell Bridge Road, stopping at the houses to look for space heaters. If I found any, I’d figure out some way of dragging them home.

“You can’t go by yourself,” Mom said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Sometimes I’m so stupid I amaze even myself. “I went all through Shirley Court by myself,” I said.

“When did you do that?” Mom asked.

Then I won the Olympic Gold Medal in stupid. “On Saturday,” I said. “That’s where I found all my stuff.”

“I thought you all went looking together,” Mom said.

“We started out together,” I said. “But we split up right away.”

“You mean you lied to me?” Mom asked.

I knew that “you” was directed right at me. Matt didn’t lie. Jon didn’t lie. Only Miranda lied.

“We didn’t lie,” I said. “Besides, it was Matt’s idea.”

“I don’t care whose idea it was!” Mom yelled. “It was unsafe and you knew it, and that’s why you lied to me.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said. “Matt and Jon can go anywhere they want. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again, and you’re mad at me for going to Shirley Court by myself?”

It’s been months since Mom and I had had a real battle, and we were overdue. She screamed, “Insensitive! Uncaring!” and I screamed, “Overbearing! Playing favorites!”

Right after I shouted, “I never want to see you again!” I ran out, got my bike, and began pedaling as fast as I could. I didn’t care where I ended up or even that I’d been too angry to put on my coat and it was too cold to be outside without one. I wanted to escape, the way Matt and Jon had.