Lisa Scottoline - Final Appeal

“They don’t do that right away, Mom. They wait about six or five weeks.”

“No, they don’t wait that long.”

“Somebody else could have adopted her.”

“I don’t think anybody would have. You should have seen her in the cage.” I flash on the scene at the pound; Bernice penned by herself, barking frantically next to a streetwise pit bull. “Nobody would have taken her, Maddie. Most people like puppies, not dogs.”

“I like puppies. Little puppies.”

I sigh. I got my second wind when I washed Bernice, but the day’s awful events and my own fatigue are catching up with me.

“It’s not my fault, Mom.” Maddie pouts. “She’s scary.”

“I know, you’re being very brave. How about you go up to bed now? You look tired.”

“I’m not tired. You always say I’m tired when I’m not.”

“All right, you’re not tired, but I am. Go up to bed, and I’ll be right up.”

She makes a wide arc around Bernice, then scurries upstairs, and I take the disappointed dog into the kitchen and put her behind an old plastic baby gate. She whimpers behind the fence, but I don’t look back. I reach Maddie’s room just as she turns off the light and hops into bed. “She’s so big, Mom,” she says, a small voice in the dark.

I sit down at the edge of the narrow bunk bed and let my weariness wash over me. I smooth Maddie’s damp bangs back over the uneven part in her hair. It reminds me of Sally Gilpin, and I feel grateful to have my daughter with me, however terrified she is of big dogs. That much is right in the world. “I understand, baby.”

“Where will she sleep?” Maddie says, digging in her mouth with a finger, worrying a loose tooth from its moorings.

A good question, only one of the hundred I haven’t answered. “I have it all figured out.”

“Mom, look,” she says with difficulty, owing to the fist in her mouth. Her eyes glitter in the dim light from the hallway. Huge round eyes, like Sam’s; my color but his shape. Across the bridge of her nose is a constellation of tiny freckles too faint to see in the dark.

“Look at what?”

“Look.” She moves her hand, pointing at one of her front teeth, which has been wrenched to the left.

“Gross, Maddie. It’s not ready. Put it back the way it was, please.”

“Everyone else has their teeth out. My whole class.”

“But you’re younger, remember? Because of when your birthday is.”

“ Duh, Mom.”

“ Duh, Mads.”

She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.

“Stop, Maddie.”

“You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”

“Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”

“Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”

“You’ll give yourself an infection.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”

She giggles.

“You think that’s funny?”

She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.

“But you love to be tickled.”

“No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”

I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother. When I gave Maddie the doll at age three, they became inseparable. “You really do look like Madeline, you know?” I say. “Except for the hat.”

“No, I don’t. She looks like me. I look like myself.”

I laugh. “You’re right.” I lean over and give her a quick kiss. Her breath smells of peanut butter. “Did you brush?” I ask, second-rate sleuth that I am.

“I don’t have to brush if I don’t want to.”

“Oh, really? Who said?”

“Daddy. He told me it was my decision. ” Her tone elides into the adolescent sneer that comes prematurely to six-year-old girls.

“Don’t be fresh.”

“Don’t be fresh. Don’t be fresh. Daddy says you can break the rules sometimes.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Easy for Sam to say. After his highly suspect charitable deductions, fidelity was the second rule he broke. Sam is a high-powered lawyer who lost interest in me at about the same time I became a mother and quit being a high-powered lawyer myself; ironically, I thought that was just when I was getting interesting.

“Gretchen says that if your tooth comes out too soon, you have to wait a long time for a new tooth to grow.” She twists a hank of Madeline’s yarn hair around her finger.

“Is Gretchen a girl in your class?”

“Gretchen knows about bugs and gerbils. She knows about why it’s a hamster and not a gerbil. She has three teeth out. Madeline likes her.”

“Then she must be nice.”

“She is. She has long hair, really long. Down to here.” She makes a chop at her upper arm. “She wears a jumper.”

Like Madeline. “Do you eat lunch with her?”

“Sometimes. Not usually. Usually I’m alone.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that much people, so nobody ever sits next to me.”

I try to remember what I read in that parenting book. Talk so your kid will listen, listen so your kid will talk; it’s catchy, but it means nothing. “What can we do about that?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs.

I forget what the book says to do when they shrug. “Would you like to have Gretchen over? Maybe one of the days I’m off from work?”

“She won’t come.”

“You don’t know that unless you ask.”

“But I don’t know her exactly as a best friend, okay?”

“But, honey, that’s how you get to know someone.”

“Mom, I already told you!” She turns away.

I am at a loss. There is no chapter on your child having no friends. I even spied on her at recess last month after I went food shopping. The other first graders swung from monkey bars and chased each other; Maddie played by herself, digging with a stick in the hard dirt. Her Madeline doll was propped up against a nearby tree. I found myself thinking, If she’s digging a grave for the doll, I’m phoning a shrink. Instead I telephoned her teacher that night.

“She’ll be fine,” she said. “Give her time.”

“But it’s March already. I’m doing everything I can. I help out in the classroom. I did the plant sale and the bake sale.”

“Have you set up any play dates for her?”

“Every time I suggest that, she bursts into tears.”

“Keep at it.”

“But isn’t there anything else I can do?”

“Let it run its course. She’s on the young side.”

“But she was fine last year, in kindergarten. She was even younger.”

“Weren’t you home then?”

Ouch. Then my alimony ran out and almost all my savings; with child support, I can swing part-time. “Yes, I only work three days a week, and she has her grandmother in the afternoon. It’s not like she’s with a stranger.”

“She’s just having some trouble with the adjustment.”

Well, duh, I thought to myself.

But I didn’t say it.