Anne Tyler: Vinegar Girl

Louie took the toasts from the toaster oven and laid them on the counter. He covered one toast with banana disks and over those he laid sardines, all lined up, and then he drizzled ketchup on everything in a zigzag pattern. Finally he set the second slice of toast on top and pressed down hard, and he put the finished sandwich in a Tupperware sandwich box he got from a drawer. Smushing the sandwich had caused a little of the ketchup to squirt across the countertop, but not very much.

When his dad and his grandpa got their prize, last winter, it was in a whole other country and so Louie had had to go too. The ceremony was so boring that his mom let him play video games over and over on her cell phone. He wasn’t sorry they were leaving him behind this time.

He licked his fingers off where he had smeared ketchup on them, and he tugged the dishtowel from the rack to wipe away as much as possible of the ketchup on his T-shirt. Meanwhile he could hear his parents’ voices on the landing. “Don’t let’s stay a minute longer than we have to,” his mom was saying. “You know how I hate chitchat,” and then the two of them showed up at the kitchen door. His mom’s long black hair was flaring out around her shoulders, and she wore her surprising red party dress with her two bare legs sticking out. His dad had his blue suit on and his pretty purple tie with the yellow lightning marks. “How do we look?” his mom asked, and Louie said, “You look like the weather-house people.”

But then he saw that they didn’t, really. It was true they were standing in a door, but they were both in the one door side by side and very close together, neither one in front or behind, and they were holding hands and smiling.