Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

Her mother smiled slightly. "Okay," she said, put back the skirt she'd been holding, and reached out to take the one Nita was carrying. "Moral rot hasn't been much of a problem with you. So this is an experiment. But if I hear anything from your principal, I'm going to make you wear flour sacks down to your ankles until you graduate. You and the dinosaurs better make a note."

"Noted, Mom," Nita said. "Thanks." She went off to put the other two skirts back where she'd found them. This one's a start. She'll soften up in a couple of weeks, and we can come back for the other ones.

They went to the cash register and paid for the skirt. Then Nita's mom drove them to the supermarket, and as they tooled up and down the aisles with the cart, Nita began to feel normal, almost against her will. But then, while standing there with a bottle of mouthwash in her hand and working out if it was a better bargain than other bottles nearby, Nita's mother suddenly turned to her and said, "What kind of dinosaurs?"

Boy, Nita thought, maybe it's a good thing I didn't mention the giant squid!

When Nita and her mom got home, Nita and Dairine helped put away the groceries (and Nita helped her mom keep Dairine out of them); so it was half an hour before she could get up to her room and fish out her manual. As she picked it up, she felt a faint fizz about the covers, a silent notification that there was a message waiting for her. Hurriedly she flipped it open to the back page. At the top of the page was Kit's name and his manual reference. In the middle of the page were the words: If you need some time by yourself, feel free.

Just that. No annotation, no explanation. Nita flushed hot and cold, then hot again. Why, that little— He wouldn't even pkk up the phone and call me! Or else he's really, really mad, and be doesn't trust himself to talk to me. Or maybe he just doesn't feel like it.

Nita felt an immediate twinge of guilt... and then stomped on it. Why should I feel guilty when he's the one who's screwing up? And then can't take the heat when someone tries to straighten him out about it?

Time by myself? Fine.

"Fine," she said to the manual.

Send reply?

"Yeah, send it," Nita said.

Her reply spelled itself out in the Speech on the page, added a time stamp, and archived itself. Sent.

Nita shut the manual and chucked it onto her desk, feeling a second's worth of annoyed satisfaction... followed immediately by unease. She didn't like the feeling. Sighing, Nita got up and wandered back out to the dining room.

Now that the groceries were gone, computer-printed pages were spread all over the dining-room table. While Nita looked at them, her mother came in from the driveway with a couple more folders' worth of paperwork, dropping them on top of one pile. "Stuff from the flower shop?" Nita said, going to the fridge to get herself a Coke.

"Yup," her mother said. "It's put-Daddy's-incredibly-messed-up-accounts-into-the-computer night."

Nita smiled and sat down at the table. Her father was no mathematician, which probably explained why he pushed her so hard about her math homework. Her mom went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea, and put it into the microwave. "You should make him do this," Nita said, idly paging through the incomprehensible papers, a welter of faxes and invoices and In-terflora order logs and many, many illegible, scribbly notes.

"I've tried, honey. The last time he did the accounts, it took me a year to get them straightened out. Never again." The microwave dinged; her mother retrieved the cup, added sugar, and came back in to sit at the end of the table, sipping the tea. "Besides, I don't like to nag your dad. He works hard enough... Why should I make it hard for him when he comes home, too?"

Nita nodded. This was why she didn't mind spending a lot of time at home; with the possible exception of Kit, she seemed to be the only person she knew who had an enjoyable home life. Half the kids in school seemed to be worrying that their parents were about to divorce, but Nita had never even heard her parents raise their voices to each other. She knew they fought — they would vanish into their bedroom, sometimes, when things got tense—but there was no yelling or screaming. That suited Nita entirely. It was possibly also the reason her present fight with Kit was making her so twitchy.

Her mother paged through the paperwork and came up with a bunch of paper-clipped spreadsheet printouts. "Though privately," she muttered as she took the papers apart and started sorting them by month, "there are times I wish I'd never given up ballet. Sure, you get sprains and strains and pulled muscles, and your feet stop looking like anything that ought to be at the end of a human leg, but at least there was never much eye-strain." She smiled slightly. "But if I ever went back to that, there would be all those egos to deal with again. 'Creative differences'... that being code for everybody shouting at one another all day." She shook her head. "This is better. Now where did the pen go?"

Nita fished it out from under the papers and handed it over. Her mother started writing the names of months on top of the spreadsheets. "How many days in May, honey?"

"Thirty-one." Nita started looking around under the papers and came up with another pen. "Mom..." "Hmm?"

"If you had a fight with somebody... and they were incredibly wrong, and you were right... what would you do?"

"Apologize immediately," her mother said.

Nita looked at her in astonishment.

"If they mattered to me at all, anyway," her mother said, glancing up as she put one page aside. "That's what I always do with your dad. Particularly if circumstances have recently proved me to be correct."

"Uh...," Nita said, seriously confused.

Her mom labeled another page and turned it over. "Works for me," she said. "I mean, really, honey..." She glanced at the next page, turned it over, too. "Unless it's about a life-and-death issue, why make a point of being right? Of getting all righteous about it? All it does is make people less likely to listen to you. Even more so if they're close to you."

Nita gave her mother a sidelong look. "But, Mom, if it really is a life-or-death issue—"

"Sweetie, at your age, a lot of things look like life-and-death. Don't get that look; I'm not patronizing you," her mother added. "Or what you do—I know it's been terribly important sometimes. But think of the problem as a graph, where you plot the intensity of experience against total time. You've had less total time to work with than, say, your dad or I have. Things look a lot more important when the 'spreadsheet' is only a page long instead of four or five."

Nita considered that to see if it made sense. To her annoyance, it did. "I hate it when you sneak up on me by being objective," she said.

Her mother produced a weary smile. "I'll take that as a compliment. But it's accidental, honey. It'll take me days to get this sorted out, and right now my whole life is beginning to look like a grid. I don't see why yours shouldn't, too."

Nita smiled and put her head down on her arms. "Okay. But, Mom... what do you do if you find out that you're wrong?"

"Same thing," her mother said. "Apologize immediately. Why change a tactic that works?" "Because it makes you look like a wimp."

Her mother glanced up from the papers again, raising her eyebrows. "Excuse me, I must have missed something. It's not right to apologize when you're wrong?"

Nita saw immediately why Dairine refused to play chess with their mother anymore. She was cornered. "Thanks, Mom," she said, and got up.

Her mother let out a long breath. "Nothing worthwhile is easy, honey," she said, and looked down ruefully at the papers, rubbing her eyes. "This, either. Come to think of it, I could probably use an aspirin about now." And she got up and went to get one.