“That’s all you see in Naples,” I said.
“Why, thank you, Madeline, for your sudden interest in the geography of Italy,” my mother said, glaring.
I sat beside Cody, squashed between the door and his car seat. Would he ever outgrow that stupid thing? I wondered, scowling over my Spanish vocabulary words. My father said Spanish was perhaps the single most important thing I would learn because one day soon more people would speak Spanish than any other language. My father was always right.
“We don’t have airbags, do we?” Cody said anxiously.
“In this old heap?” I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding!” Mom drove an embarrassing 1984 Volvo 240 with almost two hundred thousand miles on it and a huge dent on the front from the time she chased after my father once when they were fighting. She plowed right into Sophie’s parents’ new Lexus. “Now look what you’ve done,” my father said, jumping out of his own VW.
“They didn’t even have airbags when they made this car,” I told Cody. “They weren’t even invented yet.”
“Because airbags kill kids, right?” Cody said, looking at me.
“Volvos are the safest cars made,” Mom said. “Did you know that?”
“You told me a zillion times,” he said, sighing.
“There you go,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Miles’s mother has airbags in her car. So don’t let her ever pick me up, okay?”
“Gotcha,” she said. “Right-o.” She took a breath.
Miles’s mother was supposed to pick Cody up from school that very afternoon. It was written on the big calendar in the kitchen. I started to keep count of my mother’s lies. Two since we got in the car and the entire day still stretched before us. Sometimes my mother tells me that I have an unbalanced view of what has happened to our family. “There are two sides to every story, Madeline,” she likes to say. But my father doesn’t lie. In his kind of journalism, he exposes lies.
“First grade is the hardest grade, right?” Cody said. “I’m in the hardest grade right now, right?”
“Oh, please,” I groaned. “Do you have Spanish? Do you have to know the state capitals? All fifty of them?”
“So,” Mom said, “about my great news. The trip? Isn’t it great? You and me and Madeline. The three of us. All together.” She looked at me in the mirror and added, “All expenses paid. By the magazine.”
That was how peasants went to Italy, I suppose.
“I don’t want to go,” Cody said. “I want to stay home with you and watch television this summer. I want first grade to be done for me and you to stay in bed all day and watch—”
“Italy!” our mother said with so much enthusiasm that she swerved the car into the next lane. “We’re all going to Italy and we’ll see museums and the Colosseum. We’ll see everything.”
She glanced back again. Cody had slumped down so far I wondered if she could see him at all.
“You can pick the things you want to see and we’ll go see them,” she said weakly.
“Uh-huh,” said Cody.
“Great,” she said. “Isn’t this great?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Clearly,” I said, closing my Spanish book firmly, “we are both sooooo thrilled.”
We turned into the school parking lot, where kids were pulling out of minivans and station wagons. They all seemed so much happier than us, practically skipping through puddles in their bright rain boots, flashes of red and yellow and green, backpacks swaying as they moved. I looked down at my own stupid shoes, imagining my bright yellow rain boots left behind in the front hallway. When had bright rain boots become cool? And how did my mom know? Why did these things always pass me by?
“Here we are,” our mother said, turning off the car.
“Uh-huh,” Cody said.
She sat there for an instant, then she said, “You know, you two, I wish I could twitch my nose and make your lives better—put Cody in the top reading group, beatify Madeline, give you both a full-time father, one who wouldn’t leave.”
She was about to cry; I knew that. This was the very type of thing she said before she started to cry. So I chose not to correct her and tell her that saints got canonized, not beatified.
I saw the smiling face of Miles’s mother, Julia, hooded in a bright green rain slicker. Then she tapped on the window and my mother sniffled and took deep, relaxing breaths, which is what she did to pull herself together. The window on the driver’s side no longer went down (or if it went down it did not go back up); so my mother opened my window instead. Everything about Julia was bigger than life: hair, face, fingernails. She was like a Godzilla, and by that I mean the original Godzilla, not the terrible remake. “Remakes stink!” my father always said.