My mother used her most soothing voice as she pulled clothes from his suitcase, folding them more neatly than he had, before putting them inside again. “If that was true, dear, the organizers wouldn’t keep asking you back.”
“Yeah, well, maybe one of these years they’ll realize their mistake. The experience is downright degrading. I’d make a request to appear with someone else, but I’m afraid I’ll end up in what they call the ‘odditorium’ speaking with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Now that would truly be the bottom of the barrel.”
“Elvira who?” my mother asked.
“Never mind. You don’t want to know.”
“Well, are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come too? We’re a team, after all.”
My father took a shirt from my mother and set it aside. He held her hands, looked into her eyes. “It’s bad enough I have to share the stage with a man as legit as a sidewalk fortune-teller. I won’t allow you, who is every bit authentic as he is phony, to play second fiddle to a fraud.”
After that, my father said he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. They finished filling his suitcase as he joked that he better not forget to pack wax fangs and a tube of fake blood. Once he had left for the airport, my mother’s mood lightened. She loved trick or treating with us, and even if there had been other houses on Butter Lane, I still think she would have made the twenty-minute drive into Baltimore every year and led us along the narrow streets of Reservoir Hill, where she and my father had a tiny apartment when they first married. The old women who remembered her carried on at the sight of Rose and me dressed as vampires or princesses or aliens. One ancient, heavyset woman with a name that sounded like it should be flip-flopped, Almaline Gertrude, insisted on inviting us in each year. Her kitchen smelled of spicy stews that I imagined came from the deli downstairs, since there was never anything but crumpled dollar bills and envelopes on her stove. While Mrs. Gertrude sat at the table with my mother, sipping microwaved tea from dainty cups that clanked against the saucers, she told us to help ourselves to her candy basket.
My sister may not have been good at school, but she was a master at the art of moping. That’s exactly what she started doing as the years went on and she grew into her teens. One Halloween night, we made the pilgrimage to the old neighborhood and found ourselves once again in Mrs. Gertrude’s kitchen, where the air was thicker than usual with the smell of spices, though there was still nothing but money and mail on her stove. I was dressed as a scarecrow, stuffed with real hay my father picked up from Watt’s Farm before leaving for his trip. Never mind that the straw poked and scratched my skin, never mind that I smelled like the livestock section at a state fair, I was thrilled to be wearing a genuine costume.
My sister, however, refused to wear any costume at all. “Not including her mope,” my mother joked when Mrs. Gertrude asked about it. Everyone but Rose laughed. And the more she moped, the more the old woman made an effort to cheer her up. “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Gertrude said when all her attempts, from cookies and milk to free rein of the TV, failed. “No costume. No appetite for sweets. Something has changed about you, Rose. Why the long face?”
My sister looked up from where she was sitting at the table with the rest of us. I thought she was about to participate in the evening at last. Then she said, “Because I’d rather be at a party with friends my own age instead of being forced to spend the night in a stinky, disgusting apartment with a dumb old fatty bat like you.”
My mother’s mouth dropped open. Her hand shot up and slapped Rose so hard across the face my sister slipped off the chair and crumpled on the floor.
“Rose!” Mrs. Gertrude shrieked, but she was not talking to my sister.
My mother jerked her hand back and brought it to her mouth, horrified by what she’d done. Neither of our parents had ever taken a hand to us, never mind with such force. The next thing I knew, my mother was ripping us out of the apartment, spewing trembled apologies to Mrs. Gertrude, Rose, me, and most of all, God.