Stewie waited patiently on her stoop. He turned his head and watched the sun, which was beginning to set on a long slant over the lake. Then he looked back to the open doorway and carefully placed the sample egg back in its carton.
When he looked up, the older lady was standing at the door, counting money out of a change purse. All coins.
“I hope you don’t mind change,” she said.
“No, ma’am. I don’t mind. It all spends the same.”
She dropped the coins into his palm. He didn’t count them out, because he didn’t want to offend her by seeming suspicious. He simply closed his fist around it all and handed over the carton of eggs.
“Aren’t you a little young to be selling door to door?” she asked him, that look of tight disapproval on her face.
Stewie shrugged. He got the question a lot.
“Not sure how old you need to be, ma’am.”
“I guess I’m just wondering how the job fell to you. Why doesn’t somebody else in your family do it?”
“Nobody else to do it, ma’am. My brother never could. It’s just not something he could manage. And my sister works nights as a nurse, like I said. Besides, they’re really my hens. I mean, they were my grandmother’s, but now they’re mine because I was the only one who wanted to keep them after she was gone. That pretty much makes them my project. But I don’t mind. I like it. I like the hens and I like the people I meet going door to door.”
“And your parents are okay with you doing it?”
“Oh, they died a long time ago, ma’am.”
He watched the look in her eyes change. She looked softer now. More like she was sorry to be giving him a hard time. More like she was wishing she hadn’t asked so many questions.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m awfully sorry to hear it.”
“It’s really okay,” Stewie said. “I was just a baby, and I don’t remember them at all. I figure you can’t miss somebody you don’t even remember.”
He did not say that he remembered his grandmother, and missed her terribly. In fact, he had never said that out loud to anyone. He never tried to articulate how much her death felt like a burning loss that left scars on every one of his days. Maybe partly because he figured it went without saying. Maybe partly because he would have had no idea where to begin with a thing like that.
“What’s your name, son?” she asked.
He thought that was nice, that she asked. Because if you don’t care one way or another about somebody, you don’t bother to ask.
“Stewart Little, ma’am. I go by Stewie.”
“Oh! Like the mouse.”
“Now, why do people keep saying that to me?”
“Nobody ever told you why?”
“Well, sort of, they do. One person said it was a book, and another said it was a movie. But I never read any book like that, and it’s not like we have a movie theater anywhere around here. Besides, it doesn’t make any sense. If he’s a mouse, well . . . mice don’t have first and last names.”
“It’s just a fictional story, though.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be that fictional. I mean, you can make up a thing that never happened for a story. That’s all fine and good. But you have to stick at least a little bit to how things actually are. I mean, when the animals start talking and having first and last names, that just seems like going too far.”
She offered a wry little smile, and he got the uncomfortable sense that she found him amusing, and not in any way he had intended. Then he started to blame himself for having said too much.
“I’ll come back next week,” he added. “Like you said.”
“You do that.”
And with that she stepped inside and closed the door.
Stewie stood on her stoop a moment, watching the sun hover over the watery horizon. Then he trotted back down the concrete steps to his wagon. He was happy to have sold one more dozen, but he was still bringing three cartons back unsold. They wouldn’t be quite as perfectly fresh the next day, and that felt like a loss.
He trotted home as quickly as he could, the wagon rattling loudly behind him. There was no time to try again at the doors of the customers who hadn’t been home before. Stacey would be awake, and she would worry about him if he was much later. And besides, she would be making something for dinner. His poor grumbly stomach needed dinner, and the sooner the better.
He counted out the change as he went along. The old woman hadn’t cheated him. Every cent of the four dollars was there.
He wondered over the fact that she had asked his name and he had given it, but she had never told him hers. Grown-ups were like that, though. They figured every little thing about you was their business to know. Meanwhile they kept a tight hold on their own information, because, after all, you were just a kid.
It made Stewie feel that growing up couldn’t come quickly enough.
When he got home, Stacey was standing in front of the stove, her back to him, her long blonde hair gathered into a ponytail. He came up behind her and rose up on his tiptoes to look over her shoulder. She was a petite young woman, but Stewie wasn’t especially tall, either.
“What did you make?” he asked her.
“Tuna noodle casserole.”
“My favorite!”
“That’s why I made it.”
She looked around at him, and seemed to notice the three cartons of eggs cradled in his arms.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “People not eating them as fast as they were?”
“More like some of my regular people just weren’t home.”
“Well, put them in the fridge and then go get Theo. Tell him dinner is on the table. Or it will be, anyway, by the time he gets out here.”
Theo wasn’t the fastest walker in the world, but Stewie didn’t figure she meant it that way. Didn’t think she meant anything special by it. More likely she just meant she was serving dinner immediately.
Stewie almost moved off in the direction of the fridge and ended the conversation, but something stopped him. Something that was on his mind and seemed to be tugging at him.
“I met a lady today,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m just saying.”
“What was it about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. There’s got to be some reason why you’re telling me about her.”
“Oh. Right. I guess. She just sort of . . . she reminded me a little bit of Gam.”
Stacey’s head shot up and she looked straight at Stewie. Tried to look right into his eyes, but he averted his gaze to prevent it. In the split second before he did, he saw the look in her eyes. It was the one he had been trying to avoid causing. The one that said she hurt for him. Stewie figured you should never say anything that makes someone hurt for you, because that just seemed awfully close to hurting someone. Closer than he wanted to go, anyway.
“Aw, Stewie,” she said, and her voice said the same thing as her eyes.
“I’m just saying.”
“It’s not her, though. You know that, right?”
“Of course I know that. I’m not a baby.”
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
It was the closest they had skated to discussing Stewie’s feelings about the loss of Gam, and it reminded him that he had his reasons for not skating so close.
He opened the fridge door and stashed the leftover eggs inside.
“I’ll go get Theo,” he said.
Theo was in his room, staring at the screen of his laptop.
“Hey,” Stewie said.
When Theo looked up and saw him standing there in the open doorway, he burst into a perfect Theo grin, all that dark shaggy hair hanging over his eyes. That went a long way toward healing the discomfort in Stewie’s gut.
“Dinner,” Stewie said.
“All right. Good.”
Some people found Theo’s words a little hard to understand, but Stewie was not one of those people.
He stood still in the doorway and watched his brother reach for his canes. Stewie called them canes, but some people called them crutches. They were the short metal kind with a brace that wrapped around Theo’s arms, and a handle for him to grip. It would have been easy for Stewie to help by fetching them for his brother and handing them to him, but he had long ago learned that Theo didn’t want the help.
“What’d she make?” Theo asked, slipping his arms into the metal braces.
“Tuna noodle casserole.”
“Your favorite.”
“I know, right? But you like it, too. Don’t you?”