Jesse looked at Markie and shook his head. “Dinosaur?” he asked.
“Nope!” Lola said, trying not to make her delight too obvious. She took a bite of her sandwich to hide her smile.
“Dingo?” Markie tried.
Normally, an eight-year-old not living in Australia would probably have to ask what a dingo was. But they had been playing this game every night for the past three weeks, and Lola, after gazing around the room for ideas and landing on Angel, had used “category: animal, and letter: D” almost every one of those nights. There were surprisingly few animals that began with D, so they’d had occasion to discuss dingoes several times.
Other turns of Lola’s included, after turning her head to look out the dining room window at the house on the other side of the fence, “Category: men. Letter: F.” Sometimes it was letter B. Or “Category: women. Letter, M-R-S-S.” Or “R.” Or “Category: boys. Letter, J.”
Lola had shamed them into dinners at the table. At six on the first night she was there, she rose from the family room floor, where she and Jesse had been lying on their stomachs, her coloring and him flipping through a video-game magazine, and announced she was going to set the table.
“For what?” Jesse asked. “And what table? Our homework’s all over the card table in here, and the dining room one is covered in my mom’s work.”
“At Mrs. Saint’s, they eat dinner in the dining room,” Lola said.
“Yeah, but where do you eat at your place?” Jesse said. “’Cause you never eat dinner at Mrs. Saint’s. You guys always leave before dinner.”
“Carol and I eat on the couch, mostly. But we live in an apartment. This is a house.”
“What does that . . . ?” Jesse started, but by then, Markie had risen from the family room couch, where she had been reading, and walked to the dining room to clear three spots at the table, so she didn’t hear the rest.
“Okay, Lola,” Markie said, walking back to the family room. “The table’s ready for you to set. We only need plates tonight since we’re having pizza. Although, we do have . . .” She went to the kitchen, ripped three squares of paper towel from the roll beside the sink, and held them out. “There! Napkins. I think our place mats are in a box in the basement, so . . .” She shrugged, grabbed three plates out of the cupboard, and handed them to the girl.
Lola stared at the plates and paper towels. “At Mrs. Saint’s, there’s always a knife, fork, and spoon for everyone.” Before Jesse could protest again, she told him, “I help Ronda set the table before I leave sometimes. You’ve even seen me do it.” To Markie, she said, “Also a second plate. For the salad.”
“Ah,” Markie said, opening the fridge and peering in. “Sadly, I’m not sure we have anything that would pass for a salad at the moment.”
She dragged out “at the moment” as though the issue was simply that Lola had asked on the wrong day. Jesse coughed from the family room, and although Markie couldn’t make it out, she was pretty sure it was one of those “cough—LIAR!—cough” coughs.
“Ronda will have extra!” Lola said, dropping the plates and paper towels on the counter. “She told me I could come over anytime we needed anything.”
Markie considered it a personal victory that she managed to stop herself from shrieking, “No!” and clutching her throat. Before she could think of a less dramatic way of expressing her horror at the thought of Mrs. Saint’s house supplying the bungalow with food and, indeed, before she could even remind Lola to put shoes on, the girl was out the door and running across the patio.
While she was gone, Jesse groaned about the impending salad. Markie didn’t like it any more than he did, but the little girl’s life had already been thrown out of whack enough. If eating the kind of dinner she expected, given that Markie and Jesse lived in a house and not an apartment, helped the child regain her bearings somehow, then Markie and her son would suck it up, be prepared to choke down a few greens, and figure out what else to serve that would merit a knife, fork, and spoon.
Markie told Jesse all of this and added that, as he surely recalled, he was the reason Lola was there in the first place. It was parenting through guilt, and it had Lydia written all over it. Markie wasn’t proud of this. But the boy shut up and headed to the pantry.
“Soup?” he suggested. “We could tick spoons off the list.”
“Brilliant,” she said. “And the salad will take care of the forks.” She turned and reached for a loaf of bread, holding it up to show him. “I’ll put some slices on a plate, and we can set the butter dish on the table. Knives.”
“Nice,” he said.
By the time Lola was back with a container of salad and a jar of homemade dressing, they had the table almost ready. They also had their attitudes adjusted enough that when the three of them sat down at the dining room table, it seemed like it was no big deal at all, Markie and Jesse eating there. Like they had been doing it all along. And they had been ever since, because Markie was not about to shatter an eight-year-old’s illusions about what dinnertime in a house was like, and Jesse had been surprisingly pleased to go along with the act.
Markie had been trying to keep food from the other side of the fence from making its way to her side, but it was a losing battle. To prevent Lola from running next door for leftover salad each night, Markie had been buying lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots, and she had picked up three kinds of dressing. But that only meant there was a different angle of attack for her neighbors. Cucumbers showed up one night, so Markie bought two the next day, and soon radishes—cut into flower shapes, no less—came over.
She added some of those to her grocery list, and suddenly, shredded carrots, rather than the regular ones in Markie’s crisper, became a must-have. Markie’s canned soup dinners were one-upped by homemade broth and stew, and her grilled cheese was sent to the sidelines by Reubens, which Ronda delivered herself. And, of course, any dessert Markie bought—cookies, mini-muffins, ice cream—had a “made from scratch” version, transported over the fence in turns by Ronda, Mrs. Saint, or Bruce. Only Frédéric and Patty appeared to feel that whatever Markie came up with was adequate.