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Annie stared at her a moment longer; then hunger won out. Grabbing her fork, she gobbled up the rest of the scrambled eggs and sausage. Then with her last piece of toast, she scoured the plate clean. Watching her, Laurel felt the ache in her own stomach ease.

She noticed the waitress heading toward their table, a skinny girl with dark hair clipped back from her pimply face. She looked about Annie’s age. Her red nail polish was chipped away almost to nothing, and there was a spot on the front of her powder-blue uniform that looked like strawberry jam.

“Will that be all?” She said it so quickly it sounded like one word, wuthabyall. Not waiting for an answer, she slapped the bill down on the table and stomped off.

Annie leaned across the table and whispered, “She’s mad because I didn’t leave her a tip last time.”

Then Annie, as if suddenly in a great hurry, scrambled to her feet, and strode, the hem of her denim skirt swishing purposefully, along the row of booths toward the waitress in the back. Laurel saw Annie put some coins into the girl’s hand; then they stood talking.

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Annie was grinning when she returned. “You remember the sign in the window when we came in, ‘EXPERIENCED WAITRESS WANTED’? Well, I have an interview with the boss at five.” Her ink-blue eyes shone, and her cheeks were slightly flushed.

“But, Annie, you don’t know anything about being a waitress,” Laurel burst out. “Bonita waited on us.” Then, seeing the smile leave Annie’s face, Laurel immediately wanted to kick herself.

“Then I’ll just have to learn, won’t I?” Annie said, looking as determined as ever … but not quite as cheerful anymore. “How hard could it be, anyway, just bringing people what they order?”

Laurel felt tempted to remind Annie that she was the one who always lost when they played Concentration, but she didn’t. For Annie it wasn’t the details, but the “big picture,” that counted most-like taking really hard classes in school and getting B’s, instead of A’s in the easy stuff. And trying out for the best teams even if you weren’t as good as the other players.

But just for right now, Laurel thought, it might be better to be able to keep a BLT straight from a burger than to know Latin or hit a home run.

“I guess you’re right,” she said uncertainly.

But Annie was gazing out the steamy window, a faraway look on her face, as if she were an explorer scouting some distant mountain range. “We’ll find a real place to live, too,” she said, looking back at Laurel, a new sparkle in her eye. “I bet there’ll be something in the Village Voice.” She grabbed her purse, and slid off her seat. “Come on, Mr. Singh at the corner lets me look without paying.”

On their way out, passing the quickserve counter, Laurel caught sight of a folded newspaper left on one of the stools. Too small to be the Times. Laurel snatched it up, and tucked it under her arm.

Outside, pausing on the sidewalk at the corner of Eighth and Twenty-third while Annie went into the candy store to look at the Voice, Laurel unfolded the paper, and saw that it was the Jewish Press. Would there be apartments

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ments in here? Well, no harm in looking, was there? She turned five or six pages, and then she saw: “Apts. Unfurn.” The very first one seemed to jump out at her.

Midwd. 1 bdrm. Top of 2-fmly hse w/grdn quiet neighborhood, $290. Shomer Shabbat. 252-1789.

Her heart bumped into her throat. But where was Midwood? At that price, it had to be in Brooklyn. But even so, it sounded perfect.

A funny name, she thought-Shomer Shabbat. But just about everyone in New York had strange names. Like the night clerk at the Allerton, Mr. Tang Bo.

This could be her chance to show Annie she wasn’t the only one with nerve. But the first thing, she knew, was to make sure an apartment wasn’t already taken. Most times when Annie called, they were already snapped up.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” Annie asked, coming out of the candy store. To make herself seem older, she’d worn her good pumps, but the way she wobbled in them anyone could see she wasn’t used to walking around in high heels. Then Annie bent down, feeling inside her shoe to make sure the Band-Aid on her heel hadn’t come off.

Laurel took advantage of the moment to stuff the paper back under her arm. “Nothing,” she said. “Uh … I just remembered … something I left at the table. Wait here, I’ll run and get it.”

In the diner, there was a pay phone by the front door, next to a coatrack. She dug a dime from the pocket of her jeans (Annie made her keep one, just in case she ever got lost), and dialed the number she’d memorized from the paper. After one ring, it was picked up.

“So don’t keep me waiting in suspense,” a lady’s voice chimed right in, before Laurel could even open her mouth. “Did you buy it or not? New refrigerators, I’ll bet you he said, don’t grow on trees.”

Bewildered and thrown off balance, Laurel felt shy and embarrassed, but she managed to stammer, “Hhello?”

There was a short silence, then the lady laughed—but a nice, jolly laugh that made Laurel think of plump

5*

EILEEN GOUDGE

Mrs. Potter, the nurse at Green Oaks, who kept a ready supply of Tootsie Roll Pops in her medicine cabinet.

“You’re not Faigie, are you? Who is this?”

Laurel felt like quickly hanging up, but the voice at the other end sounded so nice, she forced herself to speak.

“This is Laurel… uh, Davis.” Or was it Davidson? She’d heard Annie tell so many lies to the landlords and supers who had interviewed them, Laurel couldn’t keep them straight anymore. She began to feel panicky. What if she accidentally said something that made this lady suspicious? “Your apartment,” she blurted. “The one you advertised in the paper … Could I … I mean, we … my sister and I, that is … It’s not taken, is it?”

“How old are you, darling?”

“Twelve.” She could get away with one extra year, but no one in her right mind would believe it if she said she was nineteen or twenty. “But my sister’s twenty-one,” she added quickly.

“Married?”

“Urn, well, no … but she’s a straight-A student except for math, and she can type.” Had she said too much? Or all the wrong things?

“She’s got a job, then?”

“Oh, well, yeah … she does … in a hat company. In the office. See, we’re from … uh, Arizona … and we really, really need an apartment, especially one with a garden.”

On nice days, I could sit outside with my sketch pad and paint box, she thought. And then maybe she wouldn’t feel so very far from Bel Jardin.

“It’s mostly weeds, you know. And the grass is up to here.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that. I could even cut it for you, if you like. Hec-I mean, my dad showed me all kinds of stuff, like fertilizing, and how to put roses to sleep for the winter.”

Laurel closed her eyes, and held tight for an instant to the image of Hector’s leathery brown hands carefully scooping out soil around a rosebush, and filling the hole with the coffee grounds Bonita had been saving for weeks.

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“Roses! I should be so lucky!” The lady-Mrs. Shabbat?-laughed her rich, bubbly laugh.

Laurel’s heart was pounding. Had she gone too far in her lies? Well, at least the part about taking care of the garden was true. She could. Just like Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden, she’d make it beautiful, and plant lots of flowers-peonies, and black-eyed Susans, and snapdragons.

“Couldn’t we just look at it to start with?” she asked meekly.

“Listen, darling, you and your sister, you got money for a deposit?”

“Oh, sure.” Then she remembered to add what Anme always said, “Cash!”

There was a long pause in which Laurel’s heart seemed to climb right up onto the roof of her mouth.

Then Mrs. Shabbat sighed and said, “To be one hundred percent honest, I don’t know if you’re exactly the right tenants for me, but you sound like a nice girl. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for you to have a look. So you want to come over now, or what?”

Laurel felt light with relief, like a balloon, so light that if she weren’t holding onto the receiver, she’d float right up to the ceiling.

“That would be great,” she said, trying to hold her excitement in. How long would it take to go by subway to that part of Brooklyn? She took a wild guess. “How about in an hour? Will you be home then?”

“Where else? I’m in my ninth month, Laurel Davis. Only God bless him, this baby is in no hurry to come out. So on your way over, say a little prayer for me that I shouldn’t have to wait three weeks past my time like with my last one.” \

Laurel hadn’t even met this Mrs. Shabbat, but she couldn’t remember when she’d liked anyone so much right off the bat. Quickly, she got the address and directions, hung up, and rushed outside to find Annie.

“What took you so long?”

“I think I found us an apartment!”

Laurel, hugging herself to keep from floating away,

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told her about the phone call. A cold wind was now blowing, but Laurel felt hot with excitement.

Annie hugged her tightly. “Laurey, that’s great! Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

Laurel had never felt so proud. She’d showed Annie she was grownup, responsible. Everything was going to work out all right, she was sure of it.

.L/aurel and Annie got off the subway at the Avenue J station. They hadn’t walked more than two blocks when Laurel began to feel as if they didn’t belong, as if they’d been whisked here by a cyclone like Dorothy and Toto into the land of Oz.

She couldn’t help but gape at a group of boys her age and older huddled under a produce-market awning, jabbering in what sounded like a foreign language. They all wore black hats and oversized black suits with tassels hanging from their belts. And on either side of each boy’s head, a long curl hung down.

Now she and Annie were passing a dark-skinned lady draped in what looked like a shiny skyblue bedsheet, both her wrists circled with thin silver bracelets almost to her elbows, a red dot marking the center of her forehead. She was holding the hand of a little pigtailed girl in a ruffled pink dress and white patent-leather shoes.

Laurel was so busy staring, she almost bumped into a line of black preschoolers herded by a plump lady who shouted, “Hey, Rufus … yeah, I’m talking to YOU … get your young butt back in that line ‘fore I whack it good!” Laurel, in her almost-new Levi’s and an old pink cardigan of Annie’s embroidered with tiny pink flowers, her long blond hair brushed back in a pony tail, felt like an alien from Mars.

She glanced over at her sister. Annie-with her big dark eyes and jutting cheekbones, her olive skin and chopped-off dark hair-looked more exotic, like she could fit in here. Then Laurel saw her peer back over her shoulder.

Laurel’s stomach jumped, and she thought of Val.

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What if he were following them? And if he found them, and had Annie put in jail, it’d be partly her fault, wouldn’t it? Because secretly she’d been wishing she could call Val or at least send him a postcard, just to let him know she was okay.

But then Laurel saw that Annie was only peering at a street sign, and she relaxed a little.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?‘1’ “East Fourteenth, that’s what she told me. Fifth house on the left.”

They passed a bakery with a mouth-watering display of fruit tarts, and a Buster Brown shoe store, then a delicatessen with melon-shaped cheeses and salamis big as baseball bats hanging in the window. At the corner, turning onto Fourteenth, another store, Lana’s Fashion Shoppe, had a sign on the door that read: “NO BABY CARRIAGES.” The sidewalks, Laurel saw, were crowded with them. Every woman, it seemed, was pushing a carriage, some of them double carriages, as well as holding the hand of at least one other child.

Laurel was getting the funny feeling in her stomach again. From the moment she’d arrived in the big, dirty bus station near Times Square, she had felt as if she’d swallowed a fish that kept flopping around inside her. On the bus, she’d been too busy looking out the window at everything, the license plates zipping past them, going from blue to green to yellow as they crossed state lines, passing cornfields and cows, forests, distant mountains like cupcakes with snow frosting their peaks, and the Woolworth stores and A & P’s on a hundred small-town Main Streets. She’d even kind of liked all those tuna-fish sandwiches washed down by Cokes, and stretching out on the seat to sleep with the engine humming beneath her like a lullaby. Or maybe she hadn’t believed it was really happening. As if that night, leaving Bel Jardin, the bus trip, were all part of some long, crazy dream-and when she woke up she’d be back in her bed at Bel Jardin.

Then, finally, Annie was pointing out the Manhattan skyline. They went down into a tunnel, under the Hudson River, and Laurel imagined the tunnel springing a leak,

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water pouring in, and drowning them before they even got to New York. She had gripped Annie’s hand, her heart hammering, the fish in her stomach flopping like crazy.

Now, after two weeks, her stomach was still a mess. Sometimes, like now, she wondered if they’d done the right thing, running away. But then what if Annie had gone without her? That would be awful too … worse than this.

Val. Suppose she’d had to stay behind with him? He wasn’t mean to her, but he was hardly ever around. Without Annie, she’d be all alone. She’d be miserable.

“I think this is it.” Annie’s voice jerked her back to the present.

Laurel stopped and stared at where her sister was pointing: a twostory wooden house, painted gray, with a little front porch and a tiny lawn surrounded by a neat hedge. A bunch of leaves had been raked into a pile near the sidewalk, under a big tree. It wasn’t Bel Jardin, but it looked nice … and well, homey. She noticed a tricycle overturned on the front walk, and up on the porch, a cozy jumble of chairs. A sign hailed over the door read: “THE GRUBERMANS.” Laurel’s heart lifted. A real family lived here.

But wait. The name was supposed to be Shabbat, not Gruberman. Could this be the wrong house? Or maybe the sign was left over from another owner.