Miss Understood (20 page)

‘What does all that mean?’ I asked.

‘Lizzie, shh,’ Mum said. ‘Marty, what are you going to do?’

‘He’s a snake, Denise. It was an honest review, he invited us there, comped us, shook our hands, and now this!’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, again.

‘Lizzie!’ said Mum, all snappy. ‘Well, snake or not, it’s an awkward position.’

Dad nodded. ‘I know it’s only a food review, but you can’t just go around buying good write-ups. You have to earn them. Argh! Surrounded by idiots!’

‘Will someone tell me what the letter means!’ I said for the third time.

Dad sighed. ‘It means that unless I say I’m sorry for what I wrote, he’s going to take me to court, and maybe get me to pay lots of money for saying nasty stuff.’

‘You know, you might win,’ Mum said. ‘If you let him take it to court, they could just laugh at him and make him pay his own court costs.’

‘That’s true. Or
he
could win,’ Dad said. ‘And then we could lose our house.’

When I heard him say that, I thought about the man living next door. He lost his house, and now people gave him cutlery sets they’d taken from charity shops. That could be us, I thought, and it was a thought I didn’t like one bit.

‘I don’t want that to happen,’ I said.

Mum and Dad, and Richie, and even Muppet looked at me.

‘What’s that, Betty?’ Dad asked.

‘I don’t want to lose our house. I mean, I know it’s right next to Derek’s house, but that’s just a little thing.’

Mum and Dad frowned at one another, all confused. ‘Who’s Derek?’ Mum asked.

Who was Derek? What did I know about Derek? He liked to eat pizza and drink beer, he had a moustache (even though he wasn’t a pirate), he owned a fairly cheap but okay (and almost stolen) picnic cutlery set, and he lived next door to us because he didn’t have a brother or a sister, and had nowhere else to live.

‘He’s no one. I don’t know why I said that,’ I kind of muttered, because I really didn’t know. It was a totally dumb thing to say.

‘Betty?’

‘Isn’t that his name?’ I asked, pointing not in the direction of the Greengrove 300, but in the other direction, towards the Greens’ house.

Dad looked at me as if I’d gone a bit mad. ‘That’s Jeremy and Wendy’s place,’ he said. ‘Where did you get the name Derek from?’

‘Oh yeah, Jeremy and Wendy,’ I said, and then I laughed, as if to say, ‘Haven’t I gone crazy today!’

‘Anyway, we’re not going to lose our house,’ Dad said.

‘You promise?’ I said.

‘Absolutely. It would be careless to lose a house, wouldn’t it?’ he said with a smile.

‘Marty,’ Mum said in a low voice. ‘Not helpful.’

Dad ruffled my hair. ‘Sorry, Betty. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to sort everything out. You don’t need to worry at all.’

But a couple of days later, something happened that made me worry about stuff I never even knew you could worry about.

It was Sunday morning, about half past eight, and Mum and I were in the family room. She was feeding Richie, and I was telling her all about the dream I’d had. It was a good one, too – one of those dreams that when you wake up, you can’t work out if it was real or not. This one had Miss Huntley in it, except she was in a wheelchair, and she could only speak Spanish, and when she asked me (in Spanish) to help her get out of the wheelchair, I could understand every word she said, even though I don’t know any Spanish words except for nachos, tacos and burritos. Oh, and piñata.

Anyway, so I was telling Mum about my dream, and she looked as if she wasn’t really listening to me. I don’t blame her, because I know that whenever Jenni says to me, ‘Hey, I had the weirdest dream last night’, I just kind of groan inside. And sometimes out loud as well, because her dreams are always boring, while mine are pretty interesting, I think.

As I was getting to the really cool part of the dream (the bit where Miss Huntley took out a red balloon and started bouncing it up in the air and saying, ‘Girl Guide biscuits, Girl Guide biscuits!’ in a little kid’s voice) Mum shook her head, rolled her eyes and said, ‘Oh, for crying out loud! Are you serious?’

‘I know!’ I said. ‘What’s with the Girl Guide biscuits? Random, huh?’

But then I saw that she wasn’t looking at me, but at something over my shoulder, and I swung around to see a group of people standing in the doorway that leads into the family room. There was a man and a lady, a girl about my age and a little boy. The man was holding some papers and brochures, and was wearing a dark grey scarf and thick-rimmed square glasses. I thought he looked a bit silly, to be honest.

‘Oh, now
this
is more like it, Cass,’ he said, turning around slowly. ‘Such good natural light.’

‘Yeah, it’s better,’ the lady replied. ‘Still, it’s not quite what I meant. Not really as modern as I’d hoped.’

‘But it’s better?’

‘I just said it was better, didn’t I?’

The man sighed. ‘Good, so now we’re getting somewhere.’ Then he handed the brochures to the lady, reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and took a photo of us. Or the room, maybe, but we were in the room – right in the middle.

‘Excuse me,’ Mum said.

The man raised his eyebrows at her, but he didn’t lower his phone. ‘Yes?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh, you’re fine,’ the man said, and he waved her away. ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing.’

‘Feeding my child, you mean?’

The man shrugged. ‘When they need feeding, they need feeding. Don’t stop on our account.’

I might still be a kid, but I’ve been around Mum long enough to know that if someone didn’t step in, she was going to explode. And since Richie had his mouth full of mashed banana, I could also tell that the person stepping in was going to have to be me.

I cleared my throat and said, ‘What my mum means is that you’re in our house.’

The couple smiled at each other. I decided then that they must have been complete idiots.

‘This is your house, is it? So you’ve decided on this one?’ the lady said in a really annoying voice, as if she was talking to a class of kindy kids.

‘Yes, we decided on this one about five years ago,’ replied Mum, whose face was going all tight and pointy. ‘When we bought it.’

The man took the brochure from the lady and frowned at it. ‘So this is an old model?’ he asked. ‘Wait – it’s not even in here.’

‘Oh, come
on
!’ Dad roared from the top of the stairs, so loudly that Richie jerked in fright, coughed a bit on his banana, then started to cry. And of course, everyone else was just as surprised.

Dad stomped down the stairs. He was wearing his grubby old mowing clothes again and the strangers in our house didn’t seem to know where to look.

‘Um . . .’ the man said, but by the time he managed to get that much out, Dad was at the bottom of the stairs.

‘What my wife and daughter are trying to explain to you halfwits is that
this is our house
! This is where we live! None of this is display!
None
of it! TV, real. Stereo, real. Wife and kids, real.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, while the lady slipped her arm around the shoulder of the little girl. ‘We didn’t know.’

‘How could you
not
know?’ Dad was asking. Well, he was shouting it, actually.
Still
shouting it. ‘How many of the other display places you’ve been to this morning have a fifteen-year-old Corolla leaking oil all over the front drive? Huh? How many of those places have a pile of shoes just inside the front door and wedding photos on the wall? How many of them feature families
eating breakfast in their pyjamas
? Did none of this strike you as
a bit odd
?’ he said, pointing at me and Mum and Richie, who were still sitting stunned at the table.

The man was blinking a lot. ‘Look, like I said, we’re very –’

‘Oh, they’re always sorry,’ Dad went on. ‘They march in here and they say they’re sorry, but it just keeps happening! Well, this is the last time.’

Suddenly, he strode over to where the family was now kind of hunched together, and as he got closer, I saw something that made me feel icky in a way I’d never felt icky before: I saw the girl flinch. She’d seen my dad walking towards her and her family, and she was scared. She was scared of my dad! My dad, the most un-scary person in the world! For a second I wondered what was wrong with her, if she found my dad scary. But then I looked at the others, and they looked a bit scared as well, especially when Dad reached out and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

The man shrugged Dad’s hand away. ‘Excuse me, but there’s no need to get physical,’ he said. ‘We get it. We’ve apologised, which is all we can really do, and now we’re going.’ He looked at Mum and bowed his head the tiniest bit. ‘We’re very sorry, ma’am. Our mistake.’

Mum didn’t say anything – she just gave a little cough, while the man herded his family towards the front door like they were a bunch of startled sheep. ‘We’ll let ourselves out,’ he said.

Dad followed the family down the hallway, and a few seconds later I heard the front door slam. I glanced at Mum. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see – maybe some kind of pride that Dad had thrown the stupid sightseeing people out of our house. Or maybe anger. Embarrassment? That was how I felt, after watching my dad frightening children that he’d never even met before.

But Mum didn’t seem to be feeling any of those things. She just looked blank and quiet, and the weirdest thing of all was that tears were running down her face.

M
um handed me Richie’s breakfast and his little aeroplane spoon. ‘Here, Lizzie, finish doing this, would you?’ she said, before standing up and walking down the hallway towards the front door, wiping her face with the back of her hand as she went.

I guess Richie knew that something was wrong, because he’d decided that he wasn’t hungry any more, even though most of his breakfast was still in his bowl. Well, apart from the bits of his breakfast that were on his face, the table of his highchair, and the floor. When I tried to feed him, he just kept screwing up his face and pushing the spoon away.

‘Fine, so you’ve had enough,’ I said.

While I was cleaning Richie up, I listened for clues from the front of the house. Mum hadn’t come back yet, and neither had Dad, but I couldn’t hear anything being said or shouted, so after Richie was sorted out, I took him out of his chair, perched him on my hip and walked down the hall.

I guess I kind of expected to see Mum and Dad somewhere near the front door, just talking or something. Maybe Mum would be getting really angry about what he’d said. But they weren’t there.

I went upstairs then, being really careful not to slip with my little brother on my hip. They weren’t in any of the bedrooms, or the bathroom, or in the study. But then, as I was standing in Mum and Dad’s room thinking about what I should do next, I looked out the window and saw them sitting on the low brick wall that runs down the side of the driveway. Dad was slumped over a bit, with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging down, and Mum had her arm around his shoulders.

This was weird. It definitely wasn’t what I’d expected to see – not them being outside,
or
seeing Dad sitting the same way he’d sat on the park bench after Uncle Tony told him that Grandpa had died. That made me wonder if someone else important and special had died.

That was why I went back downstairs, still being very careful (but boy oh boy, Richie was starting to get pretty heavy!) and opened the front door.

Mum and Dad weren’t all that far from where I was standing, and I was about to ask what was wrong, and if someone had died, but Mum must have heard me come outside. She turned her head, even though she still had her arm around Dad.

‘Go back inside, Lizzie,’ she said.

‘Is everything okay?’ I asked.

‘It’s fine. Go inside, Lizzie,’ she said again.

Usually when my parents tell me to do something, I do it straight away, because I try to be good like that. So I knew that if I was going to keep on being good, I’d have to turn right around and go back inside the house. But sometimes, even when you know that there’s a thing you should do, there’s something else that stops you, and says to you that the right thing to do is to stay and find out what’s really going on.

I guess Mum knew that, because she didn’t get cross when she checked to see if I’d gone inside and saw that I hadn’t. She just said it again. ‘Lizzie, everything’s okay. Please go inside. Maybe you could put Richie down for a sleep?’

I was about to ask why Dad was crying (I couldn’t see that he was, but when he’d sat like that on the park bench he’d been crying a lot, and he hadn’t stopped crying for about two weeks straight). But then I saw a car pull up at the end of our driveway. It was quite a big car, one of those four-wheel drives that Dad says aren’t really four-wheel drives at all, and a man got out.

Let me describe this man. He was wearing a black leather jacket, a white shirt, a gold tie, and he had a moustache, a bit like a pirate. He also had a name tag pinned to his shirt, just under the edge of his jacket. And the tag said
DEREK
.

I didn’t know what to say when I saw who it was. I did know that I couldn’t say, ‘Hi there, Derek! How nice to meet you again!’ But my parents always taught me that you shouldn’t ever be rude to anyone, and that ignoring someone because you don’t know what to say to them is one of the worst kinds of rudenesses there is. (It’s definitely not
the
worst, but it’s still pretty bad.)

That’s why it was kind of lucky that Derek was there to talk to my parents. Or my dad, mostly.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and I could tell straight away that he was pretty mad. ‘Mr Adams?’

Dad said something that I couldn’t quite hear, but I guess it had to be something like ‘Yes, it is’, because Derek closed the car door fairly hard (it wasn’t a slam, but it was pretty close) and came stomping up the driveway. Mum and Dad both stood up and waited for him.

‘Mr and Mrs Adams, I’ve just had some people down at the office who are very distressed,’ Derek said. ‘They said they’ve had to put up with . . . with “a torrent of abuse”, I think is the term they used.’