by Mary Hoffman
When Grace went back to the house that night, she decided to call Aimee on her cell phone. Aimee sounded surprised to hear from her when it wasn’t a Sunday morning.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked straight away.
“Everything!” said Grace dramatically. “All the boys are going out with the girls. But the girls and boys don’t spend any time together anymore.”
Aimee could make little sense of this. But then Grace said, “And my Ma’s going to have a baby!” and Aimee’s big gasp at the other end was just what her friend needed to hear. Only then, Aimee spoiled it a bit by saying, “So soon?” as if it was only what Grace might have expected sooner or later.
“You mean, you guessed all along they’d have a baby?” asked Grace.
“Well, it is what happens, isn’t it?” said Aimee. “People get married and then they have babies. At least they do if they’re your ma and Vince’s sort of age.”
Grace knew that Aimee was right, but she also knew that she hadn’t dreamt of it when Ma got engaged last Christmas and that was what was making her so mixed up. Grace hated things to happen that she hadn’t already thought about.
She waited until Ma came to say goodnight and pretended to be already asleep. Then, when Ma’s footsteps had gone downstairs and she heard the theme song of the late-night TV show Ma liked to watch with Vince, Grace tiptoed into their bedroom and picked up the extension phone. She dialed Papa’s number in The Gambia, something she wouldn’t have dared to do on her cell.
Jatou answered, and knew from the sound of Grace’s voice that she wasn’t just calling for a chat. “I’ll get Antony,” she said.
Grace knew it wasn’t right to tell Papa before he had heard the news from Ma. But in the end she just had to get it off her chest.
There was a long silence at the other end.
“I expect Ava would have told me herself in the end,” Papa said at last. “She took a long time to write to me about her engagement. But the main thing is, Grace, how do you feel about it?”
This was exactly what Grace wanted to hear, someone who understood that the most important thing about this new baby was how she felt about it. She talked to Papa for a long time, until she heard the TV theme again and realized she had been on the phone long distance for nearly an hour.
Whatever Papa said about how she would always be his and her ma’s first child and how that made her special, it didn’t alter the fact that he had done the same thing as Ma had—married someone else and then had a baby—two babies, in fact.
Perhaps Ma and Vince won’t stop at one? thought Grace, as she hurried back to her own room. And the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that they wouldn’t. She was sure Ma wouldn’t have had only one child if Papa hadn’t left. Now Grace saw the future mapped out ahead of her with more and more surprises in the shape of half brothers and half sisters. Their house would be as full as Maria’s and she’d have to escape round to Crishell’s all the time. Thank goodness Crishell really was an only!
Grace fell asleep dreaming of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, with screaming, tumbling, sticky brats leaning out of eyelet windows and rappelling down the shoelaces.
Next day at lunchtime she told the gang her news. They were wonderful. No one said, “How lovely!” or “Congratulations!” They were just the way they always had been.
Maria said, “Bad luck!” and gave her a hug. Raj said, “Oh no—your house will smell of diapers and we’ll have to creep around being quiet when it’s asleep.”
Kester said, “You’ll get used to it. It’s just the shock, I expect.”
And Crishell said, “You’ll be a wicked stepsister!” which was quite the most cheerful thing Grace could think of, even though she did correct Crishell to “wicked halfsister.”
In class they were still doing the fairy tale project, so Grace and Crishell worked together making a list of all the stories they knew involving halfsiblings and steps. There was Diamonds and Toads, which the girls had successfully retold in the winter term, turning the disagreeable stepsister into a boy, to get at Russell. Then Cinderella, of course, with the hateful ugly sisters, and their teacher had told them that in some versions of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty was a halfsister to the others.
Grace sat back astonished. “You see!” she told Crishell. “I’m doomed! The half or step always hates the new baby.”
“It’s only because you’re used to being on your own in the family,” said Crishell. “Like me. And Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White.”
“Hang on,” said Grace. “Isn’t there one about Snow White and Rose Red? Maybe they were halves or steps who got on well.”
“Why don’t we go to the library tomorrow and see what we can find?” suggested Crishell.
So they did. And as well as looking at all the fairy storybooks, they went on the Internet and looked up “Fairy tales+sisters” on the search engine.
They found Snow White and Rose Red, Brave Molly Whuppie and Kate Crackernuts, which were all stories about brave girls rescuing their sisters.
“It looks as if it will be all right if it’s a girl,” said Crishell. “Though Snow White and Rose Red were real sisters and so were Mollie and hers.”
“What if it’s a boy?” asked Grace.
“Well,” said Crishell. “There’s the lovely one about the girl whose brothers were turned into swans—not to mention Hansel and Gretel.”
“I like the stories where the girls make things happen,” said Grace. “Like Gretel tricking the witch and Beauty not being afraid of the Beast.”
“Yes,” agreed Crishell. “It’s much better than squealing for a woodcutter to come and save you, like Red Riding Hood.”
“It’s like you too” said Grace. “You stood up to Russell in the end.”
“Do you think so?” said Crishell. “I think I squealed for a woodcutter and you and the others came to help.”
Grace gave her a hug. She was never going to understand why Crishell was so nice to Russell, but it didn’t matter, as long as she was nice to Grace too.
“But there still isn’t a story about a girl being nice to her half brother or sister,” said Grace. “It’s beginning to look as if I’ll have to write my own.”
“I’ll help you,” said Crishell. “We make a good writing team.”
That night, when Nana went home, Ma said, “Grace, we got a huge phone bill this morning. What’s this expensive call to The Gambia all about? I haven’t called your Papa recently.”
“Well, maybe you should have,” said Grace.
“Now, Grace,” said Vince gently. “Don’t be cheeky to your ma.”
“I wasn’t,” said Grace. “But he didn’t know about the baby and I really needed to talk to him.”
“I think we should let it go this time, Ava,” said Vince. “But, Grace, can you ask me before making any more long-distance calls? Or maybe you could e-mail your dad? He does have e-mail, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Grace. “Though it’s not the same as talking to someone, is it?” Still, she knew that Ma and Vince could have been a lot crosser with her. She looked at the bill and saw how much her call had cost. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Vince went to make them all one of his special smoothies to cheer them up.
“Are you OK about the new baby, Grace?” asked Ma. “You would tell me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you?”
And she looked so tired and anxious that Grace said, “Of course, I’m fine about the baby. I’m looking forward to it.”
And she really, really wanted that to be true.
“Let me show you something,” said Ma. And she took Grace up to her bedroom.
In her jewelry box lay her old wedding ring—the one that Papa had given her.
“You do still have it,” said Grace.
“Of course,” said Ma. “I loved your Papa. In fact, in a way, I still do. I have some happy memories of our time together. But I love Vince too. Sometimes you just have to let the pas
t be the past and live for the present.”
“It’s a bit like me and Aimee and Crishell, isn’t it?” said Grace. “Aimee’s still the best friend I ever had, but now that she’s gone away, Crishell is the person I want to spend the most time with.”
“But it’s different with the new baby,” said Ma, “because I still have my old baby.”
And she gave Grace a hug.
Bravo, Grace!
Sometimes Grace thought that her Ma was not very keen on the new baby idea herself. Ma wasn’t getting any bigger; in fact, she had lost weight. She was very sick in the mornings and often looked terrible when she drove off to work with Vince.
“It’ll pass,” said Nana, when Grace asked her about it. “It’s always worst in the first three months.”
“Was she like that with me?” asked Grace.
“Just the same,” said Nana.
Good, thought Grace. Maybe that means it’ll be a girl.
It was true that by the end of the term, Ma was looking a lot better and was a lot more interested in food. Vince made it his mission to feed her up. Like the witch and Hansel, thought Grace.
In the last week of term, Ms. Woollacott’s class was giving three assemblies—Monday, Wednesday and Friday—for the little kids. Hansel and Gretel was a huge success on Monday, with all the little ones calling out “mmm!” as soon as they saw the gingerbread house.
“It’s funny how all our fairy tales are about eating,” said Grace, who hadn’t noticed it before. “Hansel and Gretel eat the house, the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and the Beast says he’s going to eat Beauty, even though he doesn’t.”
“And there’s all that food laid out for the father,” added Maria, who had been brilliant with the props for that scene.
“That’s why little kids like them,” said Raj. “They’re always thinking about food.”
“Not just little kids,” said Kester. And Crishell nodded. She was looking a lot less thin, because the counseling had been helping her mother to get over her obsession about weight.
Everyone’s putting on weight, thought Grace, when she looked at Ma that evening. If she stared really closely, she could see the beginning of a bulge below Ma’s waistband.
My sister or brother’s in there, thought Grace, trying it out. But it was no good. It was too weird.
“A penny for them, Grace,” Ma said suddenly, and Grace realized that she had been really silent all evening.
“I was thinking about the new baby,” she said.
“That’s good,” said Vince. “We’ve been thinking about it too.”
“Probably a bit too much,” said Ma. “You see, Grace, it was a bit of a shock to us.”
“We wanted to have more children eventually,” said Vince. “But neither of us thought it would be that soon. So we were a bit gobsmacked.”
“Me too,” said Grace, but she wasn’t really
listening anymore. Had Vince actually said “more children”? Did that mean he thought of her as his child?
“I mean,” Ma was saying, “we hadn’t had a chance to talk to you about it, get you used to the idea.”
“Or ourselves,” added Vince. “I’m not even used to the idea of being married yet—let alone being a dad!”
“You’ll be a great dad,” said Grace, without thinking. Then she realized it was true. She hadn’t liked Vince when he first came into their lives, because he was so big and noticeable and always somehow there, taking up Ma’s time and attention. But now a series of pictures came into her head—Vince helping to rescue Crishell when she fell through the ice on the pond last winter, Vince giving Grace a cell phone for Christmas so that she could talk to Aimee, Vince fixing the gate between the two gardens, Vince giving her the amethyst earrings, Vince cooking breakfast in Nana’s flowery apron, Vince making sure she got into the wedding car with him and Ma . . .
Now she realized that she liked the bigness of him; it made him feel permanent and reliable. And the fact that he was always there was a good thing. A good thing in a dad, anyway. Her own papa was hundreds of miles away.
It took only a few seconds to think all these things, because Vince was still making her a little bow and saying, “Why, thank you, Grace,” when she realized her eyes were filling up with tears, and she had to run out of the room.
“Leave her, Vince,” said Ma quietly. “She’ll be fine.”
But Grace didn’t feel fine. How could she be so disloyal to her own papa? It was like going to The Gambia all over again, when she had seen Papa and Jatou and their two children as a complete family without her. First she had felt left out and jealous and then, when she had started to like Jatou, she had felt guilty because it felt unfair to Ma.
But this was going to be much harder because, as Nana had said, she was going to be living all the time with Ma and Vince and the new baby. And then they would be a family of four—two parents and two children—just like the family in her old school reading book. And people would see them out together and think that Vince was Grace’s father too. And Papa would be the odd one out.
She was longing to talk to Nana about it, and started to tell her about it as soon as they got in the car to go to school next morning. Nana let Grace pour out all her feelings. She was a good listener.
“Well, honey,” she said, when Grace had talked herself to a standstill, “You’ve done a lot of thinking about all this. I’ve been thinking a bit about it too. It seems to me as if families are all shapes and sizes nowadays. And, what’s more, they keep on changing. It’s the same for everyone. Take me, for instance. When I was a little girl, there was me and my brother . . .”
“Great-uncle Maxie,” said Grace.
“Exactly, only he wasn’t anybody’s great-uncle then. He was just a skinny little kid,” said Nana. “Well, there was us and our Ma and Papa. Then we grew up and I married your Grandpa and Maxie married Carmel. And then my family was me and your Grandpa and our little girl Ava.”
“That was Ma,” said Grace. They were parked outside the school now but there was still five minutes before the bell. “And then she grew up and married my Papa.”
“Yes, she married Antony and they had you and that was your family for a while, just the three of you.”
“And then Papa left us and Grandpa died and you came to live with us,” said Grace. “Only I don’t remember, because I was very small.”
“And then it was the three of us,” said Nana.
“For ages,” said Grace. “I thought it would be forever.”
“Well, now you know that isn’t so,” said Nana.
“And Papa said he wanted one family, not two, when we went to visit him, do you remember?”
“I do,” said Nana. “And I was proud of you, the way you took to your new little sister and brother. And I’m sure I’ll be proud of you again when the new baby comes.”
“Aren’t you proud of me now, Nana?” asked Grace.
“Of course I am, child, but I’ll be even prouder if you get yourself into school on time,” said Nana, as the bell started to clang.
Little Red Riding Hood was a great success with the little ones on Wednesday. They booed at Kester the wolf and cheered when the woodcutter came on. They specially liked the bit where Sally popped up from under Kester’s nightie. So did Crishell. When Kester took his bow at the end, she turned to Grace and said, “Isn’t he wonderful?” then looked very embarrassed.
And then, Crishell went up to Kester and gave him a big kiss and it was his turn to be embarrassed. But Grace saw that he kissed her back.
She couldn’t wait to tell Nana. When she got into the car after school, she was full of it.
“What big eyes you have, Grace!” said Nana.
“That’s what the little girl is supposed to say to the grandmother,” said Grace, “not the other way around. Guess what?”
“What?” said Nana obediently.
“It isn’t Russell who is Crishell’s boyfriend,” said Grace. “It’s Kester!”
&n
bsp; “Well, if that doesn’t beat all!” said Nana.
That night, Ma told Grace she had been given a special test at the hospital and that she and Vince now knew the sex of the baby.
“Do you want to know too, Grace?” she asked. “It is entirely up to you.”
Grace thought about it. “No,” she said at last. “I think I’d prefer it to be a surprise.”
Ma and Vince exchanged looks. Even Vince knew already how much Grace hated surprises and liked to be prepared.
“Are you sure?” he said.
Grace nodded.
Parents weren’t allowed at the special assemblies, so no one saw the three plays except the teachers and the little kids. After Beauty and the Beast, Grace and her gang all felt a bit flat, even though it was the last day of school and the summer holidays stretched invitingly ahead.
“We should do them again,” said Kester.
“Yeah,” said Raj. “Let’s do them at Grace’s and invite our families. I bet we know all the words by heart and the five of us can play all the parts.”
So they spent the rest of the afternoon collecting props and asking Ms. Woollacott if they could take things home.
Then Grace had an idea. “Suppose we did the story I wrote for the baby as a fourth play.”
“OK,” said Crishell. “I’m sure we could turn it into a play—it’s just like a fairy tale.”
For the next week the whole gang rehearsed, including Maria, who didn’t mind being Red Riding Hood and Beauty now that there were only her friends and family to see her. Grace and Crishell made real programs and all the gang’s parents were invited.
They had never had such good costumes and props for any of their shows, what with the things they had brought from school and the contents of Grace’s dress-up box, which still lived in the old apartment. It now held lots of lace shawls and straw hats and dangly black jet jewelry that used to belong to Mrs. Myerson.
On the day of the performance, all the grown-ups gathered in Grace’s old garden and Grace opened the gate to usher them into chairs on the lawn of the house.