The Rule of Threes

by Marcy Campbell

  I felt confused and hurt and angry. “What did Rachel say?”

  “I already told you, she said she’s not coming.”

  Olive looked at me for a second, her eyes all red and puffy.

  “I need to get going,” she said, hoisting her backpack over her shoulder.

  “Wait! Stay. Talk to me,” I said. I blocked my doorway. “We’re a team, Olive! If we’re going to win this contest, we’ve got to be in it together, all of us. And we really need to win this contest.”

  She nudged me aside and walked into the hallway. “You keep saying that, Maggie, but really? I think, really? It’s you who needs to win it.” And then she left without even looking back at me.

  When Dad came in later to see what I was up to, I launched into an explanation of the work I was doing. When I was upset, sometimes I could distract myself if I just talked, a lot, preferably on a topic I knew a ton about. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Olive had said, about how I was the one who needed to win this contest, and I didn’t think it was fair. Didn’t we all want to win? My dad had come up to ask if I was going to stay in my room all day, and instead of answering him, I thrust a piece of fabric into his hands, a swatch of acrylic with a bold yellow chevron pattern.

  “I’m thinking of using this fabric to cover the chairs in the outer office,” I said. “It’s technically an outdoor fabric, so it can take a lot of wear.”

  He nodded appreciatively, running his hand over it. We were standing in front of my concept board. He leaned in, looking closely at it.

  “What are these dotted lines?” he asked. “Is that where people walk?”

  “Yes,” I said, tracing the lines with my wand. “When guests enter the space, they’ll come this way, to the secretary, Mrs. Abbott, or else continue down this way to the principal’s office.”

  No longer would Mrs. Abbott have to bump her shins on the stupidly placed mini-fridge. My arrangement would provide a much better flow. No more shin bruises! Yes! Sometimes, it took a shake-up of the normal to find a new, better way. I couldn’t help but think of Olive, and the fact that I hadn’t even realized how good she was at drawing until Rachel flaked out.

  “Okay, that makes sense,” Dad said, “and what’s this metal thing?”

  “It’s just a sample of a drawer pull I like, for a new filing cabinet.” I pointed to a magazine photo of a white lacquer filing cabinet with bin-style pulls.

  My dad shook his head. “Wow, Mags, seriously, I think you’ve thought of everything.”

  I smiled so big, my face hurt. “You have to say that. You’re my dad.”

  “Now excuse me, I don’t have to say anything.”

  He put an arm around me and squeezed me close, and I squeezed him back, smelling the gel that he used, unsuccessfully, to get his messy hair to behave. When he hugged me the other day, I’d felt trapped, but not now. Now I didn’t want to let him go.

  “Where do you get all these ideas from?” he murmured. “Must be from your mother because it certainly isn’t from me.”

  I giggled, thinking about how Dad often came downstairs in the morning in pants and shirts that looked so terrible together, Mom would make him go back upstairs to change. Mom, meanwhile, used her realtor’s eye to merchandise countless rooms in the homes she was selling, hiding the flaws, highlighting the attributes. But if I got my design know-how from Mom, it was because she got it from Grandma. Thinking of Grandma, and of our phone call, still gave me a lump in my throat.

  Dad kept an arm around my shoulders as he asked me, “How are you doing? With all the changes around here?”

  I didn’t feel so huggy anymore; I ducked under his arm. “Fine,” I said. I moved closer to my concept board, pretending to study it.

  “You know, we have to be honest with each other,” he said. “You can tell me anything, Mags.”

  Yeah, right, I thought. Except that you don’t tell me anything, and you’re not honest. Not telling somebody something is still a lie, just a different kind.

  From the hall came the thump of a basketball. I often heard Tony before I saw him, I realized. On cue, he came strutting into my room wearing that blue hoodie again with frayed jeans. Dad tried to take a swipe at the ball, but Tony jerked it away, pretended to take a jump shot, then motioned to Dad, who took a few steps toward my loft, and held up his hand for Tony to pass to him.

  “I’ve got moves that were invented before you were even born,” Dad said.

  “Way, way before I was born, old man.” Tony laughed.

  They said these lines like they’d said them before, like it was a little private joke. I stood in the corner of my room, feeling my hands forming into fists. Were they actually trash-talking each other? Like Dad did with his basketball buddies? I used to go to some of his games at the YMCA, and he’d ask if I wanted to shoot around at home, but I never did. So he quit asking.

  “Please don’t throw that ball in here,” I said. They could break something. If they hit my concept board, they’d wreck it.

  “Don’t worry,” Tony said, grinning, “it’s only a problem if we miss, and we are not gonna miss.” He held out his hands, wanting my dad to throw the ball back to him.

  Dad glanced at me. “You know, we really shouldn’t throw the ball in the house, Tony.”

  Tony’s face fell. “Oh, okay. Well, are you ready to go?”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To the park,” Dad said. “Some of the guys and their sons are coming. I thought Tony could meet some other kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to come, Mags?” Dad asked, a note of hopefulness in his voice.

  This was a chance, maybe, to do something fun with Dad again, but I saw Tony look away. I knew he didn’t want me along. My dad probably didn’t either. I finally understood what it meant to be a third wheel. Besides, he said some of the guys and their sons. Where did I fit into that statement? Nowhere.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said quietly. “I should finish my board.”

  “You sure?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I smoothed my hands over my fabric sample, watching Tony gleefully run out of my room, spinning the ball on his fingertip, like he thought he was in the NBA.

  Mom was washing dishes. She liked to use super-hot water, so hot that the steam rose up around her like a smokescreen. She ran one of our yellow dishcloths around a frying pan. I didn’t say anything, just took a towel out of the drawer and started to dry. Mom liked to get everything dried and put away rather than leave stuff out overnight. It always bothered her when people who were trying to sell their houses left dishes out. “Such an easy solution to that problem,” she’d said on more than one occasion. Most problems weren’t so simple to solve.

  “You didn’t want to play basketball with the boys?” she asked.

  So they were “the boys” now, like a dynamic duo? I couldn’t help but think . . . I mean, if Dad had really wanted a son, why didn’t he and Mom have one of their own? I was twelve years old, almost thirteen. They’d had plenty of time.

  “Well?” Mom asked. She turned and took a long look at me, then turned back to the sink to scrub at a spatula covered in bits of egg.

  “No,” I said.

  We washed and dried quietly for a few minutes until Mom said, “Your father loves you so, so much, you know.” How was it that my mom always knew what I was thinking? Even when I didn’t want her to?

  She shook the water from her hands and looked at me. “They have thirteen years to catch up on,” she said.

  “But this is just temporary,” I sputtered. “Tony’s going back to his mom, and then everything can get back to normal.”

  Mom let out a big breath, which parted the steam cloud in front of her. “We really don’t know yet what’s going to happen, sweetie. Tony’s mom just got out of detox. She’s got ninety days in the program house to try and get herself together. And that’s not a lot of time.” She ran some more water. “There’s a lot to undo. No matter what,
though . . . your father has met his son, and we can’t take that back. We wouldn’t want to.”

  My eyes started welling up, and I covered my face with the towel. I thought Tony would be back with his mom by Christmas, but what if . . . ? I felt especially bad because I knew that, despite what Mom said, I did want to take it back, take it all back. No Tony, none of this, just me and my parents on the beach finding the horn of the tiniest unicorn in the world.

  I felt like a terrible person for thinking that.

  The next thing I knew, Mom was hugging me, and although I still had my face covered with the towel, I could hear her crying, too, her voice husky and choked. “This is very hard for me, too, Maggie, you understand that, right? Even though I’ve known for a few years that Tony existed, and that there was a chance someday we’d meet him, well, I certainly didn’t expect . . . I didn’t expect it would be like this.”

  I pulled the towel away from my eyes, and we looked at each other, and for some reason, the realization that we were both crying made me feel better, weirdly, like we were in this together. Without really meaning to, I felt myself smile, and that made her smile, and just as suddenly as we had started crying, we stopped.

  “What do we do now?” I asked, wondering about the weeks, the months, the years ahead.

  Mom shook her head like she didn’t have an answer. She ran some cool water into the sink. The scalding stuff must have gotten the better of her, even with her tough hands. She said, “We finish the dishes.”

  Back in my room, I was still feeling really cruddy about how Olive and I left things, and I knew I’d be worrying all night unless I apologized, so I texted her.

  Hey, sorry things were weird at my house. Didn’t mean to take the Rachel thing out on you. Sorry . . .

  She replied right away.

  You’ve got a lot of stuff ur going through. Everybody does.

  Yeah. Hey. You are an awesome artist!

  awwww, thanks

  I know what would cheer us up!

  Shopppp-payyyyy!

  When Olive and I entered the Good Samaritan Thrift Shoppe the next day, Mildred, the owner, yelled, “Hello, my favorite thrifters!” from behind the counter, which made us laugh, as it always did. We loved the store, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of the reason we loved it was Mildred, who was the cool grandma every middle schooler wished she had, every middle schooler but me, anyway. My grandma was already pretty cool, even without red cowboy boots like Mildred’s. Her long, white hair was swinging as she came around the counter, pointing to her boots.

  “Like ’em?” she asked. “Came in yesterday, and only cost me five dollars. Little big on me, but they’ll do.”

  “They are fantabulous!” Olive said.

  “They absolutely are,” I added.

  “Thank you,” Mildred said and did a little curtsy. “Now, what can I help you girls with?”

  “We’re competing in a design contest at our school,” Olive said. “And we have to decorate an outer office.”

  “An outer office?” Mildred asked, looking puzzled.

  “It’s basically a lobby,” I explained. “The secretary sits there, and you have to go through it if you need to see the principal.”

  “Uh-oh, I hope you girls never have to see her,” Mildred said.

  “It’s a him, and he’s not so bad,” I replied, though I saw Olive raise her eyebrows. She, along with most of the sixth-grade class, it seemed, was not a fan of Mr. Villanueva. They didn’t like all his rules, even if that was kind of why I did like him. Still, I didn’t want to ruin things with Olive just after patching everything up, so I didn’t say anything more.

  Mildred asked, “So, do you girls need any help from me, or do you just want to browse?”

  “Browse,” we both said. There was nothing more fun than browsing the Shoppe. We’d once asked Mildred why it was spelled that way, and she said it was meant to be fancy. We liked to pronounce it shop-pay. Rachel was best at it: “Ladies, let’s go to the shop-pay,” she’d say in this snooty accent.

  I was still kind of miffed that Rachel had texted Olive to back out of our meeting. Why wouldn’t Rachel text me? Was she afraid I’d get mad?

  I had to be honest, though: I would have gotten mad.

  “What about this one?” Olive asked. She held up a fluffy rug with blue and purple stripes.

  “Do you think we should text Rachel? Tell her we’re here?”

  Olive frowned. “Well, we’re already here. By the time she’d get here, we might be gone.”

  “Yeah, I guess . . .”

  “So?” Olive shook the rug at me. “What about it?”

  “That could work,” I said, tilting my head and squinting at it. “But then we’re kind of committing to purple as our primary accent color. How do we feel about that?” I knew how I felt about it, and it wasn’t good.

  “Purple’s nice!” Mildred called from an aisle over.

  “I don’t know,” Olive said. “I feel like it’s going to make the room seem too cold, with all the blue and green. I think we need a brighter accent. Yellow, maybe.”

  “I agree,” I said. Olive put the rug back on the shelf, and I breathed a sigh of relief. That purple would have been a seriously bad choice.

  We walked up and down the aisles, trying on dopey sunglasses, picking up super-old electronics and wondering what they were used for.

  We found an old phone on a cluttered shelf and moved it to a table so we could play around with it.

  “There aren’t any buttons,” Olive said. “How do you dial the numbers?”

  I looked at the plastic thing around the numbers. “I think you move this plastic thing around? But do we pick up the receiver thingy first?”

  We started laughing, holding the receiver up to each others’ ears, until Mildred came over and gave us a demonstration.

  “Like this,” Mildred said, and stuck a finger into the plastic thing over the number three and moved it around until it hit a metal thing. Then she repeated it nine more times with nine more numbers. “I just called my number.”

  “Are you kidding me? That took forever!” I said.

  Mildred held up her hands. “Well, that’s the way it was, girls.” She winked. “Just think if they didn’t answer. You’d have to start all over again.”

  In the next aisle, we found a funky yellow rack for sorting papers and some green and yellow baskets to match. Olive agreed with me that they’d be great on top of the existing bookshelf, which I planned to paint blue. My dad had already picked it up from school and brought it home to our garage.

  Eventually, Mildred said she had to close up, and we’d better get walking home before dark. It ended up that the baskets and paper rack were the only things we bought.

  “Who’s going to paint the bookshelf?” Olive asked. “You and Rakell usually do that stuff.” We were making plans as we walked, Olive writing in her mini notebook. There was a lot to do and there was . . . just the two of us. A part of me was starting to envy my competitors. They might not have the training, but at least they had more hands. I wasn’t sure how we were going to get it all done.

  “Yeah, don’t remind me.” Rachel and I had a system with furniture. We’d set up in my garage, put on some music, get out my dad’s big tarp. I’d sand. Rachel would prime. We tag-teamed the next coats, one of us brushing while the other caught any drips. “Do you want to paint with me?” I asked Olive.

  “You know I hate painting, unless it’s decorative stuff,” she said. “I can add a design to it when you’re all done.”

  “Maybe a design to mimic whatever shape is on the rug we find.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Olive said. She held up her hand, and I high-fived it.

  We turned the last corner before my house, and I noticed a man and a boy walking a block ahead of us. I didn’t recognize them in the fading light, but then the boy started dribbling a basketball, thump thump. Guess the father-son park thing was becoming a nightly event.

 
; “Maybe you could ask Tony,” Olive said, pointing.

  I stopped walking and looked at her like she was crazy. “No way.”

  With my luck, not only would Tony be a basketball whiz, but he’d probably be great at painting, too. The decorating contest was my thing. With everything else changing so fast around me, I thought—no, I knew—that this was something I could control. I knew what I was doing. I was in charge. It was going to be amazing.

  Maybe Olive wasn’t so far off when she said I needed to win the contest.

  Out of Sync

  The following Sunday, Mom suggested I come with her to pick up Grandma and tour an assisted living facility. I wanted to see her, but I was worried. Would she call me by the wrong name? Would she even know who I was?

  I dove into my disaster of a bedroom closet, tossing aside stuffed animals and hair ties and mateless socks until I found it, the birthday card Grandma had given me a year ago. It had a picture of a black-and-white kitten on the front, and Grandma had drawn an arrow pointing to it and written, “Looks like Mittens, doesn’t it?” I grabbed a decorating book and took it, and the card, out to the car where Mom was waiting for me.

  “Why do you have that card?” Mom asked.

  “I’m going to show it to Grandma,” I said, “in case she can’t remember me. Maybe she’ll remember Mittens, or remember sending the card, and that will help.”

  “Oh, honey, she’ll remember you,” Mom said. Then she added, “I’m sure,” but that made her sound really unsure.

  Mom pulled out of the driveway and started down our street. She was driving a lot more carefully, and slowly, than she had taking Tony to school the other day. Today, it seemed like she wasn’t in any hurry. She said, “The phone thing, Maggie . . . well, you have to remember that was at night when she was tired, and she didn’t have her hearing aids in. It was your voice she couldn’t place. If she could have seen your beautiful face over the phone, she would have known you.”

  Mom turned and gave me a big smile, and I noticed her eyes were shiny. She sniffled a bit, then turned on the radio station that played all the music from when she was in high school. Normally, I’d groan and ask her to change it, but I didn’t. I had a feeling this was going to be a long day, for everybody.