Sincerely

by Courtney Sheinmel

  Dear Katie,

  Thank you so much for your letter. I would love to visit you in California one day. There is nothing much going on in New York right now. I hope you are having a good weekend in Redwood City. Please write me back soon.

  Sincerely,

  Sophie

  P.S. Please don’t show anyone else my letters.

  I folded it up and put it in the envelope that matched my stationery. After I sealed the envelope and put a stamp on it, I realized I had forgotten to send Katie a picture. I hoped she wouldn’t be mad. I would just send Katie a picture with the next letter.

  Haley came home full of information about Dad’s hotel. When Dad had checked in, they’d been all out of single rooms so they’d given him a suite. There was a bedroom, a living room, and two bathrooms.

  “You should have seen it, Sophie,” Haley said. “The bed was so big. Dad even let me jump on it!” I glanced at Mom to see if Mom was going to be angry. She never lets us jump on our beds at home. But Mom didn’t say anything this time, and Haley continued. “There’s a Jacuzzi in the bathroom and we ordered a ton of room service. And they have all the Harry Potter movies on pay-per-view, but we didn’t have time to watch them all.”

  “Did you watch any of them?” I asked.

  “We watched the one where they play chess on that giant board and they get to be the pieces,” she said. “Daddy said he is leaving the hotel soon. I wish he could live there forever. There were so many movies I didn’t get to see.”

  “I’m sure Daddy will let you rent movies when he is in his new apartment,” Mom said.

  “Oh, I forgot something,” Haley said. She went to the closet and pulled an envelope from her jacket pocket. “Dad said to give this to you.” I took the envelope and saw my name in Dad’s handwriting written across the front. He had used all capital letters. For some reason Dad never writes in lowercase letters. Haley and I had given up trying to correct him.

  “Open it,” Haley said.

  “Later,” I said. I folded the envelope up as small as I could and held it between my hands. Maybe I would read it, or maybe I would throw it away.

  “Daddy didn’t write me a letter,” Haley complained.

  “You got to see Daddy,” Mom reminded her.

  Later that evening when Haley was taking a bath, I went into my room to read Dad’s letter. I unfolded the envelope and ran my fingers across my name: SOPHIE. Then I tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter. It was written on hotel stationery. The paper was pretty small, and Dad had used up the entire page. It was covered in his slanted capital letters. My heart started to beat faster as I began to read, and I felt stupid for being nervous. He was still my father, after all.

  DEAR SOPHIE,

  I MISSED YOU VERY MUCH TODAY. I KNOW YOU ARE CONFUSED RIGHT NOW IT IS HARD FOR A PARENT TO EXPLAIN TO HIS CHILD WHY HE NEEDED TO LEAVE. LET ME ASSURE YOU IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU OR HALEY. IT IS NOT YOUR MOM’S FAULT THAT I LEFT EITHER. WE GREW APART FROM EACH OTHER, WHICH IS SOMETHING NEITHER ONE OF US COULD HELP. ONE DAY, WHEN YOU ARE GROWN, MAYBE YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.

  I WILL BE GETTING A NEW APARTMENT SOON, AND THERE WILL BE A ROOM FOR YOU AND HALEY. I THINK THE APARTMENT WILL BE ON THE WEST SIDE AND I HOPE THAT YOU WILL DECIDE TO COME AND VISIT SOON.

  I’M SURE THE NEXT FEW WEEKS AND MONTHS WILL BE DIFFICULT FOR YOU. I UNDERSTAND YOUR RETICENCE (CAUTION). BUT NO MATTER WHERE I AM, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE MY DAUGHTER, MY FIRSTBORN. YOU AND HALEY ARE THE MOST ESSENTIAL (IMPORTANT) PARTS OF MY LIFE. I WILL BE THERE FOR YOU WHENEVER YOU NEED ME.

  LOVE,

  DADDY

  It was just like Dad to try to turn the end of his letter into a vocabulary lesson. Well, I already knew what the word “essential” meant; if we were so essential, then why had he left? And I didn’t care at all what the word “reticence” meant. I folded the letter back up and put it in my desk drawer, beside the letter from Katie. I wasn’t sure if I would write him back.

  Nine

  THE NEXT DAY I asked Mom if I could stay home from school. I thought I should be able to stay home the Monday after the weekend that Dad moved out, but Mom said I still had to go. “Please,” I said. “I really don’t think I can sit there all day.”

  “You can’t miss school because of this,” Mom said. “I know it’s hard. But the sooner you go, the easier it will be.” I was pretty sure she just wanted me to go to school so she could have the apartment to herself. I should have just told her my stomach hurt. She wouldn’t have made me go if she’d thought I was sick. It wouldn’t exactly have been a lie, since I had felt like throwing up since Saturday. But I went into my room and put on my uniform, just like it was any other day. It had been only two days since Dad had left, but I felt like a different person. It was strange to go through the exact same motions as I had the week before, as though I were exactly the same person with exactly the same life. Something so big and important had happened, but other things hadn’t changed at all. I still had to get out of bed and put on my gray skirt and go to school. I would still get into trouble with Ms. Brisbin if I didn’t wear my uniform.

  At lunch I didn’t even try to sit with Jessie. Instead I went straight to Marachel’s table.

  “Hey, Sophie,” Marachel said when she saw me coming. “Sit here.” I knew I was lucky to have other people to sit with. There used to be a girl in our class named Libby who had no friends at all, and she ate alone unless one of the teachers happened to see her and sit with her. She moved away after fifth grade. I wondered how Libby was doing in her new school. Nobody there had to know that she had no friends in New York. She could be a completely new person; maybe she was even popular.

  “How was your weekend?” Marachel asked me.

  I decided then that I wasn’t going to tell anyone about my parents. It wasn’t because I thought everyone would feel sorry for me and make a big deal out of it. After all, Marachel’s parents were divorced too. And it wasn’t like I was pretending that it hadn’t happened and that Dad would be coming home after work tonight. I knew he would be going back to his hotel, and eventually would be moving into his new apartment. Mom said he wasn’t going to take any of the furniture from our apartment, just his clothes and papers. I pictured him picking out new furniture for his own place. He didn’t like antiques the way Mom did, so I was pretty sure all his stuff would be modern. It would look so different from our home. I hated thinking about it, and I blinked quickly to get the image out of my head. It was just that I really didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want anyone asking how it had happened and where Dad was going to live now—especially since I didn’t know all the answers. I turned to Marachel. “The weekend was fine,” I said. “What about yours?”

  “Pretty good,” she said. “I went to my dad’s house.”

  Marachel’s dad lives in Connecticut, which is the state right next to New York. Still, his house has to be at least an hour away from the city. I wondered if my dad would ever move away like that. Mom liked living in Manhattan, but Dad had always wanted a house. Maybe once he got used to not seeing us every day, he would change his mind about living near us and leave the city. I wondered how long it had been after Marachel’s parents divorced before her father moved away. Actually, there were a lot of things I wanted to ask Marachel, like whether she had seen it coming or had been as surprised as I was when her dad left, and whether she was really angry about it, and when all the bad feelings went away. But I didn’t ask her about any of it. If I acted too curious about other kids’ divorced parents, they might figure out that my parents were getting divorced too. Instead I just said, “What did you guys do?”

  “Nothing much,” Marachel said. “We just hung out.” She seemed so casual and easygoing about visiting her dad. I wondered if I would ever feel that way about my parents, if it would ever seem normal to have to leave my home to see my dad, and have his home be somewhere completely different. At that moment it seemed all wrong.

  “How’s Abe?” Lily asked her.

&
nbsp; “Oh, he’s so cute,” Marachel said. “He can almost walk now.”

  “Who’s Abe?” I asked.

  “My brother,” Marachel said. “Actually, he’s my half brother. He’s almost one.” If Marachel had a half brother, that meant she had a stepmother, too. I didn’t know that Marachel s dad had remarried. I would hate it if my dad got remarried and had new kids. If he liked his new wife better, would he like his new kids better too? One thing I was sure of was, even if I had new brothers and sisters, Haley would always be my favorite. It would be up to me to protect her.

  We finished eating and sat around until the five-minute bell rang. I picked up my tray and walked toward the conveyor belt. From behind me I heard someone calling my name.

  “Sophie, wait up!” I knew it was Jessie. For a split second I thought maybe she had changed her mind about me, and then I thought she probably just wanted me to tell her about last night’s reading. I turned around.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Jessie looked uncomfortable. We had barely spoken to each other in the last week. I waited for her to say something and shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

  “I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about your parents,” Jessie said.

  I was so surprised that she knew that for a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about. She was watching me and I knew I had to say something. “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Your mom told my mom,” she said. Our mothers were pretty good friends, so that made sense. Still, it didn’t seem fair. I thought it should have been up to me to decide when people at school found out about my parents. But if Jessie knew, I was sure that Lindsay, Amy, and Melissa knew as well—maybe they had even told more people about it. I guess it wasn’t a secret after all.

  When I got home from school that afternoon, all of Dad’s stuff was already gone. Mom said he had taken the day off of work so he could pack everything up while Haley and I weren’t home. I was glad because I didn’t want to see him anyway. Mom also said that Dad already had an apartment to move into.

  “How did he get an apartment so fast?” I asked Mom.

  “He must have looked over the weekend,” Mom said, but she didn’t sound convinced herself. I knew it wasn’t that easy to find a new apartment. Jessie and Liz had moved last year, and Liz had looked at different places for a whole month before she’d found something she liked. I realized Dad must have been planning to leave for a while. Maybe he had even been looking for apartments the day we went to the pumpkin farm, and that was the real reason why he hadn’t come with us. After all, he didn’t bring his briefcase with him that day, and he always had his briefcase when he was going to the office. It was just like Dad to pretend everything was normal when really everything was completely messed up. I hated that he thought he could fool me.

  “Do you know where the apartment is?” I asked Mom.

  “Somewhere on the West Side,” she said. That was the same side of the city that Lindsay lived on. Maybe they would see each other on the street. I imagined Dad bumping into Lindsay as he waited for the crosstown bus so he could come to the East Side and pick up Haley and me. I wasn’t sure Dad knew who Lindsay was. The last time Lindsay had been at our apartment was for my birthday party in the second grade. Still, if they did see each other at the bus stop and started talking, I was sure it would be about me—after all, what else did they have in common? I would hate that. Luckily, I realized, Lindsay’s parents had so much money that she probably always took cabs instead of the bus.

  Haley went to see Dad’s new apartment at the end of the week. It had two bedrooms—one for dad, and one for Haley and me to share, just like at our real home. Dad still didn’t have a couch or a table, but he had a card table and folding chairs in the living room so he had a place to sit down and eat, and there were beds in the bedrooms. Dad had even picked out bedding for Haley and me. Haley said we each had a pink comforter and sheets with flowers on them.

  “He shouldn’t have picked them out without us,” I complained. “He doesn’t even know what we like anymore.”

  “No, it’s pretty,” Haley said. “Really.”

  Haley also gave me another letter from Dad. This time I didn’t wait so long to open the envelope. I finished talking to Haley and then I went to my room to open it. His letter mostly just described his new apartment, but I already knew about it from Haley. At the end he wrote about how much he missed me and wanted to see me. “I don’t want to pressure you,” he wrote, “but I also want you to know how much I miss you. Whenever you are ready, I am here.” I read that part a couple of times. Then I put the letter back into the envelope and put it into my desk drawer with the other letters from Katie and Dad. For someone who didn’t usually get any mail, I was getting quite a collection.

  • • •

  Over the weekend Mom announced that we were going to clean the whole apartment and organize everything. Things looked kind of messy since Dad had come in and taken all his stuff, but I hated cleaning. It was just one more awful side effect of Dad’s leaving.

  Mom had taken all the leftover books and papers from the shelves in the living room and put everything in the center of the floor. “Come on, girls,” Mom said. “I need your help with this pile.”

  Haley went over to Mom but I stayed on the couch. Mom looked over at me. “I really need your help with this,” she said. Ordinarily I would have given her a hard time about making me clean, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. I got up off the couch, and Mom patted the floor next to her. “We need to decide what to keep and what to give away,” Mom explained. “So any books that you two no longer want, just pile in that corner.”

  Haley and I went through the stack of books together. Most of my old books we decided to keep, since Haley wanted to read them.

  “What about this one?” Haley said. She held up a book I didn’t remember seeing before. “Is this a good book?”

  I took it from her and read the title, The Best Names for Your Baby. “This isn’t a book you read,” I told Haley. “It’s a book of names for when you’re having a baby.” I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought that was definitely a book we should get rid of. If Mom got remarried, I didn’t want her to find it and decide to have another baby. “We don’t need it,” I told Haley. “Put it in the give away pile.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Mom said. “Let me see that. I haven’t seen it in years!” She took it and flipped through the pages, smiling. It was the first time she had smiled all day. “Daddy bought this for me when we found out I was pregnant with you,” she told me.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Mom said. All the names were listed alphabetically and defined, just like in a dictionary. I flipped through the pages to get to the S’s and looked up my name. “Sophie,” I read. “Meaning: wise.”

  Haley clamored for the book. “I want to see my name too!”

  “Hold on,” I told her. “I’ll look it up.” Haley bent over my shoulder and I turned the pages to the H section. “There it is,” I said, and I pointed.

  Haley read it out loud. “Meaning: hero. Oh, cool!”

  “Why did you name me Sophie?” I asked Mom.

  “You know this story,” Mom said. “Daddy’s mother was named Sophie, and she had just passed away, so Daddy really wanted to name you after her.”

  “What if I was a boy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we would have picked out a boy’s name that started with an S. We really didn’t talk about it. I just knew you were going to be a girl.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Mother’s instinct,” she said.

  “Did Dad know I was going to be a girl?”

  “I guess he did,” Mom said. “He knew he was going to have a girl to name after his mother.”

  I thought about the pictures of my grandma Sophie. She looked so old. Sophie sounded like a good name for an old lady. Maybe that’s why it meant wise—it was a good name for someone who was very old an
d had a lot to remember and think about. But being wise seemed like a really big responsibility for someone who was just eleven. I wished my parents had picked a different name; maybe then everything about me would have been different. “Sometimes I don’t like my name,” I said.

  “Nobody ever likes their name,” Mom said. “But I love your name. It was the first thing we picked out for you, your first present.” Mom took the book from my hands. “Let’s not throw this one away,” she said.

  “Okay,” Haley said. “Are we done cleaning now?”

  “No,” Mom said, “but we can take a break for a little while.”

  “Can I call Jennifer and see if she can come over for dinner?” Haley asked, and Mom nodded. Haley skipped into Mom’s office to get the phone. I knew I had at least a few minutes of privacy, so I went into my room to write to Katie.

  Dear Katie,

  My mom is making Haley and me help her clean the house—I guess it’s like “spring cleaning” even though it’s fall. We just finished cleaning the bookshelves. Haley and I found this book of names. You know, the kind of book you get when you’re having a baby. It lists all the names and defines them all, like in a dictionary. My mom got it when she was pregnant with me. My name means “wise.” I’m not really sure that it fits me. I’m named after my grandmother, so maybe she was wise. Haley’s name means “hero.” I’m not sure if Haley is a hero. She’s only seven, and I think that is still too young to know. But her name definitely has a better meaning than mine does.

  I made some new friends the other day—at least I think I did. There are these girls in the other sixth-grade class who I’ve been eating lunch with. They’re really nice, but I still miss Jessie. Even though she’s being mean, I miss her. I guess that’s pretty stupid, but I can’t help it. Does that make any sense?