“I’d rather not work at a fast-food place if I can find something else.”

“Why?”

Alice tried to think of a reason her mother might find acceptable.

“I don’t approve of what they’re doing.”

“What’s that?”

“Destroying the rain forest.”

“And I don’t care for what Baltimore city schools do half the time, but a person has to work, baby.”

“You won’t even eat at those places.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Helen reached for her bony hip, gave it a squeeze. “But you do. And if you eat it, you can’t then draw the line at working there for the rain forest’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s until you find something better.”

“But when will I have time to find something better if I’m behind a fryer every day?”

Helen didn’t answer. She had drifted back into her morning silence, her private thoughts. Alice ’s words often seemed to reach Helen on a delay, like some of those talk radio shows whose callers misbehaved. Minutes would pass, and Helen would suddenly respond to a question that Alice no longer remembered asking.

But when Helen spoke again this morning, it was all too clear she had heard every word Alice had spoken.

“I ran into Ronnie Fuller’s mother at the Giant. She said Ronnie had gotten a job.”

Ronnie Fuller’s mother. Alice tried to remember the woman, but she had been such a ghostly presence in the Fullers’ household, tiny and wan. She remembered the father and the brothers much better. She had always thought Matthew, Ronnie’s youngest oldest brother, liked her. He teased her a lot, pulling her braids and punching her.

“Yes?”

“At the Bagel Barn.”

“I wouldn’t want to work there.”

“No one wants you to work there. But the Bagel Barn happens to be next to Westview. Alice -what were you really doing over at Westview?”

“Looking for work.”

“Tell me the name of one place where you’ve put in an application.”

“The Safeway.”

“The Safeway’s at Ingleside.”

“I started at Ingleside and then went to Westview. It’s right across the street.”

“The Safeway’s union. They wouldn’t even let you apply.”

“I know. I asked. I asked to put an application in and they said no, but it still counts.”

“ Alice -”

“I did. CVS and Rite Aid, too. I’ve got no experience, and no one’s hiring. Except the convenience stores, and you said I couldn’t work there because they might put me on a night shift.”

“ Alice.” Helen grabbed her by the wrist. No lingering fingertip strokes for Alice, not in this situation.

“I’m not doing anything.” But that sounded defensive, so she altered it. “I mean, I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t be doing.”

“ Alice, baby. Baby, baby, baby.”

The old endearment felt ludicrous now that Alice was almost as tall as her mother and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds.

“You’ve got to let things go, baby.”

“I know.”

“You can’t undo what’s done, baby.”

“I know.”

“The past is the past, baby.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I ever said anything. You ask me things, and I answer, I tell you the truth. I always did. Maybe that makes me a bad parent. But you’ve got to put everything behind you.”

“I know.”

“I love you, baby.”

“I know.”

Alice began to feel as if they were singing a song to each other, like one of the old R &B songs her mother used to put on the stereo late at night, sitting in the dark with a glass and a cigarette. Alice wasn’t supposed to know about the cigarette, but she did because the music always woke her up and she crept to the top of the stairs, listening, too. She knew that smoking was bad, really bad. They taught this in school every year, beginning in first grade. But she couldn’t begrudge her mother those middle-of-the-night cigarettes, not even when she finally figured out her mother was smoking dope, which was even worse than tobacco. The nuns said you should call the police if your parents used drugs, or talk to the priest. But Alice wasn’t falling for that.

“I am really, truly looking for work, maybe not as hard as I could, but I am looking. It’s just-this is my first summer, my first real summer in so long. I want to have a little fun.”

She felt guilty, guilt-tripping her mother. It was too easy. Besides, she didn’t want to dribble her power away, didn’t want to squander it on small things. She had always been a saver-Helen called it “hoarding”-the type of child who put away her Christmas and birthday checks until the small amounts became medium ones. She had saved for things her mother found ridiculous, items that Helen would not buy for Alice no matter how inexpensive. “I’d rather have one pair of well-made Italian shoes than twenty pairs of shoddy, so-called stylish ones.” Actually, Helen had been known to treat herself to both. “But I’m a grown-up,” she would remind Alice. “My feet have stopped growing.”

Alice needed money to buy the things she knew would transform her. All she wanted was to be popular, and-slowly, surely-she had been inventing that girl. A girl who lived in a strange house, yes, with a strange mother, sure, but also a girl who was still cool enough to be friends with someone like Wendy. Helen’s approach to life, her preemptive disdain for the things that she could never have, was not Alice ’s way. She would rather be a minor star in a major constellation than to be a lonely, mediocre sun in an inferior solar system. That was the only thing she remembered from the high school astronomy unit taught at Middlebrook. Their sun was average, mediocre.

But it made her feel horrible, thinking such thoughts about Helen. Helen, who hadn’t had to be a mother, who truly chose to bring Alice into the world. She had been very candid with Alice about this, explaining how she had fallen in love with a man and they had rushed into things and the next thing Helen knew, she was pregnant and he was dead in a car crash. “Just like the president’s father,” she said, referring to the old president, the one who had been in charge when Alice went away. His father had died, too, before he was born. And his father was kind of a bum, too. Helen hadn’t made that connection, but Alice had figured it out. A good father didn’t die in a car crash before his baby was born. That only happened to a father who was out doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

“Do you know what your horoscope says, Mom? ‘Aquarius: It’s time to see the world through fresh eyes. Be a friend to get a friend. Virgo, Pisces predominate.’ ”

“Lots of eyes in the horoscope today.”

“Do you know where that baby is?”

“What?”

“The doll’s head. Did you put it away in the basement or attic?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know, baby. Why do you want that old thing?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I miss it. I like things to stay the same.”

“Well, they don’t, baby. That’s the one thing I can guarantee you. Nothing ever stays the same.”