Only Emma (9 page)

“How come you didn’t want me to come over to your house?” Cynthia asks. “Because you didn’t want to share that little boy with me?”

“Huh?”

“Sharing that little kid,” Cynthia says,
explaining. “Like we were real babysitters,” she adds. “You know, teenagers.”

That’s what Cynthia wants to be when she grows up: a teenager. She told me.

“I don’t think you would like Anthony, once you got to know him,” I tell Cynthia. “I mean sure, he’s cute and everything, and he can make a pretty good fireman’s hat out of construction paper, but he also wrecks toys. And he hogs the VCR, too, and he drools when he sleeps.”

“We could train him not to drool,” Cynthia informs me.

Now, this is a weird thing for her to say.
Train
him? Like a seal in the zoo, or something? “I don’t
think Anthony would be that easy to train, Cynthia. And anyway, he’s just staying with us for a week. We wouldn’t get very far.”

“Then Friday night is our only chance to try. We’ll pretend we’re teenagers, and we’ll babysit, and we’ll teach him how to do stuff,” Cynthia says.

“You—you mean you really
want
to come over on Friday?” I ask her.

“Well, yeah, if it’s okay with your mom. And with you,” she says, suddenly shy.

“It’s okay with both of us,” I tell her, only half telling the truth.

Cynthia gets all excited. I can hear it even over the phone. “Oh, Emma,” she says, “we can play school with him, and
pick out clothes for him to wear, and dress him up, and everything.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” I say, going along with all of Cynthia’s goofy plans. Over the phone, anyway.

She will find out the truth about Anthony soon enough.

But at least we are friends again—until we attempt to babysit Anthony Scarpetto on Friday night, anyway.

   8   

Scissors Skills

“Can you watch Anthony for about forty-five minutes?” my mom asks me that night, right after dinner. “I’ve got to catch up on some work—uninterrupted, for a change. I’ve gotten a little behind.”

“I’ve got a little behind, too,” Anthony says, shaking his bootie and dancing around the kitchen.

I think he actually made a joke, but I decide to ignore it. My mom starts to giggle, though.

“
Watch
him?” I ask my mom. “All by myself?”

This would be Cynthia’s dream come true, I guess.

“I’ll still be here, Emma. I’ll just be busy working,” my mom reassures me. “All you have to do is to play with Anthony for a little while.”

“O-o-o-kay,” I say reluctantly.

“Now, stay out of trouble, you two,” my mom says playfully, preparing to make her getaway. “Don’t squabble, and don’t try to cook anything.”

“What about the chain saw?” I call after her as she disappears down the hall. “Can we use the chain saw, Mom?”

“What’s a chain saw?” Anthony asks.

“I don’t know. Something loud and scary,” I tell him, looking at my watch.

Not even one minute has gone by. That means we have more than forty-four minutes to go until my mom stops working and starts taking care of Anthony again.

“What do you want to do?” Anthony asks, looking sort of lost. He is no longer shaking his little behind, I notice.

“I don’t know. Something safe,” I tell him.

That eliminates doing puzzles, for one thing.

“I could take a bath,” Anthony says.

“Nope. Too dangerous. But I could read you a story,” I tell him, quickly trying to figure out which of the old picture books in my room would make him sit still the longest.

“Nope. Too dangerous,” Anthony says, grinning at me.

I grin back, and then I look at my watch again. I sigh. “Well, what about drawing some pictures?” I ask, mentally crossing my fingers—because drawing is something that might keep Anthony quiet the whole time Mom is working.

“What kind of pictures?”

“Anything! Pictures for your mom and dad,” I say, inspired. “And one for your grandmother in Tucson.”

“Okay,” Anthony says, brightening. “But you draw, too.”

“If you insist,” I say, and I get the crayons and paper out of the kitchen cupboard where Mom keeps our art supplies.

This could actually be fun! It’s been a long time since I used crayons.

Anthony flashes me a sunny smile, and we set to work.

Forty-three minutes later, my mother comes into the dining area and plops a plastic bag on one end of the table.

Anthony throws his crayon down, jumps off his chair, flings himself against my mother’s legs, rubbing his pink and white face into her skirt. He is acting as if he thought she would never walk back into the room.

She doesn’t topple over, for once. I think she
is getting used to Anthony.

“Hey,” I tell him. “Don’t make such a big deal out of everything. It’s not like you’ve been locked in a closet. We were having fun, remember?
Coloring
?” I wave my hand toward the table. Its surface is almost covered with ten or eleven of Anthony’s spidery drawings.

He works fast.

“Yeah,” Anthony says, his voice muffled. “But don’t go away again, okay?” he begs my mom, looking up at her face. Right on schedule, tears trickle down his cheeks.

“Oh, honey. Of course I won’t,” my mother says, her voice breaking with emotion as she sinks to her knees. She gathers him into her arms. “I didn’t know it would upset you.”

“It
didn’t
upset him, not until now,” I tell my mom. “He was perfectly fine.”

“Well, never mind,” my mother says in a soothing voice as she attempts to unstick Velcro Boy from her legs. “I just remembered that I bought you guys some brand-new construction paper when I went to Office Depot this afternoon. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner, Emma. But I was hoping that you and I could help Anthony cut some up.”

“Cut some up?” I echo. Buying colored paper and then cutting it up sounds like a waste of money to me.

And my mom is usually so careful about every penny she spends.

“Miss Becky says my scissors skills are weak,” Anthony says, looking tragic.

Mom and I both bite our lips and try not to smile, hearing such an unusual sentence come out of little Anthony’s mouth. But I guess that bad scissors skills are nothing to laugh about if you’re four years old. And I don’t want Anthony to flunk out of preschool!

“Well, let’s get cutting,” I say, starting to stack up Anthony’s drawings.

“Wait—I haven’t signed my art yet,” Anthony says, reaching for an orange crayon.

Now, first of all, his drawings are not exactly masterpieces. No one is going to mix them up with the art I did tonight, for instance: pictures of perfectly shaded birds. And for another thing, all of Anthony’s drawings look exactly the same. He could sign one, and everyone would get the general idea. And third, since it takes Anthony about ten minutes and a tongue sticking out of his mouth to print even his first name one time, it is clear that there are not enough hours in the day for him to sign every piece of art he dashes off.