his office. He had another office, in a big building somewhere else which Mouse saw once, but he didn’t go there every day
like other dads she knew did when they went to work. Instead
he stayed home, in the room with the door closed, talking to
customers nearly all day on the phone.
But sometimes he had to go to his other office, like he had
the day he brought Fake Mom home with him. And sometimes
he had to go away. Then he’d be gone for days.
The night that Fake Mom came home, he stepped into the
house alone. He set his briefcase beside the door, hung his coat
on the hook. He thanked the older couple across the street for
keeping an eye on her. He walked them to the door with Mouse
trailing behind.
Mouse and her father watched them make their way slowly
across the street and back home. It looked like it was hard. It
looked like it hurt. Mouse didn’t think that she ever wanted to
get old.
When they were gone, her father shut the door. He turned
to Mouse. He told her he had a surprise for her, that she should
close her eyes.
Mouse was sure her surprise was a puppy, the one she had
been begging for since the day they walked past it in the pet
shop window, big and fluffy and white. Her father had said
no at the time, that a puppy was too much work, but maybe he had changed his mind. He did that sometimes when she really
wanted something. Because Mouse was a good girl. He didn’t
spoil her, but he did like knowing she was happy. And a puppy
would make her very, very happy.
Mouse pressed her hands to her eyes. For whatever reason,
she held her breath. She listened intently for the sound of yaps
and whimpers coming from the other end of the room where
her father was standing. But there were no yaps or whimpers.
What she heard instead was the sound of the front door open-
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ing and then closing again. Mouse knew why. Her father had
gone outside, back to his car to collect the puppy. Because it
wasn’t like the puppy was hiding in his briefcase. It was still in
the car, where he had left it so he could surprise her with it.
As she waited, a grin spread across Mouse’s face. Her knees
shook in excitement. She could hardly contain herself.
Mouse heard the door close, her father clear his voice.
He was eager when he spoke. He said to Mouse, Open your
eyes, and before she ever laid eyes on him, she knew that he was smiling too.
Mouse’s eyes flung open and without meaning to, her hand
shot to her mouth. She gasped, because it wasn’t a puppy she
saw standing before her in her own living room.
It was a woman.
The woman’s thin hand was holding Mouse’s father’s hand,
fingers spliced together in that same way Mouse had seen men
and women do it on TV. The woman was smiling widely at
Mouse, her mouth big and beautiful. She said hello to the girl,
her voice somehow as pretty as her face was. Mouse said noth-
ing back.
The woman let go of Mouse’s father’s hand. She came for-
ward, bent down to the girl’s height. The woman extended that
same thin hand to Mouse, but Mouse didn’t know what to do
with it, so she just stared down at the bony hand, doing nothing.
Mouse noticed then how the air was different that night, more
dense, harder to breathe.
Her father told her, Now go on. Don’t be rude. Say hello. Shake her hand, and Mouse did, mumbling a feeble hello and slipping her tiny hand inside the woman’s hand.
Mouse’s father turned and hurried back outside. The woman
followed behind.
Mouse watched on silently, staring through the window as
her father unloaded bags of the woman’s things from his trunk.
So many things, Mouse didn’t know what to make of it all.
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out from the inside of her purse and handed it to the girl. Your father says chocolate is your favorite, she said and it was, second only to Salerno Butter Cookies. But chocolate was a sorry consolation prize for a puppy. She would have rather had a puppy. But
she knew better than to say that.
Mouse thought about asking the woman when she was going
to leave. But she knew better than to ask that too, and so she
took the candy bar from the woman’s hand. She held it in her
sweaty hands, feeling it go limp in her grip as the chocolate
started to melt. She didn’t eat it. She wasn’t hungry, though she
hadn’t had dinner yet. She had no appetite.
Among the woman’s many belongings came a dog crate. That
got the girl’s attention. It was a good-size cage. Right away,
Mouse tried to imagine what kind of dog it might hold: a col-
lie or a basset hound or a beagle. She stared out the window as
her father continued to bring things in, wondering when the
dog would come.
Where’s your dog? the girl asked after her father had finished unloading the car and come back inside, locking up behind
himself.
But the woman shook her head and told the girl sadly that
she didn’t have a dog anymore, that her dog had just very re-
cently died.
Then why do you have a dog crate? she asked but her father said, That’s enough, Mouse. Don’t be rude, because they could both see that talking about the dead dog made the woman sad.
Mouse? the woman asked, and if Mouse didn’t know any bet-
ter, she’d have thought the woman laughed. That’s some nick-
name for a little girl. But that was all she said. Some nickname. She didn’t say if she liked it or not.
They ate dinner and watched TV from the sofa, but instead
of sharing the sofa with her father, as she always did, Mouse sat
in a chair on the other side of the room, from which she could
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hardly see the TV. It didn’t matter anyway, she didn’t like what
they were watching. Mouse and her father always watched sports,
but instead they had on some show where grown-ups talked too
much and said stuff that made the woman and her father laugh,
but not Mouse. Mouse didn’t laugh. Because it wasn’t funny.
All the while, the woman sat on the sofa by Mouse’s father
instead. When Mouse dared to look over, they were sitting
close, holding hands like they had when she first arrived. It
made Mouse feel strange inside. She tried not to look, but her
eyes kept going back there, to their hands.
When the woman excused herself to go clean up for bed, her
father leaned in close and told the girl that it would be nice for
her to call this woman Mom. He said he knew it might be strange for awhile. That if she didn’t want to, it was okay. But maybe
she could work her way up to it in time, her father suggested.
The girl always tried to do everything she could to please her
father
because she loved him very much. She didn’t want to call
this strange woman Mom—not now, not ever—but she knew
better than to argue with her father. It would hurt his feelings
if she did, and she didn’t ever want to hurt his feelings.
The girl already had a mother, and this was not her.
But if her father wanted her to, she would call his woman
Mom. To her face anyway and to her father’s face. But in her own head, she would call this woman Fake Mom. That’s what
the girl decided.
Mouse was a smart girl. She liked to read. She knew things
that other girls her age didn’t know, like why bananas are curved,
and that slugs have four noses, and that the ostrich is the world’s biggest bird.
Mouse loved animals. She always wanted a puppy, but she
never got a puppy. Instead she got something else. Because after
Fake Mom arrived, her father let her pick out a guinea pig. He
did it because he thought it would make her happy.
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They went to the pet store together. The minute she laid eyes
on her guinea pig, Mouse was in love. It wasn’t the same as a
puppy, but it was something special still. Mouse’s father thought
that they should name him Bert after his favorite baseball player,
Bert Campaneris, and Mouse said yes to that because she didn’t
have another name in mind. And because she wanted to make
her father happy.
Mouse’s father bought her a book about guinea pigs too. The
night she brought Bert home, Mouse climbed into bed, under
the covers, and read the book from end to end. She wanted to
be informed. Mouse learned things about guinea pigs that she never knew, like what they eat and what every single squeak
and squeal means.
She learned that guinea pigs aren’t related to pigs at all, and
they don’t come from the country of Guinea, but from some-
where high in the Andes Mountains, which are in South Amer-
ica. She asked her father for a map, to see where South America
was. He dug one out of an old National Geographic magazine in the basement, one that had been Mouse’s grandfather’s magazine. Her father had tried to throw the magazines away when
her grandfather died, but Mouse wouldn’t let him. She thought
they were fascinating.
Mouse put the map on her bedroom wall with Scotch tape.
She stood on her bed and found the Andes Mountains on that
map, drew a big circle around them with a purple pen. She
pointed at the circle on her map, and told her guinea pig—in
his cage on the floor beside her bed—that was where he came
from, though she knew her guinea pig hadn’t come from the
Andes Mountains at all. He had come from a pet store.
Fake Mom was always calling Bert a pig. Unlike Mouse, she
didn’t read the book on guinea pigs. She didn’t understand that
Bert was a rodent, not a pig, that he wasn’t even related to pigs.
She didn’t know that he only got that name because he squeaked
like a pig, and because once upon a time, someone thought that
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he looked like a pig—though he didn’t. Not at all. That some-
one, in Mouse’s opinion, was wrong.
Mouse stood in the living room and told Fake Mom all that.
She didn’t mean to sound like a know-it-all. But Mouse knew
a lot of things. She knew big words, and could find faraway
places on a map, and could say a few words in French and Chi-
nese. Sometimes she got so excited she couldn’t help sharing it
all. Because she didn’t know what a girl her age was supposed
to know and not know, and so she just said what she knew.
This was one of those times.
But this time when she did, Fake Mom blinked hard. She
stared at Mouse, saying nothing, with a frown on her face and
a deep wrinkle forming between her eyes as wide as a river.
But Mouse’s father said something.
He ruffled Mouse’s hair, beamed proudly at her, and asked
if there was anything in the whole wide world that she didn’t
know. Mouse smiled back and she shrugged. There were things
she didn’t know, of course. She didn’t know where babies came
from, and why there were bullies at school, and why people
died. But she didn’t say that because she knew her father didn’t
really want to know. He was being rhetorical, which was another one of those big words she knew.
Mouse’s father looked at Fake Mom and asked, She’s really
something, isn’t she?
Fake Mom said, She sure is. She’s unbelievable. But Fake Mom didn’t smile the same way her father had. Not a fake smile, not
any kind of smile. Mouse wasn’t sure what to make of that word
unbelievable, because unbelievable could mean different things.
The moment passed. Mouse thought the whole conversation
about rodents and pigs was through.
But later that night, when her father wasn’t looking, Fake
Mom got down into Mouse’s face and told her if she ever made
her look stupid again in front of her father, there would be hell to pay. Fake Mom’s face got all red. She bared her teeth like a 9780778369110_RHC_txt(ENT_ID=269160).indd 146
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dog does when it’s mad. A vein stuck out of her forehead. It
throbbed. Fake Mom spit when she spoke, like she was so mad
she couldn’t stop herself from spitting. Like she was spitting mad.
She spit on Mouse’s face but Mouse didn’t dare raise a hand to
wipe it away.
Mouse tried to take a step back, away from Fake Mom. But
Fake Mom was holding on too tightly to Mouse’s wrist. Mouse
couldn’t get away because Fake Mom wouldn’t let go.
They heard Mouse’s father coming down the hallway. Fake
Mom let go of Mouse’s wrist quickly. She stood straight up,
fluffed her hair, ran her hands over her shirt to smooth it down.
Her face went back to its normal shade, and on her lips came
a smile. And not just any smile, but one that was radiant. She
went to Mouse’s father, leaned in close and kissed him.
How are my favorite ladies doing? he asked, as he kissed her back.
Fake Mom said they were fine. Mouse mumbled something
along the same lines, though no one heard because they were
too busy kissing.
Mouse told her real mom about Fake Mom. She sat down
across from her on the edge of the red rag rug and poured them
both cups of pretend tea. There, as they drank their tea and nib-
bled cookies, she told her how she didn’t like Fake Mom much.
How sometimes Fake Mom made Mouse feel like a stranger in
her own home. How being in the same room with Fake Mom
gave Mouse a tummy ache. Mouse’s real mom told her not to
worry. She told her that Mouse was a good girl and that only
good things happened to good girls. I’ll never let anything bad happen to you, her real mom said.
Mouse knew how much her father liked Fake Mom. She could
see it in the way he looked at her
how happy she made him. It
made Mouse feel sick to her stomach because Fake Mom brought
out a kind of happy that Mouse never could, even though they
were happy before Fake Mom came.
If her father liked having Fake Mom around, she might stay
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forever. Mouse didn’t want that to happen. Because Fake Mom
made her uncomfortable sometimes, and other times scared.
Now when Mouse wrote stories in her head, she started
making up stories about bad things happening to an imagi-
nary woman named Fake Mom. Sometimes she fell down those
squeaky steps and hit her head. Sometimes she got buried in
one of the rabbit holes beneath the clumps of fur and hair and
couldn’t get out.
And sometimes she was just gone, and Mouse didn’t care
how or why.
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Sadie
That evening, there’s a bite to the air. The temperatures are
plunging quickly. I pull my car from the parking lot and head
home, remembering that Will and Tate are off playing with
Legos tonight. The idea of it concerns me, of Will not being
around to act as a buffer between Imogen and me.
I try not to let it get the best of me as I drive home. I am a big
girl; I can take care of this myself. And besides, Will and I are
Imogen’s guardians. It’s our legal obligation to take care of her
until she turns eighteen. If I want to search through her things,
it’s very much in my right to do so. That said, there are questions I have that I’d like answers to. Namely, who is the man in the
photograph that had his face scratched off at Imogen’s hand? Is he
the same man who wrote the note to Imogen, the one I found in
the pocket of her sweatshirt? A Dear John note, I took it to be.
His reference to a double life leads me to believe that Imogen was the other woman. That he was married, maybe, and broke her
heart. But who is he?
I pull into the drive and put the car in Park. I look around
before I step from the safety of the locked car, to be sure that
I’m alone. But it’s dark out, nearly black. Can I really be sure?
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I move quickly from the car. I scurry into the safety of my