One day after Mom had been gone almost two weeks, I went to Spinelli’s after school to stock up on chicken potpies. I thought I’d never get tired of chicken potpies, but I had to admit they were sort of wearing on me, particularly because we’d been eating them for breakfast, too. A couple of times, we bought beef potpies, but they were hardly ever on sale, and Liz said you needed a magnifying glass to see the meat.
Mr. Spinelli had a grill behind the counter where he made hamburgers and hot dogs, wrapping them in tinfoil and keeping them under the red warming light, which steamed the buns until they were nice and soggy. They sure smelled good, but they were beyond our budget. I loaded up on more chicken potpies.
“Haven’t seen your mom in a while, Miss Bean,” Mr. Spinelli said. “What’s she been up to?”
I froze up, then said, “She broke her leg.”
“That’s a shame,” he said. “Tell you what. Get yourself an icecream sandwich. On me.”
That night Liz and I were doing our homework at the Formica table when there was a knock at the door. Liz opened it, and Mr. Spinelli stood outside, holding a brown paper bag with a loaf of bread sticking out the top.
“This is for your mother,” he said. “I came to see how she’s doing.”
“She’s not here,” Liz said. “She’s in Los Angeles.”
“Bean said she broke her leg.”
Liz and Mr. Spinelli looked over at me, and I started glancing around, avoiding their eyes, acting, I knew, about as guilty as the hound dog who stole the hambone.
“She broke her leg in Los Angeles,” Liz said smoothly. She was always quick on her feet. “But it’s not serious. A friend’s bringing her back in a few days.”
“Good,” Mr. Spinelli said. “I’ll come see her then.” He held out the groceries to Liz. “Here, you take these.”
“What are we going to do now?” I asked Liz once Mr. Spinelli had left.
“I’m thinking,” Liz said.
“Is Mr. Spinelli going to send the bandersnatches after us?”
“He might.”
“Bandersnatches” was the word Liz took from Through the Looking Glass—her favorite book—for the do-gooding government busybodies who snooped around making sure that kids had the sort of families the busybodies thought they should have. Last year in Pasadena, a few months before we moved to Lost Lake, a bandersnatch had come poking around when the school principal got the idea that Mom was negligent in her parenting after I told a teacher our electricity got turned off because Mom forgot to pay the bill. Mom hit the ceiling. She said the principal was just another meddling do-gooder, and she warned us never to discuss our home life at school.
If the bandersnatches did come after us, Liz said, they might put the two of us in a foster home or juvenile delinquent center. They might separate us. They might throw Mom in jail for abandoning her kids. Mom hadn’t abandoned us, she just needed a little break. We could handle the situation fine if the bandersnatches would only leave us alone. It was their meddling that would create the problems.
“But I’ve been thinking,” Liz said. “If we have to, we can go to Virginia.”
Mom had come from a small town in Virginia called Byler, where her father had owned a cotton mill that made stuff like towels, socks, and underwear. Mom’s brother, our Uncle Tinsley, had sold the mill a few years ago, but he still lived in Byler with his wife, Martha, in a big old house called Mayfield. Mom had grown up in the house but had left twelve years ago, when she was twenty-three, driving off that night with me on the roof. She hadn’t had much to do with her family since she left, not returning even when her parents died, but we knew Uncle Tinsley still lived at Mayfield because from time to time Mom complained it was unfair that he’d inherited it just because he was older and a guy. It would be hers if anything ever happened to Uncle Tinsley, and she’d sell it in a heartbeat, because the place had nothing but bad memories for her.
Since I was only a few months old when we left, I didn’t remember either Mayfield or Mom’s family. Liz had some memories, and they weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were sort of magical. She remembered a white house on a hill surrounded by huge trees and bright flowers. She remembered Aunt Martha and Uncle Tinsley playing duets on a grand piano in a room with French doors that were opened to the sun. Uncle Tinsley was a tall, laughing man who held her hands while he swung her around and lifted her up to pick peaches from a tree.
“How are we going to get there?” I asked.
“We’ll take the bus.” Liz had called the depot to find out about the fares to Virginia. They weren’t cheap, she said, but we had enough money for two cross-country tickets. “If it comes to that,” she added.