Baby by Patricia MacLachlan

Author:Patricia MacLachlan [MacLachlan, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ages 9 & Up
ISBN: 9780307567154
Publisher: Yearling
Published: 1993-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

chapter 10

Six days of ice.

Six days of no electricity.

No school because of water leaks.

And then, suddenly, without any warning, Sophie began to speak in sentences.

We’d spent hours in front of the fireplace. We’d eaten toast cooked over the fire and soup from the soup pot, when Sophie stood up and looked at us and said, “Food not good.”

Lalo loved it. He had come over to our house, wrapped like a mummy. He wore a wool hat, wool gloves, wool-lined boots, and a great wool scarf that Byrd said could have covered his mother’s grand piano. Mama laughed when she opened the door.

“Lalo? Are you in disguise?”

“My mother,” explained Lalo as he came in quickly. “She thinks germs cannot penetrate wool. Her words.”

Papa and Mama smiled. Lalo’s mother, Marvella, was efficient, running a forty-two-room inn. She was also beautiful and tall with long black hair, and she had come to the island fifteen years ago and fallen in love right off with Lalo’s father, who was then a fisherman. She had convinced him to buy the inn.

“I don’t want you to fish. I’m scared of water. It makes me sick,” she had said.

“But this is an island, surrounded by water,” he’d told her.

I thought Marvella was perfect, and brave to be living in a place that scared her because she loved Lalo’s father. Even her name was perfect, Marvella Baldelli. She cooked dishes with wonderful names, too, like Provençale and scallopini and francese. She did, however, have “flawed ideas”— Lalo’s words—about electricity.

“Don’t stand near the sockets, sweet girl,” she told me when I visited, pulling me to the center of the room as if the electricity lurked in the sockets, waiting to hurl its arc forward. She always called me “sweet girl.”

Lalo dropped his wool in the hallway and went looking for Sophie.

“How’s your mother?” asked Mama, following him into the living room.

“At peace. There’s no electricity,” said Lalo.

Papa laughed.

Lalo saw Sophie. He smiled.

“So hello, Sophie.”

“So, Lalo,” said Sophie in a friendly, precise manner. “I want hot cereal.”

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