Crazy As Chocolate by Elisabeth Hyde

Author:Elisabeth Hyde [Hyde, Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59692-991-3
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2002-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The more you prod my sister Ellie, the more she holds back. Ask if she’s happy with her psychiatrist, and she’ll tell you how much he charges. Try to find out if she’s on the right medication, and she’ll marvel over her friend who’s the model case, takes twenty milligrams of Prozac day after day, year after year and does just fine. Talk about the news, though, or dilly-dally on about some tedious case you have, and pretty soon she’ll be telling you everything you want to know.

I see this happening in the bathroom. All she’ll say for the moment is that she’s fine with the idea of a divorce. I leave her and join the group upstairs, where it seems that Rachel has been showing everyone how well she can read, to which end she has opened up the front page of the newspaper, where there is a full-color picture of two grinning children riding the roller coaster at the carnival. In the caption below, Rachel has artfully deciphered the words “this weekend.”

What little resistance she gets dissipates completely when she produces a few crumpled dollar bills from her pocket and asks if this would be enough to get us into the carnival? Because she would be willing to pay for us all? If we’d just take her? Please?

My father checks his watch. “What about dinner plans?”

“I thought we’d go out,” Gabe says.

My father looks worried. “I hope you made reservations,” he says. “I don’t know about you people, but if I have to wait more than fifteen minutes I end up having too darn much wine, and then I don’t care what the heck I’m eating, it might as well be a hamburger.”

“We’re all set,” Gabe says, and without looking at me he flees the room. I hear the door to my study close, and inwardly smile at the thought of him madly flipping through the phone book for a good restaurant.

“So can we go?” Rachel asks.

“Go where?” says Ellie. She has silently rejoined us, looking slick and dewy from the shower, dressed now in a long rumpled linen shift, with armholes you could fit your head through. Thankfully, she has covered herself underneath with a lacy black camisole. Rachel shows Ellie the newspaper and tells her the plans. At first Ellie says no, because she gets overwhelmed by crowds, but Rachel starts to whine about how they never get to do this kind of thing in New York, it’s always the zoos and museums and if Dad were here he’d say yes.

I wonder if I am the only one who thinks that kids lose their charm when their parents show up.

Ellie cups Rachel’s chin and brushes a few corkscrews off the girl’s forehead. “You’re right,” she says. “We never do things like this. Though I want you to understand that whether Dad would say yes is beside the point.”

“So we’re going?”

“Promise to behave?”

“Promise!”

“Tell me if this is something Wilson can brag about,” Ellie declares as I lock up the house.

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