I took the doll from her and put it back on the dresser. Across the hall, the bathroom door opened. My mother stood there, holding a curling iron.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I told her at six o’clock to start getting ready, but you know how she is. She stayed in the tub for so long, she nearly melted.”

“It’s all right,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “The Kanki is open for another couple of hours. If we don’t make it, we can always go to the Waffle House. They’re open all night.”

“Yuck.” My mother addressed Abby. “She was always a smart ass, you know. Even as a small child.”

“I can believe it,” Abby replied.

“You have the patience of a saint.” She closed the bathroom door. I could hear Nana pottering around in the living room. I couldn’t tell what she was doing. From the sound of it, she was kicking over the stack of books that still propped up the dining room table.

I picked up a Life magazine and sat next to Abby on the bed. “Can I offer you some reading material? This is all about Jackie Kennedy.”

“Oh, thank you,” she replied. Her stomach growled. “Mind if I just eat this?”

“I warned you.”

“I know.”

“You are a saint.”

“Oh no, I’m not. No one’s ever written a poem about my nose.”

Return of the Jedi was both better and worse than I’d hoped. Better because the special effects were amazing, worse because I was too old for ewoks. Abby and I agreed that whoever had come up with them needed to be strangled.

We sat in the back of the theater, behind the rest of our friends, sharing a giant tub of buttered popcorn and a Pepsi. In front of us, Kim sat huddled up next to John Wilder. Joe and Nick sat on either side of them, and Alan sat next to Nick, casting the occasional baleful look in Kim’s direction. Dave and his brother sat down on the front row. They said they were experimenting to see which seats were the best for viewing the forest chase scene. They’d all seen the movie twice before, once on opening night, and then again on the Sunday after we came back from the beach. Two weeks had gone by since then, and this was the first day that Abby had managed to coax me into leaving my house.

Hunter hadn’t yet been by to pick up the rest of his things. He and Jean had taken up residence in a trailer in the Stonybrook trailer park. My mother and Nana had driven by late one night to look at it. The lights were on and his van was parked out front, but they didn’t see anyone, and they certainly didn’t stop.

“It’s a nice park,” my mother said. “Lots of trees and landscaping. It’s better than he deserves.”

“Did you want him to live in a hovel?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s where he belongs, he and that idiot blonde parakeet.”

When the credits rolled on Return of the Jedi, Abby asked me if I’d found a job for the summer yet. “Are you picking tobacco for that third cousin of yours again?”

“First cousin once removed, and the answer is no. I haven’t done that since I was fourteen, and I only did it for a week then. It was hot and it was gross.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “Like working at the flea market is better. Why don’t you come with me and put in an application at the DMV? Mama says they’re hiring temps for the summer. The pay’s okay, and it’s nice and air-conditioned.”

“What would I do?”

“You’d do whatever. Filing, typing, opening boxes of license plates.”

“I wouldn’t be making the license plates?”

“Prisoners make the license plates, so unless you’re incarcerated, no.”

The credits ended and the lights went on. Joe Chang turned around in his seat and gave us the thumbs down. “Sappy ending. Gag me.”

“‘Your father was dead, in a manner of speaking,’” Nick said, his impersonation of Alec Guinness somewhat marred by his Polish accent. “Crappy. Totally unbelievable.”

“I liked it,” Kim said. “I thought it was sweet.”

John nodded in agreement, smiling stupidly at her.

Abby and I laughed. Alan gazed at them mournfully.

“If you think it’s stupid,” I asked Nick and Joe, “then why have you seen it three times?”

“Cool special effects,” Joe said.

“Really cool,” Nick agreed.

Before we went to the personnel office at the Division of Motor Vehicles, we stopped by the file room where Abby’s mother worked. We found her sitting in the ninth row of a room full of cabinets. Edna sat in what looked like an old elementary school desk. It was a small chair with a flat top attached to it. She had a long file drawer filled with index cards in front of her and rubber finger cots on the thumb and index finger of her right hand. She looked up without smiling.

“Hi, Mama,” Abby said. “We’re here to apply for temp jobs.”

“We?”

“Poppy gave me a ride. She needs a summer job, too.”

“I don’t know how many they’re hiring.”

“Could you show us where we need to go?”

Edna extracted herself from the small chair. She was an attractive woman, not especially tall, but muscular and well built, like Abby.

“Let me tell the boss lady where I’m going,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

She entered an office a few rows away. There was a hushed conversation and someone said, “Sure. You can use your break time.” When she came back, she plucked the rubber finger cots off and laid them next to the file drawer.

Abby and her mother walked side by side down the hall with me bringing up the rear. The less attention I drew to myself, the better. Edna was a broad-shouldered woman, and her hair was short and no nonsense. I knew that she was younger than my own mother by several years. She’d had Abby when she was eighteen, which made her thirty-five or thirty-six. Other than that, I knew very little about her, except that she didn’t like white people, particularly me. She and Abby fought constantly, though it was clear that Abby loved her mother, or at least felt a strong sense of obligation to her.

“My mother works hard,” she said. “She never buys herself anything.”

“Don’t you wish she would?”

“All the time.”