“You’re so considerate!” Miles’s mom always said when he came over. “My mom always says it’s the maid’s day off,” Andy would tell her. It was one of Lori’s refrains, one that she’d repeat if she ever saw Andy’s dirty clothes on the bathroom floor or if he’d forgotten to put the seat down. Mrs. Stratton was always nice to Andy. She’d ask him to stay for dinner and she’d always bake something for dessert and give him some of it, a big chunk of cake or a slice of pie, to bring home. “Tell your mother hello,” she would say, but Andy never would, and he’d throw the sweets in the trash can by the bus shelter before he got home. The Strattons were black, like Andy’s father; like Mr. Sills, the handyman who came around every week or two, tightening dripping faucets and oiling squeaky doors; like most of the people in the neighborhood. They were black, and Lori was white, and he was pretty sure that Mrs. Stratton didn’t really like her. Once, when he’d left Miles’s bedroom to use the bathroom, he’d heard Mr. Stratton, who worked for the gas company, talking down in the kitchen. How come she moved here? How come she’s not back with her own? Mrs. Stratton had murmured something—Andy had heard his own name and nothing more—but then Mr. Stratton had said, “Well, how sure are we about that? She wouldn’t be the first bird to try to slip an egg into another man’s nest.” “Stop,” his wife said in a cold voice Andy had never heard her use. After that, Andy had never felt like just a regular friend of Miles’s, a normal kid from school. Instead, he’d thought that they looked at him as the kid with the white mother and a black father, half one and half the other, a kid who didn’t belong.
Mrs. Stratton was a stay-at-home mom, but Andy’s mom worked at a beauty salon called Roll of the Dye in Rittenhouse Square, which was Philadelphia’s fanciest neighborhood. She left the house at nine-thirty Tuesday through Sunday and came home at seven, smelling like perm solution and cigarette smoke, with sneakers on her feet and her high heels in her purse. Andy had to have the stoop swept, the floors vacuumed, the couch pillows smoothed, the table set, and dinner—boiled noodles with canned spaghetti sauce, or frozen pizza or pot pies or a Swanson Hungry-Man for him, a Lean Cuisine for her—heated up and ready. By second grade, he knew how to use the microwave and the oven, and Lori had taught him to run the dishwasher and the washer and dryer. Most kids aren’t responsible enough for this, but I think you are, she’d said, and Andy had been glad to learn, proud that he knew something other kids didn’t. It wasn’t until that fall, when he’d read the part in Tom Sawyer where Tom tricks the other kids into whitewashing the fence, that Andy realized, with a feeling that made his face and ears get hot, how his mom had
fooled him.
He looked over the kitchen again, the linoleum in front of the sink worn to translucence, the sputtering olive-green refrigerator, the stick-on pine paneling that was peeling off in strips from the walls. Mr. Sills had said he could fix it, could make it look like new and it wouldn’t take more than a day, but Lori had told him thanks but no thanks. “You do enough as it is,” she’d said, and Mr. Sills, looking sad, had shrugged, then packed up his toolbox. “Call me if you need anything,” he’d said, and then looked at Andy. “That goes for you, too, young man,” he’d said. Andy knew that he would never call. We don’t take charity, Lori always said. Andy thought that maybe she paid Mr. Sills, when he wasn’t looking, to change the lightbulbs that she couldn’t reach and fix the basement window after it had cracked, which made it okay.
Andy counted each ring of the church bell and was surprised that it was only three o’clock. He walked to the closet, planning to put on his shoes and go outside again, when he heard a key in the door. He froze, head down, as his mother stormed into the room, home from work four hours early. Her blond hair, which had been gathered into a high ponytail that morning, was falling down, tendrils hanging against her cheeks, and her hands moved in angry jerks as she unzipped her coat, fake shearling, with the white lining already turning yellow, and tossed it on the couch.
Andy hurried to hang it up. Lori stood there, unmoving, just looking at him. All the stylists at Roll of the Dye had to wear black, which for Lori meant black jeans and either a black blouse or a black jersey top, always tight, always unbuttoned or cut low enough to show the smooth skin of her chest and the tops of her breasts. Aspirational, Andy had heard her call it, which meant that she had to look pretty so the women who came to the salon would want to look like her and that even the old ones or the fat ones would think that they could if they let Lori do their hair.