Treasure Island!!!

but not Sunday because Lars and I have plans and I was going to ask you, before you fired me, if I could have Wednesday off. Any of the other usual hours would be good.
     
    Your Faithful Hand
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    S ometimes when a person does something wrong, she finds it easier to continue in a wrong way; for if having done a wrong thing, she proceeds to do a right thing, the wrong thing may appear to others all the more plain. I offer this sententiousness as an attempt to understand Nancy, whose actions the most compassionate person would find difficult to explain. Not only did she fire her best and only part-time employee, she refused to accept Richard for her collection. This woman who for years had given homes to lizards that people had dumped anonymously into the drop-box after maiming them,
refused
, as a matter of principle, to accept my bird. All she wanted was her money back.
    I was at my parents’ house, explaining some of the indignities to my sister Adrianna, who for financial reasons, had recently moved back home. Adrianna loaded pita chips with hummus and ate them very slowly, leaning one elbow on the speckled Corian breakfast bar.
    “Well, he’s yours now,” she said. “Tell me where you see potential snags.”
    I counted them off on my fingers.
    “The dirty cage. The smell of feather dust. The cost of feed. The cost of shots. Holding the bird for shots. The bird angry with me after shots. Daily upkeep. Daily training. Daily contact.” I paused and stared at my pinky. “There’s also the question of how I could own a bird and ever go away on the weekends.”
    “You never go away on the weekends. You come over to Mom and Dad’s.”
    “Well, maybe I’ve been
planning
to go away on weekends.”
    “Maybe it would be good for you to have a pet,” Adrianna said. “The responsibility, I mean. Besides, if you needed to get away, doesn’t your friend Rena do pet-sitting?”
    I passed myself the tub of hummus she’d been hoarding.
    “Rena gets on my nerves.”
    Adrianna looked quizzical.
    “Very unambitious personally, and very doom-and-gloom about the environment. Mm thinking of cutting her loose,” I said with a full mouth.
    “She still worried about her nitrogen footprint?”
    “Negative energy,” I summarized. A huge glob of hummus dropped onto my mother’s vinyl coupon organizer, which was lying on the counter. “Let’s finish talking about Nancy. Do you understand what I’ve sacrificed for her, how much study of
Treasure Island
I’ve missed while I sat and signed out her goldfish? I was trying to help her. Now I wonder where I’d be if I’d applied my ingenuity to myself instead of to her Library.”
    “There’s an idea.”
    “The real reason Nancy hates the parrot is because she doesn’t have the guts to go and get
anything
for the Library.”
    “But it’s the money issue too, right? She’d been saving up for her mother’s hip replacement.”
    In the pantry, packed with chickpeas, Cheez-its, and peanut butter pretzels for my parents’ next two hundred guests (they never entertained), I found and broke open a second bag of chips.
    “If I have to, I’ll keep Richard even if it ruins me, even if I have no money to go to the movies or buy clothes or ever go anywhere on the weekend ever. But I’ll tell you what I told Nancy’s voicemail last night: only if she takes the parrot will I let bygones be bygones.”
    “Who’s talking about bygones?” my mother said, coming into the kitchen with a basket of laundry.
    “Who’s picking up fag-ends of conversations?” I said.
    She set her basket down on the kitchen table and, as if I had said nothing at all, began to fold my father’s boxers.
    “I mean, who’s pulling on the line? Dipping without a chip? Fishing without the bait? Cruising without a motor?”
    “Really, sweetie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “Exactly,” I said. “Because I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Adrianna.”
    “Oh,” my mother said, with the pleasure of having successfully translated a scrap of a foreign language, “have I interrupted?”
    “Well, yes. It was kind of a confidential matter.”
    “Okey dokey.” She took her laundry down the hallway and disappeared into her bedroom.
    “What was all
that
about?” Adrianna said. “You pissed at Mom?”
    “I’m not pissed. I just don’t need her knowing my business. Listen,” I said, when I was sure we were in no danger of being overheard. “You