Treasure Island!!!

to excite me about future employment.
    “All right,
here’s
one.”
    “One what?”
    “CROWDED CLOSET. Experience with sales. Ask for Doug.”
    “I’m not interested in retail. Especially a thrift store. Dead people’s clothes and other people’s cast-offs? I’ll stay in my
own
closet, thanks.”
    “Which reminds me,” my mother said. “I did some reorganizing for you. Just went through and pulled out
very
worn things, your hoodie from high school, the drama T-shirts, old socks with holes.” I nodded. She read on:
     
    Want a job that will “MEAT” [she spelled this out and winked before continuing] your expectations? Local grocery needs MEAT CUTTER.
    HOUSEHOLD HELP. Fun loving family of 6 needs help keeping home running smoothly. Please have superb laundry skills, including washing, ironing and mending.
     
    THE PRETZEL PLACE looking for upbeat, high energy people to fill counter positions. Apply at mall location.
     
    “You like soft pretzels,” my mother added, eyebrows raised.
    “Leave me alone,” I said. “If you want to work on someone’s problems, look to your
other
daughter.” But she never took my hints.
     

CHAPTER 16
     
    R ichard was molting, and scruffy as he was, there was something enviable in his ability to start fresh. I opened my book, but couldn’t read a line. The room felt stuffy and hot. “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard said, dragging out a chewed feather.
    After further thought, I took the bright green feather to Adrianna’s room.
    “Want a bookmark?” I said, holding it aloft. She closed the door.
    I tried reading in the living room, but my father had the TV on loud enough to reach the Dry Tortugas. In the kitchen, my mother scraped carrots and listened to
The Fabulous Danny Boy Album
: one song; twelve artistic interpretations.
    “How long am I to lie here in this old berth?” I said, slumping on the breakfast bar.
    “Are you sick?” my mother said.
    “No.”
    “It’s cabin fever then.” She stopped scraping carrots. In a minute she had found her purse, tucked a few bills into my hand, and advised me to get out of the house. The weather was miserable, but off I went. I tramped a few blocks, pretending to enjoy the open air, before making a beeline for a shopping center, where I found a newly opened sandwich shop.
    A small and predominantly plastic place, the shop boasted a service counter, three booths sticky enough to discourage loitering, and a vinyl menu board with changeable white letters, most of which spelled something fatally wrong (i.e. “wheat, white, onion role, or rye”). Not the sort of place I would go twice. But as fate would have it, I knew the girl behind the counter—a plump person with one blue eye and one green eye. One glance at her and I seemed to have dropped to all fours and was tunneling deep into the past.
    “Patty Pacholewski! What are you doing here? This is a stunning stroke of luck.”
    “Do I know you?” the broad-shouldered girl said, wiping her hands on her apron.
    “Mrs. Buskirk’s class! Fifth grade, and beyond. Don’t you remember?”
    Once she recovered from the surprise, we fell into easy and affable conversation, reminiscing about the afternoons I had spent at her house (she lived in a carriage house by a lake, with a glamorous spiral staircase, and a mother who descended from it, scowling). I asked how was her little brother (fine), and her dog (dead), and her mother and father (fine and dead, respectively), and she asked why I had been so mean to her in seventh grade, to which I had no answer. I ordered turkey bacon and tomato, but what I really wanted to know was did she remember reading
Treasure Island
and how all us girls had sat with our hands below desk level, passing around her bracelets and rings.
    “No, but I kind of remember my rings.”
    “Your jewelry never looked like it came from a bubblegum machine,” I said with admiration.
    “You drew pictures of it, do you remember? You had a notebook and you made an inventory of all the girls in the class and their clothes.”
    “No,” I said, marveling. “But that sounds like me.”
    I recalled how Long John Silver says to Jim Hawkins, “You’re a noticing kind of person.” A lot of times I’ll be out for a walk and somebody will point out something that escaped me: sky seems hazy, crocuses in bloom, just passed a burrow which belongs to some kind of small animal, your guess is better than mine. Since the break-up with Lars, I