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"Are you sure you don't want to tell your mother about all this?" I asked. "I mean, she can go in and see it for herself." I was actually trembling.
"Oh, absolutely not. She would go ape wild if she knew I was spying on Harry."
"But . . . it's so weird, Karen. She couldn't be upset with you."
"Don't tell me what she'll be and not be," she snapped back at me. Then she smiled. "Look, Zipporah, don't you think I've tried in little ways to get my mother to see what Harry is really like? She's comfortable in the life she has now. There are no money problems. She can go and buy whatever clothes she wants. She has her own expensive car. The work in the drugstore is easy. She can flirt with other men, and Harry doesn't get upset. I have everything I need, and I'll have college tuition, which takes worrying about me off her back. We live in the village's nicest home. And now," she said after a pause, "you want me to go to her and tell her the man who is providing all this is a nutcase pervert, and we should pack and leave?"
"The bad things are happening to you, not her. She's your mother first, whether she likes it or not."
"My mother," she said, her eyes steely cold, "is not your mother, Zipporah. I told you. I was a blunder. If she believed in abortion, I'd be nothing more than an inconvenience, but she pretends to be religious, even though the last time we went to church was my real father's funeral. Not everyone has this . . ." She looked around. "This perfect world you live in."
"My world is not perfect," I said defensively, but after hearing what she was telling me, it surely was.
"Okay. Anyway, don't you see why I'm telling you all this? This makes your idea even better and more possible."
I wasn't sure now that I liked it to be called my idea. Wasn't it our idea?
"Hmmm," she said, looking toward the kitchen. "Something smells yummy. I wish I was as good a cook as you are, but Harry wouldn't eat anything I made, even warmed up."
"He wouldn't?"
"No. Only mommies can feed Baby Harry.'"`
I shook my head. "Who would think these things of him? People have no idea what he's like at home. I know you couldn't meet a more pleasant man when you talk to him in his drugstore. My parents th
ink he's very nice."
"He smiles at everyone until they smile back. Remember that line Mr. Potter used in English class when he yelled at adorable little Bobby Sandow? 'The devil bath a pleasing face'? Something from a Shakespeare play."
"Yes."
"Well, that's Harry." She paused and looked around. "Where's your father, by the way?"
"He's tied up in some legal matter and won't be here until later."
"Just the two of us?"
"Yes."
"Great. Let's eat soon. I'm starving," she said.
How she could have an appetite under these circumstances amazed me. I had just lost mine but pushed ahead. She set the table, jabbering away about Alice Bucci and Toby Sacks smoking a cigarette in the girls' room.
"You'd think they were the first ones ever to do it. They took two puffs each and flushed it down the toilet. Now they think they're big deals. I swear the girls in this school are as lightheaded as foam on an ice cream soda. Did you see what Abby Jacobs was wearing today? That pleated skirt she wore was so short you could see what she had for breakfast when she bent over. I was so embarrassed for her."
On and on she went, as if we were living in a television show, her voice not revealing any of the deeper tensions or the events she was living through at home. Anyone listening to us would surely think we were typical teenagers. They would never dream we were planning to confront a sexual abuser and save Karen from the horrors that occurred in her own bedroom.
She paused and looked at me and saw what I was thinking. "Stop worrying so much, Zipporah. If you walk around with that gloomy face all day, someone is going to wonder why, especially your parents. We don't have to dwell on it. It will only make us nervous and afraid, and then we'll fail, and things will be worse."
I nodded. She was right of course. I had to admire her strength.
I smiled.
"I made us some chocolate-drop peanut butter cookies."
"You did?"
"It was just a mix. Nothing special."
