Picking Blueberries by Anna Tambour Page B

Miller, and thinking of writing a book about them.
    Mostly nobody knew
what to cook in the restaurant, and even less, how to clean. This
was fine until one day a retired cook got food poisoning, and then
there was another meeting at Dick's parents' house. Why Dick's
parents' house again, he didn't know, but the house was in the
middle, so maybe that was it.
    After that, Dick heard
Jonathon complain to Mother that he had been rostered, and couldn't
get out of working one shift a week. The good thing was that Miss
Prescott started making pies, and the place got a good review in
the newspaper. She must have liked making pies. And then at the
next meeting at Dick's parents' house, when someone said, "The
review went well. We're up for renewal," there was clapping,
yelling, and suddenly, "Brown sugar" blared out again, and the room
stampeded itself into the floorboards till way after Dick went to
bed.

    Soon after, Father
began to stay away longer at work, and Mother was often not home
because in the next door, a baby sitter had moved in. Her name was
Betsy, and she wore a dress as long as Mrs. Fox, but she didn't
smell like milk. And she was curvy, and she didn't curl her hair
but wore it in braids curved over her head. She came after the last
recruiting trip. The babysitting was for Dick and his little
sister, Jane, who was only nine months old.
    Mother had been
looking for a babysitter. Betsy worked free-of-charge, as all
babysitting was, in The Community. Mother called her "the wet
nurse" and laughed. Mother was conscientious about not leaving the
house with just Dick and Jane in it. She wouldn't do something like
that. "The pigs won't help if we get ripped," she explained to
Betsy, "so don't leave the house." Mother loved her Sierra dishes,
yellow and blue and green. They took years to collect. And no one
had the record collection of Mother and Father.
    Dick remembered Mother
when he was a little boy and she wore lipstick and teased her hair.
He wondered why she hadn't thrown out the makeup. She had a picture
on the bedroom wall of someone who looked like her, except Mother's
hair was free-flowing. Virginia Woolf, she said, a writer. Dick
walked to the library and checked out a Virginia Woolf book, but he
returned it half-read, as he couldn't understand why the lady was
so upset all the time.
    Dick liked Betsy. She
liked him, and told him stories about creatures she invented. She
invited him to play with her and the neighborhood kids, the day
after she first babysat, and he had fun. Betsy made something
weird, white and hard and soft at the same time. A big tray of it.
If you hit it hard, it was like concrete, but if you put your
finger into it, your finger would sink down as through batter. It
was just cornstarch and water, she said. Dick had a lot of fun and
met some neat kids. They all had even more fun when Betsy added
food coloring to the white stuff, and she began to throw it around,
inviting them to, too. She did something fun every afternoon, and
Dick had fun outside after school, something he hadn't before.
    When Betsy was with
Jane, she got a look on her face. Dick thought it looked like love.
He liked to watch her with Jane. She sang lullabies that she made
up on the spot, really soft.
    One day, just before
Father and Mother were to go out again, Dick walked into the
kitchen, but Betsy was sitting on a kitchen chair, and Father was
kneeling at her feet with his hands on her skirt, cupping her
knees.
    "She's right with it,"
Dick heard Father say. Then Father noticed him, and got off the
floor, and Betsy smiled at him, and her eyes were wet.
    She moved into the
house the next day. She brought a big cooking pot with a heavy
bottom and a rocking chair. The pot went into the kitchen and the
rocking chair, into the living room.
    She babysat a lot
after that, and she sang so much that Dick was really happy that he
could have her so much to herself.
    Then she worked in the
restaurant during the day, so that the play