Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry Page A

boyfriend. I hoped they were going off to Nantucket or someplace for a romantic interlude. I hoped she'd get married eventually so that old Tom would have a father who would take him camping and stuff and let him get dirty.
    But of course I couldn't say any of that. I played along. I told her I was sure my parents wouldn't mind, that I was sure I could manage to keep her house and her son in good shape for two days, and that I'd be delighted to stay overnight on West Cedar Street on Saturday night.
    And all the while I was thinking: Fate. Fate had set things up so that we could hijack the Swan Boats, not only for the bag ladies, but for
Tom Terrific, who had never been allowed to ride in one.
    And Fate had set the date. It was only four days away.
    "When you stay at my house and take care of me," said Tom Terrific happily as we walked down West Cedar Street that afternoon, "we can stay up late and watch TV, and we can cook hot dogs with mustard, and we can tell ghost stories, okay?"
    "Sure," I said. "We can do all of that." I couldn't tell him yet what else we could do. I had to set it up first, with Hawk, and the bag ladies, and with Seth. I smoothed Tom's hair as he trotted along beside me, chattering about the prospects for Saturday night. We could eat monumental amounts of ice cream. Play Chutes and Ladders. Have a tickling contest.
    "Maybe we could call up my daddy," Tom Terrific said suddenly, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. "in California."
    So that's where his father was: three thousand miles away. Poor kid. My father may be behind a newspaper much of the time, but at least he's
there,
in my house.
    "Tom, old buddy," I said to him, "whatever
we decide to do Saturday night, it will be terrific."
    "Yeah," he said contentedly, and he dropped my hand as he leaned over to pick up a worm from the brick sidewalk. We examined it carefully, squiggling in the palm of his hand, all the way to the Public Garden.

    It was a gorgeous, bright blue day, one of those early August days that already has a few of September's molecules floating in it. Days like that make you feel good. Everybody in the Public Garden looked cheerful, as if they had just gotten income tax refunds, job promotions, and new clothes.
    I had said to Mrs. Kolodny before I left the house, "It's a fabulous day. You ought to go out for a walk."
    She had just untied her shoes, put her feet on the coffee table, and settled down with a cup of coffee in front of the TV. On the screen, a woman with masses of red hair was saying, "Pregnant? I can't be!" and a doctor was nodding solemnly at her in response, shuffling some lab reports in his hand.
    "Shhh," said Mrs. Kolodny. "That's Suzanne.
She thought it was menopause symptoms, ha-ha."
    I watched with a weird kind of fascination. For seven minutes, Suzanne did variations of her "I can't be pregnant!" line. She dabbed at her well-made-up eyes with a tissue. The doctor sorted his papers again and again and said medical things sternly. "You must take vitamins, Suzanne," he said several times.
    A commercial came on, and a gray-haired woman began telling a flustered bride how to make good coffee for her hubby. Mrs. Kolodny lowered the sound.
    "Suzanne," she explained, "is pregnant because she got involved with the lawyer who's going to defend her son at the murder trial. The son, Lance, killed a drug dealer, but it's first-degree murder even though it was a drug dealer because it was premeditated, and the reason it was premeditated was because the drug dealer had been responsible for getting Lance's fiancée hooked on heroin. She's in a hospital now. Lance is in jail, of course, waiting for the trial, and Suzanne hired this hotshot criminal lawyer, Greg, even though she had to mortgage her home to do it, and then Greg seduced her after they had dinner together to talk about the case and she drank too much wine."
    I nodded in a kind of horrible concern for these idiotic people. "Will the lawyer get Lance off?" I