Here Today Read online

  Doris paused at the refrigerator and flicked the Mother’s Day card open with one polished fingernail. “Marie made a card for me?” she said, smiling at Ellie.

  “Nope,” Ellie replied. “She made it for me.”

  “Oh.” Doris closed the card, and Ellie felt secretly gratified by the look of dismay on Doris’s face.

  Upstairs, Doris peered into the bedrooms, saw each bed smoothly made, but said only, “Kiss had a bath, didn’t she?”

  “On Sunday,” replied Ellie.

  Doris entered the bedroom she had shared with Ellie’s father. There were her things on her bureau, moved slightly since Ellie had recently dusted under them. There was the picture in the tortoiseshell frame of the Dingmans on their wedding day. There was the vial containing baby teeth lost by Ellie, Albert, and Marie. There was the first Christmas present Ellie had bought Doris with her own money—a large blue plastic orchid, meant to be worn as a pin, which Doris had worn once, then had used as a “bureau decoration.”

  Doris stood by the bed for a moment, then looked out the window. “There’s your father,” she said.

  Ellie watched Doris hurry out of the room, heard her run down the stairs and meet Mr. Dingman at the front door—a brief greeting and a muffled exchange of words before they disappeared into the kitchen. Ellie tiptoed to the top step of the stairs, sat on it, then silently slid down several more steps, as close to the kitchen as she dared creep.

  “Hollywood?” was the first thing she heard her father say. “Hollywood?”

  “I’m not getting anywhere in New York,” replied Doris.

  “So come—”

  “And you know I can’t come back here.”

  “You can’t even say ‘home,’ can you? You can’t even call this place your home.”

  “I haven’t found my home.”

  Ellie leaned forward, straining, but couldn’t make out any words for a while. Then she heard, “All right, I’ll call a lawyer. I’d like to get divorced as quickly as possible,” and realized it was her father speaking.

  Another pause.

  “What do you plan to tell the children?” Mr. Dingman asked. Doris’s answer was nearly inaudible, but Ellie clearly heard her father say, “Not even that? So it’s up to me? Everything’s up to me?”

  “No, it isn’t—”

  “That’s why you came home when you knew the children would be at school.”

  “Well …”

  “This is great, Doris. It’s just great.” Mr. Dingman paused. “What is Ellie doing at home?” he suddenly thought to ask. “Ellie? Ellie?”

  “I better go pack,” said Doris.

  “Fine. Ellie?”

  Ellie and Doris passed quietly on the stairs. Ellie found her father seated at the kitchen table and was about to sit in the chair opposite him when the phone rang. Mr. Dingman reached for it. “Hello?” he said. Then, “Oh.” He glanced at Ellie. “Yes, she’s here…. I don’t know. I just got home. I haven’t spoken to her yet…. No, she’s fine. Well,”(another glance at Ellie)“actually she looks like … like someone took a swing at her…. What? … Oh, really? Holly said that? … I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to her. And this isn’t—I can’t—right now is not—” Finally Mr. Dingman looked at his watch. “Would it be possible for me to call you tonight, Mr. Pierce? I’ll talk to Ellie this afternoon…. Okay…. Okay, thank you. Good-bye.”

  Mr. Dingman hung up the phone. “Honey,” he said, “what’s going on? Holly told Mr. Pierce something—” He stopped speaking and looked closely at Ellie, then pulled her to him, sat her in his lap as if she were three years old again. “Are you really okay?”

  Ellie nodded, tears dripping down her nose and making tiny navy spots on her father’s blue shirt.

  “Your mother is leaving. For good. I guess you know that.”

  “Yeah. I know about the divorce, too. I was listening,” she confessed. “But, anyway, I had already figured it out.” Ellie reached for a box of Kleenex, blew her nose, then looked at her watch. “Doris had better hurry. Albert and Marie will be home in an hour and a half.”

  Mr. Dingman reached for the Kleenex, blew his own nose, then turned Ellie around so she was facing him. “We’re going to be all right, you know,” he said.

  “I know,” said Ellie.

  “We’d better do something about that lip.” Mr. Dingman made a paper-towel compress for Ellie and held it to her mouth. “Does this hurt?”

  “Not so much. It’s starting to feel better.”

  Mr. Dingman nodded. “You can tell me what happened later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Ellie sat in the kitchen with Kiss, just sat, while her father talked to Doris in the bedroom. Later, after Mr. Dingman had come grimly down the stairs, Ellie went to her parents’ room. The suitcases lay open on the bed, overflowing with the contents of Doris’s drawers and her closet. Doris stood in the bathroom, clearing small bottles and tubes out of the medicine chest and sweeping them into a makeup case.

  “Doris?” said Ellie.

  Doris turned around, and Ellie could see the back of her beehive in the mirror. “Yeah?”

  “How come I don’t call you ‘Mom’?”

  Doris flashed Ellie a crooked smile. “Well, I wouldn’t let you. I made you call me Doris starting when you were a baby.”

  “I know, but why?”

  “I suppose because I never felt like a—”

  Ellie glared at her mother.

  “‘Mom’ is so old-fashioned,” said Doris.

  “Uh-huh.” Ellie looked at Doris’s bureau. It was a mess, strewn with old bobby pins and rubber bands, things Doris was going to throw away. The wedding photo lay facedown, and the vial of baby teeth and the plastic orchid had been moved to one side.

  Ellie sank into the armchair and watched Doris flit from the sink to the bureau to the closet to the suitcases. Doris’s presence was huge, as if she were an inflating balloon, taking up all the air and space. There was no room for Ellie. So Ellie crossed the hall and lay on her bed. She slid effortlessly into her private place and was aware only of the leaves on the maple tree outside her window until she heard Doris call, “Eleanor? I’m leaving now.”

  Ellie got to her feet and looked into her parents’ room. Doris was standing by the bed, the packed suitcases at her feet. The plastic orchid was still on the bureau, but the photo and the vial of teeth were gone.

  “You’ve been leaving forever,” Ellie replied.

  Doris, who had just picked up a suitcase in each hand, lost her grip on them and they thumped to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then she struggled down the hallway with the suitcases.

  Ellie watched her for a moment, grabbed the orchid from the bureau, and slipped it into the back of the tote bag that was slung over Doris’s shoulder. Then she lay down in the room that was now Mr. Dingman’s, and stayed there until at last she heard the Buick pull out of the driveway.

  Downstairs, Ellie found her father sitting at the kitchen table, talking on the phone and writing something on a pad of paper. He glanced up at Ellie, then said into the phone, “Excuse me, could you hold for just a moment?”

  “I’ll meet you on the porch,” Ellie mouthed to him, and took Kiss with her to the front stoop.

  Ellie sat on the top step once again, grateful for the shade that was creeping across the front of the house. Kiss plopped down next to her, this time with her head in Ellie’s lap. Ellie let out a loud sigh. She stroked Kiss’s ears, then leaned back on her elbows and took in the entire street—Holly’s neat house; the Levins’, with three bicycles lying on their sides in the lawn; the Lauchaires’, where Mrs. Lauchaire was lugging a picnic table to the sidewalk for the lemonade stand she had promised Domi and Etienne; and the ladies’ old house in the shadow of the Witch Tree.

  Ellie was too far away to make out the face on the tree, but she could feel herself in its gaze, knew it was watching over the people in all the houses on the street. It would watch over Ellie for a long, long tim
e. It would watch over her in seventh grade when she and Holly moved to the junior high, a bigger school where the sparrows held no power, and Ellie and Holly discovered that most kids couldn’t care less what street their classmates lived on or what their mothers had done. It would watch over her during the long summer, one of the hottest on record in Spectacle, when Nan and Poppy came to visit, then brought Ellie, Albert, and Marie back to Baton for two wonderful weeks. It would watch over her that afternoon as she and her father would finally sit down with Albert and Marie and tell them the truth about Doris. And it was watching over her at that very moment as she heard the grinding of gears and turned to see the school bus pull up at the corner. The doors squeaked open, and out jumped first Allan, whooping and wearing a paper hat he had made in art class, then Marie, Domi, and Rachel, holding hands, then Etienne, craning his neck to see whether the picnic table had been set up, then Albert and David, yelling, “School’s out! School’s out!” even though one more day was left, and finally Holly, who waved to Ellie.

  Ellie looked again at the Witch Tree at one end of the street, then at the kids at the other. In the space between was her whole life.

  About the Author

  Ann M. Martin in the acclaimed and bestselling author of a number of novels and series, including Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), A Dog’s Life, Here Today, P.S. Longer Letter Later (written with Paula Danziger), the Doll People series (written with Laura Godwin), the Main Street series, and the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club. She lives in New York.

  Copyright © 2004 by Ann M. Martin.

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Here today / Ann M. Martin.—1st ed. p. cm.

  Summary: In 1963, when her flamboyant mother abandons the family to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress, eleven-year-old Ellie Dingman takes charge of her younger siblings, while also trying to deal with the outcast status in school and frightening acts of prejudice toward the “misfits” that live on her street.

  ISBN 978-0-439-57944-5 (alk. paper)

  [1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Mothers—Fiction. 3. Family life—New York (State)—Fiction. 4. Prejudices—Fiction. 5. Neighborhood—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. New York (State)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M3567585Her 2004 [Fic]—dc22 2004041620

  First edition, October 2004

  Cover photo by TC Reiner

  Cover design by Leyah Jensen

  eISBN 978-0-545-34904-8

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.