I didn’t say anything. I just turned and waited. Evan said, “Jenny, this must all be crazy and frightening for you, I’m sorry. You’ve not even had a chance to get used to the idea of your mother and me getting married, and right on top of it you’re having to deal with packing up your whole life and going to a strange place where nothing’s familiar. I’m truly sorry.”

Sally came to stand beside him, and Evan put his arm around her. That made me feel funny—not so much him, but the way she flowed against him like water, which I’d never ever seen her do with anybody. Evan went on, “Look, I can’t tell you everything’s going to work out, that you’ll be instantly, totally happy in England. I can’t promise to be the perfect stepfather for you, or that you won’t hate Tony and Julian on sight. But Sally and I will do our best to make a home for us all, and if you’ll give us the benefit of the doubt, that’ll help a great deal. Do you think you can manage that, Jenny?”

I know, I know, writing it down now it looks like a reasonable, really friendly thing to say to somebody who hadn’t been the least bit friendly to him since the day Sally introduced us. And I know it makes me look totally pathetic to say that I just sort of nodded and mumbled, “I guess,” and made a lightning get-away to my room and Mister Cat and my favorite radio station that I wasn’t going to be able to get in London. But the thing is, I didn’t want him to be reasonable, I wanted him to be cold and mean, or anyway at least stupid, so I wouldn’t have to worry about his feelings, or about liking him better than Norris. He was probably a better person than Norris in a lot of ways, I already knew that. So a lot of people are, so what? It didn’t make any difference to me.

Back then, I didn’t even know what Evan did for a living. I didn’t want to know. Sally told me he was an agricultural biologist, doing stuff for the English government on and off, but I didn’t have any idea what that meant, except that she said he talked to farmers a lot. He’d been in Iowa or Illinois, someplace like that, going to seminars and conventions, and then he’d come on to New York, I don’t remember why, and that’s how he became definitely my mother’s only pickup ever. They met at a concert—I think she wanted me to go with her, but I went over to Marta’s instead—and Sally came floating home that night, late as Mister Cat, bouncing into my room to tell me she’d met this sweet, funny English person, and they’d gotten thrown out of the West End, not for being drunk, but for sitting and laughing for hours without drinking at all. When she went off to bed, I heard her for the longest time, still laughing to herself.

I didn’t think much about it then. I only realized I was in trouble when they started playing music together. Sally spends so much time at the piano every day, working or practicing, that she just about never touches it for fun. She used to, sometimes, with Norris, when he lived with us—I remember they used to do old stuff, Beatles, or rhythm and blues, clowning around together to crack me up. But once they split up, she quit all that, never again—that fast, that flat. And now here was Evan coming over with somebody’s beat-up classical guitar, and the two of them waking me up at night singing English and I guess Irish folk songs. He was all right, nothing much, about like me on piano. But they were having a great time, you could tell. I could tell, lying there listening in the dark.

Of course he was over practically every day after they got engaged. They’d order pizza and sit in the kitchen talking about finding a place in London, because Evan’s old flat wouldn’t be nearly big enough, and about where I’d go to school, and where Sally might teach regularly, instead of freelancing the way she did here. I didn’t talk if I could avoid it, and I really tried not to even listen. I think I felt that if I ignored everything that was going on, maybe none of it would actually happen. Mister Cat is terrific at that. All the same, I still couldn’t help picking up a few things, whether I wanted to or not, and some of them didn’t sound that terrible. London, for instance. London sounded pretty much like NewYork, give or take, with all kinds of crazies wandering around, and all kinds of at least interesting stuff going on everywhere. And I even started to think, well, okay, just maybe I could handle London. If I absolutely had to.

Sally told me Evan had custody of his two boys, the way she did of me—they were staying with his sister while he was over here— so I knew they’d be living with us, and that was about all I knew. He showed us four million Polaroids, of course, a whole suitcase full. One of the boys was just a baby, nine or ten—that was Julian— but the other one, Tony, was a couple of years older than me, and Evan said he was a dancer, been a dancer practically since the day he was born. Wonderful. I love him already.

Evan never spent the night at our place. I knew that was because of me. I also knew that Sally stayed over with him every now and then, but she always came slipping back in at five or six in the morning, shoes in her hand, trying like mad not to wake me. They never even went away together overnight, not one time. The whole business was incredibly stupid—who cared, after all?—but I’m trying really hard to be honest, so I have to say I enjoyed every minute of it. Because I cared, I liked making that much hard for them, it was the only thing I could make hard for them. And I also have to say that my mother never once ran me out of the house, never once even suggested wouldn’t it be nice if I spent the weekend up in Riverdale with my disgusting cousin Barbara. Not that it would have worked, but I’d have tried, if it was me.

So I got used to having Evan around most of the time. I didn’t talk to him much, but he didn’t seem to care—he just went right on including me in the conversation, whether I said anything or not. What I didn’t want to get used to was the way Sally and he were together, which was just… I can’t find the word, and I don’t know how to say this so I don’t look too childish, too immature. I was thirteen years old, and I didn’t want to see my own mother giggling and whispering in corners, and getting all dazy eyed and heavy mouthed like some girl backed up practically into her boyfriend’s locker. It made me feel weird, off-balance, and I hated it. When I saw them staring at each other, not saying a word, my skin turned cold, and my whole stomach started to tremble. I wouldn’t talk to anybody then; I’d go into my room and be with Mister Cat. They never noticed; they’d gone away with each other while I stood there. Nothing I could do about it.

But Evan went back to England in May, and was gone for more than a month. Sally said he had some kind of a job offer, and besides, he needed to be with his boys for a while. He’d been telling them about her and me on the phone for months—Sally’d even talked to them a couple of times—but he still had a whole lot of explaining waiting for him back home. Meanwhile, she wanted us to spend some time by ourselves, just us girls, getting reacquainted and all set for the big adventure. We were going to see movies about England and read books about England together, and watch every damn Merchant and Ivory video we could find. “It’ll be fun,” she told me. “It’ll be like going into training.”

I said, “Training for what? Life among the limeys?” Sally went absolutely into orbit. I wasn’t ever to say that, it was as bad as calling the French “frogs” or calling Germans “krauts,” or people calling us what they do. It trailed off right there—I told you, Sally has trouble saying the real names of some things. Anyway, for once I actually kept my mouth shut as she kept going on and on. “We’re going to be living there, Jenny. Not visiting, living. We’re going to be limeys ourselves.” I didn’t say anything.