“She definitely moved out, right?”
“YES!” Izzy pumped a tiny fist. “And I haven’t seen her here, either.”
“Nope. I told you, witches don’t like row houses. She’ll never show up here.”
“But, Mary Jane—” Izzy turned and leaned into me; her face grew dark and serious.
“Yeah?”
Izzy whispered. “I found makarino cherries in the fridge.”
I whispered back. “Your mom put them there.”
“She did?” Izzy still whispered.
“Yes. She did.” I’d run into Mrs. Cone at Eddie’s last week. We’d been standing right at the maraschino cherry jars and I confessed to having told Izzy about the witch who had stocked the fridge with maraschino cherries. She had laughed, picked up a jar, and then put it in her cart.
“So there really is NO WITCH here!” Izzy grabbed a black-bottom cookie and bit into it.
My mother and Mrs. Cone brought two glasses of milk and two suede-colored coffees to the table. They were chatting like any two mothers might. It was nothing like the conversations Mrs. Cone used to have with Sheba, but it didn’t sound fake, either.
“Divorce is never easy,” my mother said. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any friends who were divorcées.
“No, but Richard makes it easier than most. It was such a strange summer, you know. Truly amazing and beautiful in so many ways. But it made me see things about myself. Ways that I’d compromised who I really was and what I really wanted.”
“You had wanted to marry a rock star,” I said quietly. Then I jerked my head down toward Izzy in my lap. Thankfully, she was tuned out, focused entirely on the cookie that was breaking into rock-hard shards in her hands.
“You remember! Yeah. I did.” Mrs. Cone’s face looked more freckly in the sunlight pouring in through the window. I could see the younger version of her: fat-cheeked, strawberry-haired, dreaming of tattooed lead singers and a life entirely unlike her own mother’s.
“How much more do we have to wait?” Izzy turned in my lap to face me. She had chocolate goo on her teeth.
My mother lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. “Six minutes.”
“Six minutes.” Izzy shoved the last crescent-moon wedge of cookie into her mouth.
“I’ve gotta tell you,” Mrs. Cone said to my mother, as if the interruption from Izzy hadn’t happened, “how relieved and liberated I feel just being me. Not a doctor’s wife. Not a Roland Park housewife. Just me!”
“Being a wife is a lot more work than husbands ever give us credit for!” my mother said.
“How much longer now?” Izzy asked.
My mother looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.”
“WAIT!” Izzy shouted. “I want to tape-record it.” She tumbled out of my lap and ran from the room. I could hear her feet clunking up the stairs.
“Oh, Mary Jane!” Mrs. Cone said, “I was talking to Richard this morning and he wanted me to tell you that that key hook you talked him into buying is working wonderfully. He only misplaced his keys once this week.”
“That’s so great!” I had seen the ceramic placque with hooks on it at Gundy’s Gifts around the corner from Eddie’s. When I told Dr. Cone about it, he had nodded in a resigned sort of way, but then he drove over there and bought it.
“IS DADDY COMING TODAY?” Izzy shouted from upstairs. As far as I knew, Dr. and Mrs. Cone saw each other several times a week. And every time I was at one house, the other called. I didn’t know anyone whose parents had divorced, but still I’d never imagined it was like this. Instead of a drawn-out tug-of-war between two people who wanted to destroy each other, the Cones’ divorce appeared to be a gentle rearrangement of housing and time.
“NO!” Mrs. Cone hollered toward the stairway. Then she looked at me and my mother and said, “You know, Richard still gets jealous over Jimmy. Can you believe that? He needs to understand that I wasn’t the only person who fell in love with him. That man casts a spell on everyone who meets him.”
“I love him, but I wasn’t in love with him,” I said.
My mother laughed nervously. “Oh, let’s hope not!”
Mrs. Cone laughed, not nervously. “No, Mary Jane was the most sane person in the house. She was the adult while the rest of us were throwing temper tantrums, playing dress-up, fooling around. You know.” Mrs. Cone shrugged.
My mother took a giant gulp of creamy coffee. Then she said, “Mary Jane is always so reasonable.”