Reluctantly Alice Read Online Free Page B

Pamela did, anyway. I’ve never had them here, Dad, and I’ve been to their houses lots.”
    â€œTrue,” Dad said.
    â€œWhere are they going to sleep?”
    â€œTell them to bring sleeping bags.”
    â€œElizabeth doesn’t have one.”
    â€œShe can use Lester’s, or we can get out the army cot in the basement,” Dad said.
    I swallowed. “What will we serve for dinner? It’s supposed to be something special.”
    Dad opened the cupboard. “Beans and franks, Campbell’s noodle, SpaghettiOs, sardines . . .”
    I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.
    â€œChinese . . .”
    â€œWhat?” My eyes popped open.
    Dad was grinning. “We’ll order Chinese.”
    I threw my arms around him.
    By the time Elizabeth and Pamela came over, Lester was on his way to pick up some cashew chicken, sweet and sour shrimp, beef with snow peas, and fried wonton. Well, I thought to myself, maybe we don’t have the right furniture, but at least we’ve got the right food.
    To tell the truth, our house is weird. Dad told me once that when Mama was alive, we had regular furniture like everyone else. But then, when it was just Dad and Lester and me, and the Melody Inn music chain transferred Dad to Maryland, he decided that Mom’s furniture was just too much to handle. So he kept just a few pieces, gave the rest to Aunt Sally, and we moved from Chicago to Takoma Park to Silver Spring like gypsies, buying a few things here and there from secondhand shops and the Door Store.
    From the outside we’re not too weird—just a regular sort of two-story house, with a front porch. We live in an old neighborhood in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C., and none of the houses are modern, so ours looks like all the rest.
    But when you walk inside you don’t see any rugs. You see this couch that looks like it was built out of packing crates, because it was, with cushions piled on top, and a beanbag chair, a couple of aluminum lawn chairs, and this huge round coffee table we got from Goodwill that takes up half the living room. There are brick-and-board bookcases, Dad’s piano, and wherever there’s a bare place on the walls, there’s a poster of either some wonderful place to visit, like Barcelona or Copenhagen, or a poster about a composer. Except that some of the posters advertisingplaces have people on them, and some of the people posters have the composer’s birthplace instead. I was nine years old before I discovered that Lepzig wasn’t a composer and Liszt wasn’t a town in Austria.
    Our kitchen is big, but the table’s so small that only Dad, Lester, and I can fit around it, and our dining room is really Dad’s office. The only way we can serve dinner in there is to push all his stuff over to one side of the long fold-up table. On this night, though, there wasn’t time to move Dad’s stuff, so when Lester came back from the China Palace with the food, we all sat on pillows on the floor around the giant coffee table and ate with chopsticks.
    I could tell that this was a big deal for Pamela and Elizabeth, especially because we were eating entirely with men . Pamela giggled every time her knee touched Lester’s, and Elizabeth giggled whenever she dropped something with her chopsticks. We sure did a lot of giggling. I never noticed it at school, but here in the living room with Dad and Lester, it sounded really weird.
    Lester, though, was the perfect gentleman. “More chicken, madam?” he asked Elizabeth.
    â€œAnother wonton, ladies?”
    â€œAnyone for some more hot tea?”
    Dad gave us a little lesson on the difference betweenCantonese and Mandarin cooking, and how oyster beef doesn’t have any oysters in it.
    I think it would have been a normal dinner and a normal sleepover if we just hadn’t read our fortune cookies. Dad’s said something about the importance of being