All-Season Edie by Annabel Lyon

lost?” one of the Indian women asks.
    I start coughing again, and all the tables and chairs and people slip sideways in my vision. I’d fall over but the Buddha puts his hand on my shoulder to make me steady.
    â€œBe still,” he says.
    Which is exactly what the Buddha would say.
    â€œWhere is your mummy?” the Indian woman asks. She has an English accent, like the people who call the tennis matches on TV that Dad likes to watch. Twenty-love, second service. Nice shot, that. Lovely.
    â€œI don’t know,” I say.
    The Buddha closes his magazine. “Should we call security?” he asks the Indian women, as though they’re all together and not strangers. This is nice of him, though I’m not sure why.
    â€œDid you come with your mummy today?” the Indian woman asks me again.
    â€œAnd my sister,” I say.
    The Buddha nods thoughtfully and says he’ll get security. He gets up from his two chairs and tells me I should sit down and wait with the ladies until he gets back. Gratefully I climb up onto one of the chairs, which is warm from his sitting on it. For a minute I close my eyes, and then I start coughing again. The Indian women cluck sympathetically, and one of them reaches over and touches my forehead and clucks some more. Then she starts pulling things out of her shopping bags to show me. I understand the woman is trying to make me smile. She pulls out a pair of socks and tears off the tags and the sticky paper holding them together and slips one over her hand to make it a puppet. She calls the puppet Freddy. Freddy pretends to eat my finger, and then he pretends to sip the woman’s coffee. “Oh, oh, oh,” the woman says in a funny voice that’s supposed to be Freddy’s voice. “Tummy ache! Do you have a tummy ache too?”
    I shake my head. I know the woman is being nice, and I don’t want to risk being rude by telling her I’m too old for sock puppets named Freddy. The woman seems to take the hint, though, because she pops the sock off her hand and back into a bag. From another bag she starts pulling out stuffed animals and explaining these are for her nieces and nephews. “Now, I know you’re a big girl,” she says. “But can you remember when you were little? Which one would you have liked best?”
    Admittedly, this is more interesting. I try to focus on the mounds of plush. There’s a bear and a raccoon and a hot pink hippo and a glittery fish. Then, to my horror, the woman pulls out the creepy-eyed gray elephant from the card shop.
    â€œHe’s so cute,” the woman says, pretending to make him walk across the air toward me. “Look at him. Isn’t he cute?”
    I nod, then shake my head, then blink several times and slide off my chair to the floor, where I land with a thump just before everything goes black.
    On Christmas morning, I lie on the sofa while Mom and Dad and Dexter bring my presents over to me. This is a change from the usual rip-roaring, hair-flying, tornado-raising creature that’s me under the tree at six thirty in the morning while everyone else struggles to act awake, but I’m still not My Old Self, as Mom puts it. My new self sleeps in to nine o’clock and then nests on the sofa with a blanket and pillows, gazing sleepily at the blinking lights on the tree more than at the presents under it. Mom and Dad make tea and coffee, and Dexter peels us each a mandarin orange. Dad lights the fire he laid last night, with about as much mumbling under his breath as every year as match after match extinguishes itself with nothing to show for its efforts. Finally the fire catches, blue and then orange, and everyone has something hot in a mug (even I have tea), and Dexter asks me if I want to start and I say no, that’s okay, Dexter can start. Then everyone gets concerned again and says they’ll bring my presents over to me.
    Still, I’m getting better. I’m not