Nest by Esther Ehrlich

running down the kitchen window. She hasn’t been paying attention to the chore wheel at all. Rachel shakes her head, but I keep holding it out to her until she kind of has no choice. She takes it from me like it has dog doo on it, just touching the edge and wrinkling up her nose.
    “C’mon, Rach,” Dad says.
    “C’mon, Rach, what?” she says.
    “How about a little effort here,” he says.
    “Fine,” she says. Rachel drops the chore wheel on the table and leans over it. “Wow!” she says. “Fascinating! What an amazing piece of work.”
    Dad stares at her like he doesn’t know her. Rachel takes a peek at him and then looks down at the chore wheel again.
    “Unbelievably interesting,” she mumbles.
    Dad’s frozen like a wild brown bunny when you surprise it on the sand path. His shoulders are hunched up. His mouth is open. He might not be breathing.
    I watch the way the rain bounces back up when it hits the picnic table in the backyard. It’s raining in two directions. When I look back at Dad, he’s shaking his head like he’s got some stuck parts that he wants to loosen up. Then he slowly walks out of the room.
    “What?” Rachel says to me, even though I haven’t said anything. She sounds as cranky as a little kid who needs to take a nap.
    “Want to play water worms?” I ask.
    “Maybe,” Rachel says, but she’s already pulling her chair right up to the window. I pull my chair up, too. We don’t choose contestants. We just watch all the squiggles of water running down the glass.
    “You know, Dad doesn’t even know how long she’ll be gone,” Rachel says. “He just dumped her off at McLean Hospital and drove away. He’s waiting for a phone call from the people there.”
    “He didn’t just dump her off. He told us it was Mom’s idea. He said that she wanted to go somewhere to rest and get better. They met with a nice doctor there. And there are apple trees.”
    “Oh, Chirp,” Rachel says. She presses her nose upto the window. I don’t know why she’s
Oh-Chirp
ing me. There’s too much I don’t know. I don’t know why Mom can’t just get better at home if we give her lots of peace and quiet and take turns dancing for her and cooking her chicken soup and mashed potatoes and, every once in a while, bringing her an ice cream sundae with hot fudge from Benson’s. I don’t know when we’ll get to visit Mom in the nuthouse. I don’t know why Rachel used to think everything Dad said was so great and now she won’t listen to anything he has to say. I don’t know what happened to the marsh lady to make her want to keep her distance from people, even a girl who talks extra gentle and shows her a red-winged blackbird nest.
    “Listen, Chirp, let’s ask if we can go see Mom for Thanksgiving, okay?” Rachel finally says. She puts her arm around me.
    “We’ll make her a pie,” I say, pressing my nose against the glass, too.
    “Lemon meringue,” she says.
    The glass is cold on my nose. Our breath makes fog.
    Rachel backs up and draws tic-tac-toe with her finger on the window.
    “You can go first, Chirpie,” she says. I’m just about to put a fat
X
right in the middle square when Dad walks in.
    “Listen,” he says, “we need to talk.”
    I turn my chair around, but Rachel just sighsreally loud, like Dad’s said we have to pick up every grain of sand on every beach on the Cape. She keeps staring out the window.
    “Rachel!” Dad says. I’ve never heard Dad’s voice sound so sharp.
    “Oh,
all right
,” she says, and makes a big deal out of dragging her chair around as if it weighs a ton.
    “This is a tough time for all of us,” Dad says, looking right at Rachel. “And I have room for a lot of things, but I don’t have room for your disrespect. I understand that you have a range of feelings, some difficult, that you’re contending with. But you simply have to do better. Do you understand?”
    “Sure,” Rachel says.
    “And?” Dad asks.
    “And, I’m sorry?”
    “Is that