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“He’ll get over it,” Patti told her. “He’ll stay in my room for a while to teach you a lesson.”

Ingrid nodded. “I know just how he feels. He’ll forgive me, but not right away.”

After tasting the scrabble, she tossed in another sack of peanuts. “Greg picked me up on the way home from school. Said he’d been looking everywhere for me because he wanted my advice on how to handle a girl who went to him to get a divorce.”

Patti interrupted. “Let me get this straight. He wants your advice?” She added to herself, “Oh, brother!”

“She’s about my age – well, she’s seventeen – and she’s been married only six months. To a high school guy she’s known since she was a kid. And do you know what’s bothering her?”

Invariably she hastened to answer her own questions before anyone else could. “Her husband doesn’t open car doors for her like he did before they were married, or light cigarettes, and carry in the groceries. So she thinks he doesn’t love her any more, and she wants Greg to get her a divorce, but Greg is trying to talk her out of it, although he’ll lose two hundred dollars – that’s how much he charges for a divorce – and he really needs the two hundred.”

“And of course he consulted you. Natch note 7. Since you’re an authority on love.”

“All right! Anyway, he wanted to try out his approach on me. Get my reaction, he said.”

The doorbell rang and Patti hurried to answer. A neighbor woman handed her a letter from her parents that had been delivered by mistake. Patti let out a yell that brought Ingrid and Mike, and they sat on the arms of the overstuffed chair while her fingers ripped into the envelope, which bore the postmark, Helvetia .

” Helvetia ?” asked Mike. “Where’s that?”

” Switzerland , you dumb bunny,” Ingrid told him.

“Well, why don’t they say so?”

Patti took two notes out, one from each of their parents. Their dad wrote about Lucerne , Switzerland . He told how the English had colonized Lucerne , “a former Swiss town,” but, with the usual English diplomacy, permitted the Swiss to fly the Swiss flag and, also with typical English courtesy, tol­erated a certain number of American and German travelers to visit the colony.

Mike said, “He’s as funny as Art Buchwald.”

“Who’s he?” Ingrid asked.

Mike emitted a worldly sigh. “I’m surrounded by morons. I battle ignorance day after day.”

“You don’t know either,” Ingrid countered. “You see a name somewhere and you go around acting like you know him.”

Patti read the note from their mother, who recounted what they had seen in Italy . Their mother would squeeze every possible dollar’s worth out of the trip. She would visit every art gallery and museum and take every tour that could be managed on a back-breaking, foot-wrecking, fourteen-hour-a day schedule. Their dad would go along willingly, although he would prefer to wander down little back streets, and poke into out-of-the-way places, and eat at small inns, and sit at sidewalk cafes, and watch the crowds go by. He was interested in people alive and on the hoof, not in the venera­tion of the old because it was old. He would remark that what the place needed was a wrecking crew to clean up the debris of a thousand years, and their mother would be shocked, not knowing that the people living in the area wished the same, that nights many of them looked at maga­zine pictures of modern bathrooms and yearned for them, but knew they would have to content themselves with the same old drab w.c. note 8 to the end of their days.

This time, their mother’s recital was briefer than usual. As she closed, she wrote, “We’re seeing so many wondrous places that Dad and I’ve dreamed about since we were first married, but sometimes I wonder if it’s worth taking six weeks out of our lives with you, when we have such little time to enjoy you before you grow up and are gone. Our hearts are with you every day, no matter where we go. We love you all so much, and being away seems to make the love a little more precious, until at times it hurts.”

When Patti finished, they sat quiet a long moment, deeply moved. Then Patti said briskly, “Let’s get dinner. They haven’t died, you know.”

Mike cleared his throat. “The minute they get back, I’m going to hit them up for a bicycle, before they forget how much they love me.”

Ingrid turned on him. “You’re horrible. Absolutely horrible. Isn’t he horrible, sis?”

11

Sammy left at seven to pick up the morning newspapers from the large stand at the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys. They bought the newspapers religiously. They remembered a friend, old Al Bricker, a smalltime gangster, who had been apprehended because he failed to read the night before that an informant had tipped off the police. Dan had said, “I read it someplace, knowledge is power, and that’s a truth if there ever was one. We’ll play it the way the big shot executives do. They read everything they can get their hands on about their competitors.”