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"What do you think, little Joey? Do you think we should give her twenty-five cents?" Dad talks to him like he is his partner, like talking to Joey will keep the FBI protection over him. Dad walks in twice to lock our windows at night ever since Joey was born.
Dad drops a quarter in my palm. I stash it deep in my pocket.
"Don't forget to bring back the change."
"Okay."
I always do. Even though I buy Milk Duds, Good & Plenty, or sometimes Chocolate Flicks, I surprise Dad with a nickel back.
"'Honk, honk.'" The Flanigans are here! I kiss Mom goodbye. Dad goes back to his pail of water, looks up at me, then at the floor. I think maybe he is waving goodbye with his eyes. FBI agents always communicate in code.
* * *
Mr. Flanigan jumps out of the car and opens the door for me, just like they do in the movies. "Nice to see you, honey!"
I climb into the Flanigans' backseat, sitting next to Fergus, who sits next to Donal, who sits next to Fintan, who sticks his tongue out to Jimmy in the front seat. The boys scoot away from me immediately because I am a girl, they say, and there's no way they want girl germs. Mrs. Flanigan leans over the seat just as Mr. Flanigan snorts, but all I see is Mrs. Flanigan's white helpless face.
"You boys straighten up. You hear?"
It must be terrible for the Flanigans to have all boys, four pesky sons who act as tough as cowboys. Last summer they cycled over to my corner lemonade stand, where I was selling Michael's old model airplanes for twenty-five cents apiece. The Flanigan boys grabbed half the planes and escaped back down the street while I sat there frozen, afraid to tell a soul for fear they'd come back to beat me up. Tonight I try hard to give them my calm Nancy Drew look.
Wind blows my light brown curls as we head for the theater, driving past the St. Bede ball field. I think of all the times I have climbed to the top of the bleachers to see the Jacaranda Navy Base theater and the green tanks and the huge gray airplanes that shake our classroom windows when they fly overhead. Mr. Flanigan says they store something called nuclear weapons there, but I forget about all that when the man in the white cap salutes Mr. Flanigan, and we enter the base.
Mrs. Flanigan, with her night-black hair, turns around in her seat. "Did you bring a sweater, Maura?" she says, smiling at me before she asks, and then smiling afterward. It's like she dreams up a question just so she can have a reason to look at me. I smile back. I know if the Flanigans could, they'd give anything to have me as their daughter.
Sometimes I lie in bed and think of Mrs. Flanigan's look when she tells Mom how lucky she is to have a daughter, and I think how if our house ever caught on fire and I was the only one left alive, I would go live with the Flanigans because they'd spoil me rotten, making me my favorite dinner every night, which is meat pie with a Bisquick crust. They would give me an extra-large bedroom with white fancy furniture and a playhouse even taller than the one Dad built for me, a playhouse with its very own electricity so I could plug in my Suzy Homemaker oven.
I look around the navy base theater. It is not like the other movie theater where my parents took us once, the one with red curtains and dark velvet cushions and little lights like fireflies. In the navy base theater, we sit on cold chairs and there are no curtains ahead, just bluish green walls. All around the theater are men wearing strict-looking uniforms. But all that disappears when the lights go off for one second, then two seconds, then three seconds, then the movie projector flicks on.
I can hear the voice of a woman, and there she is, on top of a mountain packed with purple and yellow flowers. She swirls and she swirls, and her arms are out to the world. I lean forward in my cold seat, and the hills "do" come alive when she sings–I can hear the crickets and the wind and the brook and practically even the flowers start to sing with her. During the show, Mrs. Flanigan smiles at me some more. I wonder if she will sew me a new wardrobe, using fabric from the Flanigans' bedroom curtains, just like in the movie.
* * *
After I see "The Sound of Music," Mom takes me to Mildred Perry, who smells like hair spray as she snips, and who gives me a butterscotch candy when the cut is over. When I come home, I walk into my parents' bedroom and look in the mirror. I have no more curls. Instead, I just have eyes, which seem even bigger, and now I can see my entire neck and my ears and all of my forehead too.
Mrs. Flanigan comes over to help Mom with the new baby, and when I answer the door, she gives me that look of appreciation.
"Why, Maura...you have a Julie Andrews haircut!"
I gulp. "I do?"
I run back to Mom, who holds a warm bottle up to Joey's mouth. Mom is quiet when she feeds the new baby, and she gives him a long look each time he tries to gulp. His saliva gets bad, and his gulps are slow. His tongue is thicker than most babies'. That is what the doctor told Mom, but I think when he gets older, that condition will just go away.
"Mom, do I have a Julie Andrews haircut, do I?"
She wipes off the baby's face and pulls him up in his bassinet because he's constantly slipping down, she says, this one, constantly slipping.
"Yes, Maura. You have an 'official' Julie Andrews haircut."
(continued on the next page)
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