Maybe This Time by Jennifer Crusie Page A

followed her into the nursery in time to see Alice go out of the nursery and slam the door. “Wonderful,” she said, and was trying to think of something else to bribe the girl with when Alice came out with her blue Jessica doll under her arm.
    â€œI want a blue bedspread with sparkles,” she said, “and it should flutter. Like butterflies. Or dancing.” She headed for the door out of the nursery and onto the gallery and beyond that, presumably, the stairs and Carter.
    â€œHold it,” Andie said, and Alice turned around, a dark look on her face. “We have to comb your hair.”
    If possible, untangling Alice’s hair was worse than Andie had anticipated since Alice screamed through the whole thing, loud enough that Carter came up to see what Andie was doing to her. “You’re next,”Andie told him over a shrieking Alice, and he left and came back five minutes later with his hair combed, in time to see Andie pull Alice’s hair up into a topknot and tie it with one of her scrunchies.
    Andie sat back to survey her work. Except for the fact that Alice was still screaming, tears streaking down her contorted, red face, she looked pretty good. “Alice, I’m not doing anything to you. Stop screaming and go look at yourself. You look cute.”
    Alice screamed louder, directing the volume directly at Andie, so Andie went into her room and got a hand mirror and brought it out to her. “Look.”
    Alice stopped in mid-scream, possibly because she realized she looked god-awful with her mouth open like that, possibly because it had been so long since she’d seen her face without hair sticking out all around it. “I hate it,” she said, but she said it instead of screaming it, so Andie counted it as progress.
    â€œThat’s my girl,” she said, standing up.
    â€œI’m not your girl,” Alice said, and stalked out the door past Carter, clearly fed up with Andie and life in general, although she gave grudging approval to Andie’s yellow Mustang when she saw it.
    The ride to Grandville was uneventful except for the one bad moment when Andie drove through New Essex and turned onto the highway, and Alice thought she was being kidnapped again. She screamed until Carter, sitting beside her in the back seat, said, “Chill, it’s the next town,” without taking his eyes off his comic book. Alice stopped. Evidently if Carter said it, it was fact.
    â€œThank you,” Andie said to him, looking in the rearview mirror to see his face.
    He ignored her.
    When they got to the mall in Grandville, he got out of the car and headed for the bookstore. Andie and a silent, glowering Alice went to a bedding store for a blue comforter for Alice and a red-striped one for Carter. When Alice objected to hers, saying, “It doesn’t have sparkles,” they went to a fabric store for some blue sequined chiffon and thread, and after that an office supply store where Alice picked out a sketchbook for Carter, and a set of markers,a big pad of quarter-inch grid paper, some pencils with skulls on them, and a pencil sharpener, all without interacting with Andie in any way until Andie offered her a set of Hello Kitty pencils. The scorn on Alice’s face was searing.
    They moved on and bought T-shirts and black-and-white-striped leggings and a stretchy black jersey flounced skirt for Alice who made gagging sounds, but once they began on Carter’s clothes, the little girl got serious, meticulously choosing what he needed.
Shopping therapy,
Andie thought, and dragged her to a home store where she bought white paint to take the pink out of Alice’s room. “I want
black,
” Alice said, the first thing she’d said since they’d left the car, and Andie said, “You can draw on the white with your markers,” and watched Alice almost smile. It was a little ghoulish. Then they went to the bookstore.
    â€œIs that your kid?”