Cassie Binegar by Patricia MacLachlan

down.
    QUESTIONS       ANSWERS
    Cassie stood back and looked at the neat lettering, the tip of her pencil in her mouth. Finally, she leaned over and wrote under “Questions”:
    Why don’t I have a space of my own?
    Then the sounds of the dinner guests below intruded. Cassie stood for a moment on the stairway, watching hidden from above before she went downstairs to become a character in the scene below.
    Everyone had brought something for dinner. Gran had baked all day and the kitchen still smelled of homemade bread and cookies. Cassie was overjoyed to see that her mother had roasted a turkey instead of fish. The writer had brought cheese. Uncle Hat brought a kicker.
    â€œWhat’s a kicker?” asked Margaret Mary.
    â€œWine,” said Coralinda, smiling faintly.
    â€œSeven and four/There’s always more,” said Hat, tipping up his wineglass.
    â€œWhat are the sticks and weeds in the salad?” asked Cassie.
    â€œSticks and weeds?” Coralinda, flushed from the kitchen, laughed. “Those are herbs and bean sprouts, Cassie.”
    â€œLook like sticks and weeds,” commented Cassie.
    Cassie looked closely at Cousin Coralinda. What was it that was different? She still wore feathers, but the only ones in sight were feather earrings, slightly worn, that made her look a bit as if she were molting. There was something different. Something else.
    The writer took Baby Binnie on his lap, where she sat staring at him for a long time.
    â€œBaby Binnie, Skinny Binnie,” sang the writer, not embarrassed at all. Baby Binnie grinned, her three and a half teeth making her look like a carved pumpkin.
    â€œRatch,” said Baby Binnie to the writer.
    â€œRatch is right,” said the writer, smiling back at Binnie.
    â€œWhatever is that in the bathroom?” asked James, coming into the kitchen.
    â€œWhat do you mean? What’s there?” asked Cassie’s mother.
    â€œIt looks to me,” said Gran, “like a sheet for questions and answers. Put there, I suppose, by someone who wishes to know more. A good idea, I might say.”
    Cassie grinned at Gran.
    â€œYou know I put it there,” she said.
    â€œIt did look like your handwriting,” said James, smiling.
    â€œAnd I was very tired of writing answers on toilet paper,” joked John Thomas.
    The writer said nothing, but smiled at Cassie from across the table. He turned to Cassie’s father.
    â€œYour boat is beautiful,” he said.
    Cassie saw that her father was pleased.
    â€œYou’ve seen her? Yes, she is beautiful. You like boats?”
    The writer nodded. “Never had much of a chance to use them. I grew up in the west, where there is not much water.”
    Beautiful? Cassie thought about her father’s boat, solid and gray with painted decks, the smell of fish never washed away, the windows of the wheelhouse blurred and sticky with salt spray.
    Cassie’s father sat back and took a sip of his wine. He looked past everyone there, as if reaching for something far away. “I’ve loved boats forever,” he said softly. “When I was seven, I built a raft out of building boards and old nails. Launched it on the river.”
    Cassie studied him. She had hardly ever thought of him as a boy of seven. What did he look like then? Was he tall or short, curly haired, fair, sad, happy? Was he the same person as now?
    After dinner they had cookies and raisin cake on the porch, the fading sunlight turning the sky the old gold color of late afternoon. It touched the faces of everyone, making them seem unreal, like old photographs: Gran, leaning back in a wicker chair, sipping tea from a china cup; Cassie’s brothers arguing gently over the last piece of cake; her mother and father, sitting close together on the couch, the backs of their hands touching; Baby Binnie, sitting at the foot of the steps, eating sand with a spoon. The writer leaned over to say