My Mother Got Married by Barbara Park

something I really didn’t want to do.
    Once again, Thomas waited.
    I was still thinking it over when he poked me under the arm with his finger.
    “Come on. Do it.”
    A second later he poked me again. This time I knocked his hand away.
    “Hey, Jellybean! Quit that!” he ordered.
    It was degrading. It really was.
    “I don’t think I want to play this anymore, Thomas,” I said. “Thanks a lot, though. It’s been fun.”
    Thomas started to panic. “Yes, Charrulls! Yes! You have to!”
    I just knelt there, looking at him. “Sorry, Carl. I just can’t,” I said quietly. Then I stood up and left the room.
    Lydia was coming in the front door. Teenagers are always coming in from somewhere, but they never tell you where.
    Upstairs, Thomas had started screaming, “Hey you! Come back here! Come back!”
    As Lydia and I passed on the steps she stopped to listen. “What’s wrong with him?” she wanted to know.
    “Nothing,” I muttered, continuing on my way.
    She turned and followed me down to the living room. “Well, if nothing’s wrong, then why is he yelling?”
    I picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. “We were playing a game and I quit, that’s all,” I said, trying to be real casual about it.
    Lydia started to grin. “Was it Let’s Pretend?” she asked.
    Naturally I refused to admit it.
    “Don’t tell me. He was making you be a horse. Am I right?” she questioned.
    Geez! Had she been spying the whole time or what?
    “Jellybean?” she persisted.
    “Great!” I said finally, throwing my hands in the air. “That’s just great. You were listening.”
    Lydia laughed out loud. “How could I have been listening? I wasn’t even here!”
    “I don’t know. But Martin Oates says that girls are the snoopiest, sneakiest busybodies in the world.”
    Lydia just kept grinning. “Get serious, Charles. I’ve been that stupid horse a million times myself. Every time I play with Thomas, he makes me be Jellybean.”
    Hearing this made me feel a little better. I pointed to my head. “Yeah, well, guess what? I think the kid’s got a screw loose somewhere.”
    Suddenly Lydia’s whole mood seemed to change. “He does not. He’s just a little boy, that’s all.”
    I shrugged. “Whatever.”
    I couldn’t tell if she was really mad or what. Sometimes Lydia was a real puzzle. Half the time she acted like Thomas was a pest, and the other half, she was real protective of him, like a mother would be. Once she held a Kleenex while he blew his nose. You’ve got to practically worship somebody to do that.
    For a while we just sat there quietly staring at the TV. But I knew that neither one of us was paying any attention to it. Lydia still had something else to say. I could feel it building up in the silence.
    “Thomas hasn’t had it that easy, you know,” she blurted out all at once. “You shouldn’t be so hard on him. His life has been hard enough.”
    I squirmed in my chair. It was embarrassing, being yelled at like that.
    “He never even knew our mother,” she went on. “Just think what that must be like for a minute.”
    She paused, and her voice softened. “She was really cute, my mom was. She didn’t look like a grown-up woman, exactly. More like a kid. That’s where Thomas and I got our freckles. Daddy says she had one of those faces that never get old.”
    She stopped again, as if she were remembering. “Thomas was only six weeks old when she, well, when she got sick. He looks at her pictures sometimes. He knows that it’s Mom. We’ve told him enough. But still, you can tell by his eyes that he’s looking at a stranger.”
    I glanced over at her face. Her eyes were filling up with tears.
    She wiped them and stared out into space.
    “It’s really hard, you know?” she added almost in a whisper. “When I fill out forms at school, I write ‘deceased’ where Mom is supposed to go.”
    Tears started to run down her cheeks. This time she stood up and hurried out of the