Hilda and Pearl by Alice Mattison Read Free Book Online Page A

with them some more. They put on their coats. At last the manager came to the lobby with Hilda, Mike, and Nathan. The manager was reassuring Hilda, and she was impatient with him. “You certainly don’t know he’s all right,” she was saying. Nathan looked so sad Frances wanted to put her arms around him. She wondered whether he had somehow learned bad news and was trying to think how to break it to them. The manager had called the police, and now a detective arrived and began to talk to the adults. Frances hoped he would talk to her but he didn’t. Finally the detective urged them to go home. The police would search. He was pretty sure Simon was not in the hotel. “Why should he hang around here?” the detective said. “Kid wants to run away, he runs away .”
    At last Ellie Potter went off to the subway, and then Frances and Aunt Pearl and Hilda left too. The men had persuaded them to go. Nathan and Mike were going to keep looking. Frances wanted to stay and help them, but of course no one would listen to her. It was very late. Aunt Pearl took Frances’s hand again as they left the building. Frances pulled it away, but although Aunt Pearl didn’t look down or say anything, she kept closing her hand on air like someone looking for a light-pull in the dark, and so Frances held her hand out and her aunt took it again.
    Frances fell asleep on the subway. When she woke up, the rough material on the subway seat was pressing into her cheek. She remembered her book, a library book, and she was afraid she had left it in the cloakroom of the hotel, but her mother had it on her lap. Now her mother was holding Aunt Pearl by the hand, and both of them were crying.
    The next day was Saturday and Frances slept late. When she woke up she remembered that there was something she’d rather not think about, then what it was. If Simon never came back she would have to make them all happy, her parents and her aunt and uncle. She would certainly fail, and that would be the end of all of them.
    The apartment was quiet. She wondered if her parents had left her alone, but her mother was in the living room with a magazine in her lap, wearing her bathrobe as if she were sick. She looked up at Frances and her face seemed flattened, stretched out, with large white areas around her eyes.
    â€œIs Daddy here?” Frances said.
    â€œHe came home and slept, then he went out again. He left early this morning.”
    â€œWhat time is it?”
    â€œAbout ten. Go eat breakfast.”
    Frances ate a bowl of Rice Krispies. She ate quickly. Then she went to her room and got dressed and made her bed. After that she didn’t know what to do. On Saturday mornings her mother sometimes did the shopping, and Frances went along. Sometimes they went shopping for clothes. She thought it would be all right to read, and she went back to the living room to see what her mother was doing. Her mother had gone into the bathroom. The bathroom door was closed and Frances heard the sound of the shower.
    Frances went into her parents’ bedroom, looking for her library book. Her mother had had it on her lap in the subway, and she must have brought it home. Maybe she carried it into her bedroom and put it down on her dresser. The bed was unmade, and on the chair were her mother’s clothes from the night before, the dress and slip and underwear. Her mother’s dress-up shoes were near the chair. Frances didn’t see the book. She could still hear the shower. She opened the door of the closet, though there was no reason for her mother to have put the library book into the closet. On the closet floor were shoes. Her father’s black shoes had not been put back on their shoe trees. The shoe trees were on the floor of the closet, but his shoes were not. He’d worn his black shoes the night before, and they were on the bedroom floor. He must have put on his brown shoes this morning.
    Probably it would be all