Free Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen

to our own devices all day while the grown-ups did whatever they did. Elijah and Susan and I discovered that we could travel all over the neighborhood on rooftops, leaping from one pitched roof to the next, swinging on branches, until we were across the block. We played hide and go seek in an empty schoolyard. We hung out with the other kids on the street, including a girl who could swallow little glass bottles and burp them back up.
    Once or twice, my father erupted at Emily the way he used to blow up at our mother. Apparently, Emily, of the three of us, was the only one who triggered his blind-rage mechanism. I remember him dragging her by the arm to his bedroom as punishment for her refusal to obey him. He threw her onto his bed and then around the room, scarily, violently. He didn’t hit her, but he didn’t have to—we were all properly terrified.
    One day, Elijah decided we were going to rob the house next door. The people who lived there were gone all day, and he knew they left the back door unlocked. He and I would sneak in and take whatever loot we could find, and Susan would stand guard. The code word was “rattlesnake.” We went through their back door the next afternoon and up the stairs to their bedroom. My heart was, of course, staccato, hotly beating. We took two twenty-dollar bills and some costume jewelry from a bureau top.
    “Rattlesnake!” Susan yelled at the top of her lungs.
    We tumbled out the back door and sauntered down the driveway as if we’d just been taking the air.
    There stood my father. He had just come home from work. We managed to act normal, then we hid the costume jewelry under the side-entrance stairs of his house and crouched together in the tiny hidey-hole for a whole afternoon, eating dog biscuits we’d found—a fitting snack for hardened criminals.
    The next day, Elijah and Susan and I went to the local Safeway via rooftops. We approached the lady behind the customer service desk with the two stolen twenty-dollar bills and asked her to break them for us. She peered at the three out-of-breath, wild-eyed, rat-haired hippie kids over her half-moon bifocals on a chain around her neck and asked where we’d gotten the money. We told her with insistent fake honesty that it had been our Christmas present. When she rightly surmised that something was amiss, since it was now July, and demanded our parents’ phone number, we ran out.
    We decided to put the money on my father’s bureau top.
    “Where did this money come from?” he asked us all when he found it.
    We all pretended we had no idea, and my father, who was always mild mannered when he wasn’t beating someone up, let it go.
    W hen we got back to Tempe, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. During the months that followed, my inchoate fear took the concrete form of a terror of punishment for breaking into the house next door. Whenever the phone rang at night after I was in bed, I lay awake, staring into the dim light of the room with wide eyes, sure it was the cops calling to arrest me.
    I finally confessed the crime to my mother and asked if she thought I’d go to jail for it. She assured me the cops weren’t going to find me, but my fear didn’t go away.
    In fact, it intensified. One night, my mother was awakened by a tapping on her bedroom window. Terrified, she looked out to see my friend Beverly Begay standing under the swamp cooler with all her siblings. They asked if they could come in and stay with us because their own mother had gotten drunk and kicked them out and told them never to come back. They looked even more terrified than my mother was.
    Although she badly wanted to invite them in for the night, my mother realized they might never leave if she did. So she talked them through the steps of breaking into their house without their mother knowing and slipping into their beds. Since they had no telephone to call the police, she told them all to stand up