Free Encore Edie by Annabel Lyon Page A

comes from a recipe book. Usually she just steams them.
    “Are these mushrooms?” I ask. “Mushrooms in my carrots? Because why?”
    “Because I’m a chef!” Robert’s mom says, making everyone laugh. “This is delicious. You know, people hardly ever invite us for a meal, do they, Robbie? Because nobody wants to cook for a chef. You know what I cook at home?”
    “My mom makes the best Mr. Noodles,” Robert says. “The secret is getting the temperature of the tap water just right.”
    “I slice a mean tomato, too,” Robert’s mom says. “When we’re being fancy on weekends.”
    “I want to hear all about your restaurant,” Aunt Ellie says.
    Robert’s mom used to be a chef in a big hotel downtown, but last year she bought her own restaurant and she doespractically everything herself. Fortunately, it’s really tiny and she says she likes to keep the menu pretty simple. It’s called the Comfort Food Café. Mac and cheese, chicken soup, fresh bread, chocolate pudding, things like that, but everything is homemade and warm and healthy and just really, really good. (This last bit comes from Robert. He does his homework there in the afternoons sometimes if there’s a free table, and answers the phone if they’re short-handed.)
    “We’ll all have to go sometime,” Dad says. “It sounds wonderful.”
    “We don’t take reservations, but you let me know and I’ll save you a table,” Robert’s mom says. “We would love to have you, any time. Now, that’s enough about me. I want to know about this musical Edie’s doing at school. Writing, directing, starring? The big cheese? The head honcho? Number One?”
    “THEY HEARD ABOUT THAT IN KITSILANO?” I say.
    Everybody looks at their plates and Daniel starts humming “It’s a Small World After All.”
    “Not funny!” I say. “Stop that!”
    He stops right away and apologizes. “You’re amazing, Edie,” he says. “How much energy you have and all the things you do. We’re laughing because we admire you so much.”
    “They teach you to say stuff like that in teacher’s college, don’t they?” I say.
    Daniel nods and makes bunny ears with his fingers toshow quotation marks. “Being Nice to Edie,” he says. “It’s a three-credit course.”
    “Which musical is it?” Robert says. He isn’t laughing. Robert is looking at me from under his scruffy brown hair, a bit shy because we haven’t actually said all that much to each other today. He really is trying to be nice.
    “King Lear,” I say. “Set to music.”
    “What music?” he asks.
    I look down at my plate. The futility of what I’ve been trying to do all these months has just broken open inside me like a rain cloud letting go. I want to cry so much my face hurts. “Jazz,” I mumble. “Nothing you’d recognize.”
    “Snob,” my sister says right away.
    “Oh, Dex, just shut up.” I’m so tired suddenly, it feels as if it takes all the energy I have just to say this one sentence. Can’t we ever stop pretending we hate each other?
    “Pumpkin, are you okay?” Mom says.
    She’ll live , I want to say, meaning Dexter. It’s not like I’ve never told her to shut up before. But then I realize Mom’s talking to me.
    “Excuse me,” I say.
    In the bathroom, I sit on the floor with my back against the cabinet and my feet against the tub, picking a piece of toilet paper apart into its separate plies. When I finish that square, I get another one.
    “Edie?” a voice calls from outside the door. It’s Robert. “What are you doing?”
    I reach up and pull the door open so he can see.
    “Okay,” he says. He seems as if he’s not sure what to do next.
    “Do you need to go?” I say. “I can move.”
    “Nah.” He sits down next to me and starts peeling apart a square of his own with his orange and brown fingernails. It’s not a big bathroom and our knees bang together when I lean over to grab some more paper off the roll. I say sorry and he says, “No worries.”
    “What are