Free So B. It by Sarah Weeks Page A

say, sometimes you forget you’re not telling the truth.
    “Shirley Temple’s the one who taught my grammy how to bake cakes. She’s a very good baker,” I said.
    Alice looked at me for a minute.
    “ The Shirley Temple we’re talking about? The movie star? She taught your grandmother how to bake?” she said.
    I nodded.
    “She comes over and bakes at our house allthe time,” I said.
    “Shirley Temple comes to your house?” Alice said.
    “Yes. She says she likes our oven better than hers,” I said.
    “I see,” Alice said, nodding and pulling a loose thread on her sleeve. “You must have a very nice oven at your house.”
    “Yep,” I said. “Shirley Temple comes over all the time to use it, and after she and my grammy bake cakes, they decorate them and stick candles in them, and then we all sit around together and pretend it’s somebody’s birthday.”
    “And she comes over to do this pretty often, does she? Bake cake in your oven?” asked Alice.
    “Very often,” I said. “All the time, really. Except of course when she’s busy in Hollywood making movies.”
    “Of course,” she said. “Tell me something, Heidi—when Shirley Temple comes over to bake with your grammy, does she ever tap-dance for you, show you the steps she’s working on for her next movie maybe?”
    “Sometimes she does,” I said. “Sometimesshe dances.”
    “In your kitchen?” asked Alice.
    “Or in the living room,” I said.
    “And does she sing sometimes too?” Alice asked.
    “Sometimes,” I told her. “If she’s in the mood.”
    Alice laughed. Then she looked down at her lap and didn’t say anything for a minute, and I knew something was wrong.
    “Heidi,” she finally said, “like I told you, I’m a big Shirley Temple fan. I think I’ve seen every one of her movies at least a dozen times, which is why I happen to know she hasn’t made a new one since A Kiss for Corliss , back in the late 1940s. She’s an old lady now, almost eighty years old. Into politics. A staunch Republican. She doesn’t tap-dance in your kitchen any more than I do.”
    “Oh,” I said, or tried to anyway. My lips could only manage to form around the sad roundness of the word; no sound actually came out. Now I understood. She’d known all along that I was lying. About the dancing and singing and the baking. About everything. She’d listened to me and kept me going just the way I did with Zander, nodding and uh-huhing and egging me on, all the while knowing that I was making it up.
    Why had she done that? Why hadn’t she told me she knew I was lying? Maybe for the same reason I didn’t tell Zander. She was more interested in trying to figure out for herself what lay underneath the lies. But I wasn’t like Zander—I wasn’t lying because the truth was too hard to admit. I wasn’t hiding the truth. If that’s what she wanted, I would just give it to her.
    “I don’t have a birthday,” I said. “And my mama’s got a bum brain and I’m not sure if I have a grammy or not.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “Bernie says it’s like Mama and I dropped from the sky,” I told her.
    “Hmm.” Alice nodded and brushed a cat hair from her skirt, but she didn’t ask me to explain. She was an October Wilinsky. She had a grandmother who shared her name and told her secrets and loved her best of all. She didn’t need to know the truth about me. Shedidn’t even want to.
    The air between us was thick and uncomfortable to breathe after that. Alice read magazines, licking her fingertip each time she turned the page. The kittens cried, but she didn’t offer to let me hold them. When we finally reached Salt Lake City, Alice tucked the magazines back in her bag, put on lipstick, and combed her hair.
    “You take good care now, Heidi,” she said as she slipped into her long green raincoat.
    When she’d come and sat down next to me in the Reno bus station wearing that coat, I’d felt as though I’d been found, but as she stepped off the