Free Puppet Wrangler by Vicki Grant

though, was Nick and how Beach Meadows I looked compared to him and how I’d like to find something more Toronto to wear. I just sort of blurted out, “Ah, could we go…shopping maybe?”
    It was like I’d asked Bess if she wanted to help me steal a bus. Suddenly, Kathleen looked…I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. She looked delighted. Like thrilled. I barely had time to pack my Choc-o-rama before we were out of the house and on a major mall crawl.
    I knew Kathleen was really worried about Bitsie ’n’ Bytesie going way over budget, so I was surprised how much she liked shopping. It was as if spending money on clothes relaxed her or something. She smiled. She laughed. 24 She only answered her cell phone three times.
    I was just planning to get one T-shirt (to replace the one with the chocolate stains), but Kathleen laughed at that too.
    One T-shirt?!? I called that shopping?!?
    No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
    I was getting a whole new wardrobe. And she wouldn’t even let me pay for anything, even though I told her Mum had given me emergency money. (I wasn’t worried about spending it. I figured if you’re twelve years old and you have a crush on someone, a new T-shirt is an emergency.)
    Kathleen insisted on paying for everything herself. I could be mean and say that was so I had to get what she liked—but it wasn’t that. 25 She did it because of all the things my mum did for her when she was young.
    She didn’t say that exactly, but I figured it out pretty fast.
    She couldn’t hide it once we walked into that store.
    Kathleen was acting perfectly normal, I mean for Kathleen. She had her lip curled up, and she was picking through the clothes like they were somebody else’s dirty laundry.
    She’d just said that there was “absolutely nothing here even worth looking at” when she suddenly sucked in her breath and put her hand over her mouth. I thought she must have forgotten something important, like her weekly massage or a dentist appointment or a niece left at the airport.
    But it wasn’t about that. It was about a pale pink sweater.
    The second she noticed it on the display she bolted over and picked it up.
    No, that’s wrong. She didn’t pick it up. She “embraced” it, like the sweater had just come back to her from the war or something. I think she might even have had tears in her eyes. She started babbling about how the sweater was exactly the same as this one she really, really wanted when she was young. I knew the part about their father leaving them and Grammie not having any money or anything and how she took this horrible job as a secretary for this bad-smelling lawyer because it was the only way they could “scrape by.”
    But I didn’t realize that Mum had to look after Kathleen from then on.
    Anyway, Kathleen wanted this sweater so badly, but she didn’t have any money. She dreamt about it every night, but she knew she’d never get it. They were living on powdered skim milk and meat that had been “reduced for quick sale.”
    There was no way her mother was going to spring for a pale pink sweater that would show the dirt and wasn’t even very warm. Then one day, Mum—Kathleen kept calling her
    â€œDodo,” which completely cracked me up. No one calls her Dodo. She’s Dorothy—and you even have to pronounce the middle “o.” Dor O Thee.
    Sorry. Where was I?
    Oh, yeah. Then one day, “Dodo” came home from her night job at the Burger Palace. Kathleen used to wait up for her because every now and again Mum would bring her back a “Queenburger” that someone had ordered by mistake when what they really wanted was a “Princess Pattie.” 26
    That night, though, Kathleen almost didn’t bother coming down because she couldn’t smell any grease. (That’s how she’d know if Mum had managed to scavenge some leftovers. Nice,