Kit's mother came into the kitchen and didn't say anything, just smiled. She was taller than Kit's dad, getting a little plump these days, but not so much that she worried about it. Her dark hair was pulled back tight and bunned up at the back, and Kit was slightly surprised to see that she was still in one of her nurse's uniforms—pink top and white pants. Though maybe it's not "still," he thought as she paused to give Kit a one-armed hug and sat down at the end of the table.
"You have to work night shift tonight, Mama?"
She bent over to slip one of her shoes onto one white-stockinged foot, then laced the shoe up. "Just evening shift," she said. "They called from work to ask if I could swap a shift with one of the other nurses in the med-surg wing; he had some emergency at home. I'll be home around two. Popi'll feed you." "Okay. Did anybody feed Ponch?"
"I did," said Kit's mother.
"Thanks, Mama," Kit said, and bent over to kiss her on the cheek. Then he looked down at Ponch, who was now sitting and gazing up at Kit with big soulful eyes and what was supposed to pass for a wounded look. You didn't believe me!
Kit gave him a look. "You," he said. "You fibber. You need a walk?" "YEAH- YEAH- YE AH-YE AH-YE AH-YE AH!"
His mother covered her ears. "He's deafening," she said. "Tell him to go out!" Kit laughed. "You tell him! He's not deaf."
"I'm glad for him, because / will be shortly! Pan-cho! Gooutr
Delighted, Ponch turned himself in three or four hurried circles and launched himself at the screen door again. Thump, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham, CRASH!
"I see," Kit's father said as he paused by the spaghetti pot, "that he's figured out how to push the latch with his paw."
"I noticed that, too," Kit said. "He's getting smart." And then he made an amused face, though not for his father to see. Smart didn't begin to cover the territory.
"So how did your magic thing go tonight?" his dad said. Kit sat down with only about half a groan. "It's not magic, Pop. Magic is when you wave your hand and stuff happens without any good reason or any price. Wizardry's the exact opposite, believe me."
His father looked resigned. "So my terminology's messed up. It takes a while to learn a new professional vocabulary. The thing with the fish, then, it went okay?"
Kit started to laugh. "You call S'reee a fish to her face, Pop, you're likely to remember it for a while," he said. "It wasn't the fish; it was the water. It was dirty."
"Not exactly news."
"It's gonna start getting cleaner. That'll be news." Kit allowed himself a satisfied grin. "And you heard it here first."
"I imagine Nita must be pleased," his mother said. "I imagine," Kit said, and got up to go to the fridge.
He could feel his mother looking at him, even without turning to see. He could hear her looking at his pop, even without so much as a glance in her direction. Kit grimaced, and hoped they couldn't somehow sense the expression without actually seeing it themselves. The problem was that they were parents, possessed of strange unearthly powers that even wizards sometimes couldn't understand.
"I thought maybe she was going to come over for dinner," said his pop. "She usually does, after you've been out doing this kind of work."
"Uh, not tonight. She had some other stuff she had to take care of," Kit said. Like chewing the heads off her unsuspecting victims!
The sudden image of Nita as a giant praying mantis made Kit snicker. But then he dismissed it, not even feeling particularly guilty. "Where's Carmela?"
"Tonight's a TV night for her," Kit's pop said. "A reward for that math test. I let her take the other portable and the VCR; she's upstairs pigging out on Japanese cartoons."
Kit smiled. It was unusual for things to be so quiet while his sister was conscious, and the thought of sitting down and letting the weariness from the evening's wizardry catch up with him in conditions of relative peace and quiet was appealing. But Ponch needed walking first. "Okay," Kit said. "I'm gonna take Ponch out now."
"Dinner in about twenty minutes," his dad said.
"We'll be back," Kit said. As he went out the back door, he took Ponch's leash down off the hook where the jackets hung behind the door. Out in the driveway he paused and looked for Ponch. He was nowhere to be seen.
"Huh," Kit said under his breath, and yawned. The post-wizardry reaction was starting to set in now. If he didn't get going, he was going to fall asleep in the spaghetti. Kit went down to the end of the driveway, looked both ways up and down the street. He could see a black shape snuffling with intense interest around the bottom of a tree about halfway down Conlon.
Kit paused a moment, looking down where Conlon Avenue met East Clinton, wondering whether he might see a shadow a little taller than him standing at the corner, looking his way. But there was no sign of her. He
made a wry face at his own unhappiness. Just a fight. Nonetheless, he and Nita had had so few that he wasn't really sure about what to do in the aftermath of one. In fact, Kit couldn't remember a fight they'd had that hadn't been over, and made up for, in a matter of minutes. This was hours, now, and it was getting uncomfortable. What if I really hurt her somehow? She's been so weird since she got back from Ireland. What if she's so pissed at me that she—
He stopped himself. No point in standing here making it worse. Either go right over there now and talk to her or wait until tomorrow and do it then, but don't waste energy obsessing over it.
Kit sighed and turned the other way, toward the end of the road that led to the junior-senior high school. He saw Ponch sniffing and wagging his tail near the big tree in front of the Wilkinsons' house. Ponch cocked a leg at the tree and, after a few seconds' meditation, bounded off down the street. Kit went after him, swinging the leash in the dusk.
From farther down the street came a sound of furious yapping. It was the Akambes' dog, whose real name was Grarrhah but whose human family had unfortunately decided to call her Tinkerbell. She was one of those tiny, delicate, silky-furred terriers who looked like she might unravel if you could figure out which thread to pull, but her personality seemed to have been transplanted from a dog three or four times her size. She was never allowed out of the backyard, and whenever one of the other neighborhood dogs went by, she would claw at the locked gate and yell at them in Cyene, "You lookin' at me? I can take you! Come over here and say that! Stop me before I tear 'im apart!" and other such futile provocations.
Kit sighed as Ponch went past and as he followed, and the noise scaled up and up. There was no point in going over and talking to Grarrhah. She took her watchdog role terribly seriously, and would work herself into such a lather that she would already be lying there foaming at the mouth from overexcitement and frustration by the time you got to the gate. Making a poor creature like this more crazy than she was already was no part of a wizard's business, so Kit just walked by as Grarrhah shrieked at him from behind the gate, "Thief! Thief! Burglars! Joyriders, ram raiders, walk-by shooters; lemme at 'em, I'll rip 'em to shreds!"
Kit walked on, wondering if there was something he could do for her. Then he grinned sourly. "What a laugh! I don't even know what to do about Neets.
All at once he changed his mind about letting things wait until the next day. Kit reached into his pocket and pulled out the manual. Among many other functions, it had a provision for print messaging for times when wizards were having trouble getting in touch with each other directly—a sort of wizardly pager system. He flipped to the back pages where such messages were written and stored. "New message," he said. "For Nita—"
The page glowed softly in the dusk and displayed the long string of characters in the Speech that was Nita's name, and the equivalent string for her manual.
There the book sat, ready to take down his message ... and Kit couldn't think what to say. I'm sorry? Friday Evening