The Great Gilly Hopkins

But everything would be all right for them both now. Courtney was coming.

“It’s silly to be nervous, isn’t it?” Nonnie said. “She’s my own daughter. It’s just that it’s been so long. And she was hardly speaking to her father and me in those days. What will we say to each other?”

Oh, Nonnie. If I knew what mothers and daughters said to each other, wouldn’t I tell you? How should I know?

“She’ll think I’ve gotten terribly old. My hair was quite dark when she left.”

“Yeah?” She tried to put Courtney’s hair on Nonnie’s head. It didn’t work.

“Would you think it was very silly of me to get a rinse?”

“A rinse?”

“Just to cover a little of the gray?”

Nonnie a Clairol girl? “Why not?”

“Let’s do it!” So while Nonnie was rinsed and curled, Gilly was cut and blown.

“You look lovely, my dear.”

Nonnie looked totally unnatural, but then Gilly had never seen her with black hair before. Maybe she’d look great to Courtney. “You look nice, too,” she lied.

Money, though not as scarce as at Trotter’s, was hardly in the supply hinted at in the letters to W.E. Nevertheless, Nonnie seemed determined to prepare royally for Courtney’s return. They bought a Christmas tree that would touch the high ceiling of the living room and had to hire a neighbor’s boy to carry it from the back of the old station wagon into the house and help them set it up.

Every ornament they hung had a family history, and Gilly half listened as Nonnie recounted each tale. She was too excited to concentrate fully, but she did grasp that the lopsided pasteboard star was one that Chadwell had made in the third grade. Most of the glued-on glitter had long departed. There was a yarn snowman that Courtney had made when a Brownie, it was gray now, and beginning to ravel. And there were yards of tattered paper chains. “You sure you want to put these chains on?” Gilly asked Nonnie.

“Oh, we have to have the chains. We always had the chains.”

So Gilly glued the chains together as best she could and hung them. The whole effect was appalling—a pile of junk. But then she put on three boxes of tinsel, one strand at a time, so that the entire tree was under a silver veil. In a dark room with only the Christmas tree lighted, it wasn’t bad. Not a department-store display, but not bad.

Nonnie slipped her glasses on and off her nose, trying to take in the sight, and finally let them hang on the ribbon around her neck while she clapped her hands like a little girl. “I can’t remember ever before having such a lovely tree,” she said.

Neither, after she thought about it, could Gilly.

December 20

Dear Gilly,

So your Mom is coming to see you? You must be real excited. Mr. Randolph, William Ernest, and me wishes you lots of luck.

By the way, William Ernest come home yesterday with a bloody nose. You know me, I like to die, but he was prouder than a punch-drunk pickle. Mr. Evans call me up to complain about my kid fighting at school but took to laughing too hard to finish. What do you think about that?

Sincerely, your friend,

Maime M. Trotter

Pow! That’s what she thought of that.

HOMECOMING

The plane was late. It seemed to Gilly that everything in this world that you can’t stand to wait one extra minute for is always late. Her stomach was pretzeled with eagerness and anxiety. She stood sweating in the chill of the huge waiting room, the perspiration pouring down the sleeves of her new blouse. She’d probably ruin it and stink besides.

Then, suddenly, when she’d almost stopped straining her eyes with looking at it, the door opened, and people began to come off the motor lounge into the airport. All kinds of people, all sizes, all colors, all of them rushing. Many looking about for family or friends, finding them with little cries of joy and hugs. Tired fussy babies, children dragging on their mothers. Businessmen, heads down, swinging neat thin leather briefcases. Grandparents laden with shopping bags of Christmas presents. But no Courtney.

The pretzel turned to stone. It was all a lie. She would never come. The door blurred. Gilly wanted to leave. She didn’t want to cry in the stupid airport, but just at that moment she heard Nonnie say in a quavering voice, “Courtney.”

“Hello, Nonnie.”