Strawberry Hill

Excerpt

You would have thought it was the best news in the world. "Guess what?" my mother said with a big smile on her face, hanging up the phone. "Daddy's found us a house to rent in Stamford!" "Just think!" she went on when I didn't say anything. "You'll be able to have your own room and Daddy will live with us all the time! Isn't that wonderful?" Right now my father only lived with us on weekends. That was because we lived in New Haven and he worked in Stam¥ford, which was too far away to come home from every night. So he lived in the Roger Smith Hotel during the week. It was the Depression, which meant jobs were very hard to get. So when he lost his old job in New Haven and found a new job in Stamford, he had to take it. He said he was really lucky, because lots of fathers didn't have any jobs at all.

"I don't want to move," I said.
"You don't want to have your own room and your own yard and have Daddy live with us all the time?" she asked.
"I like it here," I said. "Besides, I'm the only one that plays in the yard anyway, except for Danny and Ruthie." Danny was my little brother. Ruthie Greenberg lived upstairs and was my best friend. Her parents owned our house.
I knew my mother didn't like living in the Greenbergs' house as much as I did. She was always complaining that our apartment was too small and that it was noisy. And she said Mrs. Greenberg didn't keep her apartment clean enough. My mother kept ours really clean. Mrs. Greenberg told me once that you could  eat off our kitchen ¥ oor.
"You can eat off mine, too," she said, laughing. "There's certainly enough food there!"
Mrs. Greenberg was really  funny. And besides, it was true. But that was because every body was always sitting around her kitchen table, drinking tea and eating sponge cake and cracking nuts and talking, so lots of crumbs and shells would fall on the ¥ oor.
I loved the Greenbergs. They were a big family. Besides Ruthie, who was the youngest and the only girl, there were four big brothers. My favorite was Sidney. He was always telling me new knock-knock jokes, which I would tell every¥body at school.

When my father came home on Friday night, my mother
gave him a big hug.
"What do you think, Allie?" he asked. "Aren't you looking forward to having your own room?"
"I guess so," I said. Actually, I didn't mind very much sleeping with Danny. We had a great big bed and some¥times when he woke up at night I would make up stories for him.
"You don't sound very enthusiastic," my father said.
"She doesn't  want to leave the Greenbergs," my mother said, sounding annoyed. She didn't like it when I spent too much time upstairs. She thought Ruthie was a bad in¥ uence on me because sometimes she used swear words that her brothers had taught her.
"What if I don't like my new school?" I asked.

-From the book Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman 

Text copyright (c) 2009 by Mary Ann Hoberman