The Apothecary Page 0,3

be an adventure,” she said.

I looked at my father. “What did you do?” I asked.

“Nothing!” he said, too loudly. A woman at another table looked at us.

“Davis,” my mother said.

“But I haven’t done anything! This is all so ridiculous!”

A waiter brought water glasses to the table, and my mother smiled up at him. When he was gone, she said, “I don’t know if you remember Katie Lardner.”

“Only from birthday parties,” I said, slumped in the booth. I was being what my mother called a real pill, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to move to London. I liked my friends, and I liked my school. I liked junior lifesaving at the beach, and trips to Santa Barbara, and oranges growing in the front yard. I liked everything except being followed by men from Washington for whatever my parents had done.

“The Lardners moved to Mexico,” my mother said, “because her father became a target. It became impossible for him to work here.”

“No,” I said. “They moved because her father was a Communist.” Then the floor of Musso and Frank’s seemed to open beneath me. “Oh, no! Are you Communists?”

Both my parents glanced around to see if anyone was listening. Then my father leaned forward and spoke in a low voice that wouldn’t carry.

“We believe in the Constitution, Janie,” he said. “And we’ve been put on a list of people they’re watching. That’s why they’re watching you, when it has nothing to do with you. And I will not have them following my child.” He thumped the table, and his voice had started to rise again.

“Davis,” my mother said.

“I won’t, Marjorie,” he said.

“I don’t even understand what Communism is,” I said.

My father sighed. “The idea,” he said, in his low voice, “is that people should share resources, and own everything communally, so there aren’t wildly rich people who have everything and desperately poor people who have nothing. That’s the idea. It’s just hard to get it to work. The trouble right now is that the US government—or at least something called the House Committee on Un-American Activities—has gotten so paranoid about the idea, as if it’s a contagious disease, that they’re going after innocent people who may hold the idea, or have held it in the past. It isn’t fair, or rational, or constitutional.”

I was determined not to cry, and wiped my nose with my napkin. “Can I at least finish the semester here?”

He sighed. “Those men want to make us appear in court, under oath,” he said. “We could answer for ourselves, but they would ask us to testify about our friends, and we can’t do that. We’ve heard they’ll confiscate passports soon so people can’t leave the country. So we have to go right away.”

“When?”

“This week.”

“This week?”

My mother broke in. “There’s someone we’ve worked with before,” she said. “Olivia Wolff. She already moved to London, to produce a television show about Robin Hood. She wants us to work on it, which is—Janie, it’s an amazing opportunity. It’ll be like living in a Jane Austen novel.”

“You mean I’ll get married at the end?” I asked. “I’m fourteen.”

“Janie.”

“And Jane Austen was from there, she wasn’t American. I’ll be so out of place!”

“Janie, please,” my mother said. “This is a great chance that Olivia’s giving us. We don’t have a choice.”

“I don’t have a choice. You had a choice, and you got on that list!”

“We didn’t choose to be on the list,” my father said.

“So how’d you get on it?”

“By believing in freedom of speech. By having faith in the First Amendment!”

The waiter came and slid our plates in front of us. “Flannel cakes for the little lady,” he said.

I gave him a weak smile.

My father stared at my stack of pancakes, with the pat of real butter melting on top. “That’s what you ordered for dinner?”

“She can have whatever she wants,” my mother said.

I glared at my father in defiance, but when I took a forkful of my last thin, golden, delicious Musso and Frank’s flannel cakes for a long time—maybe forever—they tasted like sawdust, and I made a face. My father couldn’t resist the joke.

“You look like you’re eating real flannel,” he said, smiling. “Pyjamas with syrup.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“Look, kiddo,” he said. “If we can’t laugh together, we’re not going to make it through this thing.”

I swallowed the sawdust. “Don’t call me kiddo,” I said.

CHAPTER 2

The Apothecary

It’s safe to say I was not graceful about the move to London. I was no witty, patient, adaptable Jane Austen. And