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 The Usual Rules - A Short Excerpt
by Joyce Maynard

It was Saturday, raining hard, the sky gunmetal gray. Normally, Josh would be watching cartoons with Louie, but he had gone down to the armory with her mother's hairbrush and her dental X-rays--the thing he had said, at first, he'd never do.

Louie wasn't allowed to watch TV unsupervised anymore, because you never knew when they were going to break into the programming with some piece of news, and it was never good.

Louie was in the family room, eating his cereal. Nobody had gotten around to turning on the lights. Josh had taken the batteries out of hte remote control, so he couldn't turn the television on. Now he sat there in his elf costume, with his cereal bowl set on the tray table they used to put their food on, video nights, when Josh had a gig and their mom let them eat their meals with a movie. His back was strangely straight, as if he was balancing a book on his head, and he was holding his spoon in midair. The way he was sitting reminded Wendy of squirrels you'd see in the park--the way one would freeze halfway up a tree, or in a patch of grass, and lock its eyes on some random spot for long seconds, before it got back to whatever it was doing before.

Come on into my room, Louie, she said. I'll read to you.

She'd told him to bring a pile of books into bed, the way her motehr had done with her when she was little. They had already read Katy and the Big Snow and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Curious George. Now he wanted Goodnight, Moon.

Don't you want a more grown-up book than that, Louie? she asked. Their mother used to read Goodnight Moon to him way back, when he still slept in his crib.

I want this one. He put the old familiar book in her hands. They were in her bed now. He adjusted his body so he was curled up against her tight. She started reading.

"In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon," she began. "And a picture of the cow jumping over the moon."

As she read the words, he placed his finger ont he part of hte picture she was talking about, the same way their mother had taught her to do when she was very little. When she got to the part about the quiet old lady murmuring hush, Louie put his finger up to his lips the same way Wendy used to when she was little. SHe'd forgotten how her mother always did that on this page.

"Goodnight room," she said. "Goodnight moon." She looked over at her brother then because his finger wasn't on the moon. His thumb was in his mouth, was part of it, and his hand was busy twirling his ribbon.

But also she saw now that he was crying. He was crying so softly that if she hadn't looked at him, she wouldn't have known.

"Goodnight comb," she said. "Goodnight brush."

She had begun to cry also, and for a few seconds the two of them just sat on the bed, looking at the picture. The rabbit in the rocking chair. The glow of the table lamp. Out the window through neatly drawn curtains, the moon.

Goodnight nobody, he said when a minute had gone by that she didn't speak. Goodnight mush. Do you think Mama is ever coming back, Sissy?

I don't think so, Louie, she said.

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