Anastasia's Chosen Career by Lois Lowry

Once he had to aim it at somebody, though. It gave him nightmares afterward."
    Anastasia shuddered. Never in her whole life, she thought, had she known someone whose father had once aimed a gun at someone.
    "We get off here," Henry announced as the train slowed and stopped. Anastasia followed her through the subway station and out into the street.
    The Peabodys' house, two blocks away, was gray, a little in need of new paint, with a big front porch. Inside, it smelled of something delicious cooking. And it was noisy. Two small children ran giggling through the front hall as the girls were taking off their jackets and hats. Henry grabbed one of them by the shoulders, and the other stopped, stood still, and looked up shyly at Anastasia.
    "These are my sister's kids," Henry explained. "It's my mom's day off, so she's babysitting. This evil one's Jason." She wiggled the arm of the one she was restraining, and the little boy grinned. "And that one there, that's John Peter. Say hi, you guys."
    John Peter opened his mouth, his eyes wide, and whispered, "Hi." Jason squirmed loose from Henry's grasp and stuck out his tongue. Then they both ran off, laughing.
    "Henrietta? Is that you?" a voice called. 102
    Henry hung up her jacket and called, "Yes, Mom. I have Anastasia with me. We'll be right in."
    "You walk in here normal, Henrietta," her mother called. "None of that panther stuff."
    Anastasia followed Henry into the warm kitchen, where the two little boys were now tussling on the floor and Mrs. Peabody stood at the stove stirring something steamy in a large pot. She turned and shook Anastasia's hand when Henry introduced them.
    "Now look at that nice haircut you have," she said. "I just don't know what to make of Henrietta's. Seems as if they just shaved her down to nothing."
    "But don't you think it's beautiful?" Anastasia asked.
    Mrs. Peabody frowned, looking at her daughter. "I have to get used to it, I guess," she said. Then she called to her grandchildren. "Jason! John Peter! You settle down now! We have company! You want Anastasia to think we're raising wild animals here?"
    The little boys ignored her and continued tickling each other and shrieking with laughter.
    "Henrietta, you go wake up your daddy and tell him dinner's almost ready." Henry left the kitchen and Mrs. Peabody turned back to the stove. "He's working the night shift this week, so he slept all day. He's going to take you home when he leaves to go to work," she explained to Anastasia. "Sit down and make yourself comfortable."
    Anastasia took a chair at the big kitchen table. It felt something like her own house: the warm, friendly, good-smelling kitchen; the little boys, just Sam's size, playing on the floor; the potholder mitten hanging from a magnet on the refrigerator door. She noticed a teapot shaped like a little house, exactly like a teapot that her own mother had.
    Wait till I tell Mom, she thought, about how a black family here in Dorchester has a teapot exactly like ours. I thought we were the only people in the whole world with that teapot.
    Wait till I tell Mom and Dad and Sam that Henry's father is a policeman—just like Bobby Hill on
Hill Street Blues
—and that once he actually aimed a gun at someone.
    Suddenly Anastasia had a terrifying thought. Henry's father was going to take her home on his way to work. That meant that she—Anastasia Krupnik—would be driven right up her own driveway in a police car. Maybe the blue lights would be flashing. She would be riding with someone who had a gun in a holster on his hip. The police radio would be on. What if a call came in—an
emergency
—and he had to stop along the way and arrest a criminal? Then she—Anastasia Krupnik—would be riding in the police car, probably in the back seat, and there would be a metal grille separating her from Henry's father, and she would be sitting beside a hardened criminal. Of course the criminal would be in handcuffs. But maybe, even with the handcuffs on, he could