Trying to ID young adult book from mid 80s, any help?

Question

It's a long shot, but this book - at least parts of it - have stuck with me for years, but I can't remember the title or author, and I've never been able to successfully search for it using plot keywords. I read it in 1986 and I believe it was a fairly recent release at that time.

The story revolves around a girl who believes her mother is dead, spending the summer with her grandmother. The girl ends up being convinced to sneak into what turns out to be an AA meeting where she discovers that her mother is actually alive.

2 things I particularly remember: one scene where the girl is pretending to be asleep while g-ma is trying to talk to her. The g-ma offers her her favorite ice cream - peanut butter and chocolate - but the girl still tries not to move - the g-ma says something like about seeing her jump. The other is at the end when the girl & g-ma are talking about seeing the mother and the g-ma refers to the friend who showed her the meeting as the "deus ex machina."

Any idea?

Answer 1

I have been looking for your book, but unable to locate it as yet. Let me suggest the new Google Book search engine, if you haven't tried it already. As keywords pop into your memory, you can play with it. On the advanced search you can limit it to dates. You also might go to the library and take a look in some of the children's fiction annual dictionaries. You would think that with a phrase like deus ex machina it would have been easy to find. It wasn't.