by Lois Lowry
The man, who had half closed the door, hesitated, because a hostile, oozing-with-politeness voice can be a little unnerving. “O’Leary,” he said, after a pause. “Name’s O’Leary.”
“Delighted to meet you, Mr. O’Leary. You say you bought this house some years ago? Lovely house, by the way.”
“Twelve years ago. I bought it from a guy named Rosenbaum. My kids were little when we moved in. Now they’re teenagers. Got any idea what that’s like, Willoughby? Three teenagers in the house?”
“I’m afraid I do not. The children are all, ah, yours?”
“Excuse me?”
“I meant, ah, you didn’t acquire any children when you bought the house, by any chance?”
The man in the doorway stared at him. “The house was empty of children when we moved in. It will be empty of children again in four years, but who’s counting, right? It will even be empty of the one who has twice been suspended from school for—”
“Knock it off, Dad.” A tall teenage boy appeared, suddenly, in the doorway beside Mr. O’Leary. “The Yankees are ahead now, three to two. You missed a double.” He glanced down at the strange pair: the frowning woman standing by the doorbell, and the man at the foot of the steps, whose face had turned quite pink with suspicion.
“Your name isn’t by any chance Tim, is it?” Mr. Willoughby asked the boy. (Tim Willoughby, of course, was the son he had left behind.)
“No. Brian.”
“Or Barnaby?” the woman asked, leaning forward to examine his face. “No, you don’t look like a Barnaby.” (Two of the other Willoughby children had been twins, both named Barnaby.3)
“Who are these people, Dad?” the boy asked his father.
“I don’t know. Their name is Willoughby and I guess they used to live here.” Mr. O’Leary turned to the Willoughbys. “Good luck. I’m going back to my game now.” He reached to close the door.
His son interrupted him. “There’s a guy named Willoughby a few blocks away. In that mansion. You know the one, Dad? It was in all the papers when the old guy retired, because he was a billionaire?”
Mr. O’Leary frowned. “His name wasn’t Willoughby. He had some weird foreign name.”
“No, the guy who took over the company. He lives there now. I remember from when I delivered papers.”
“You mean back when you were willing to work? Before you decided a summer job was beneath you?” his father asked him.
“A mansion! A mansion containing a Willoughby? We must go there, Henry,” Mrs. Willoughby ordered her husband. “Now.”
Brian O’Leary gave them directions, pointing to the end of the block and describing the streets on which they should turn.
“Is it far?” Mrs. Willoughby asked as she joined her husband on the sidewalk. “My feet hurt.”
“Take an Uber,” Mr. O’Leary suggested. He pushed his son inside, turned away, and pulled the door closed behind himself.
“What’s an Uber?” Mrs. Willoughby asked her husband.
“I have no idea,” he told her. “It’s probably a German swear word.”
Grumbling to each other, they began to walk.
10
The defrosted Willoughbys were making their way toward the mansion very slowly, because Mrs. Willoughby’s ridiculous high-heeled shoes didn’t fit properly, and because Mr. Willoughby insisted on examining every parked car that they passed. None of them looked the way he thought an automobile should look. “Tesla?”1 he said loudly. “What on earth is a Tesla?”
At that same moment, the Poore children were arguing with their mother in the kitchen of their little house. “Whatever do you mean, you’re going to apply for jobs? My dear children shouldn’t have to go out and work,” she said, and picked up a corner of her apron to wipe a tear away.
“But we need food, Mother,” Winston pointed out.
“And new clothing,” Winifred added, demonstrating with a gesture to her outfit, which was much too small.
“And a computer,” muttered Winston. He muttered because he knew his mother would not take kindly to that particular need. Fortunately she didn’t hear him. She had gone to the broom closet and removed the broom, which was so deteriorated that it had only a few straw bristles. Nonetheless, despite the inadequacy of the broom, she began to sweep the kitchen floor.
“You’re quite right,” she said. “We do need money. And I have had an idea.” She leaned down and tried to smooth the edge of a piece of linoleum that had cracked and torn loose. “I think it will provide for our needs until your father returns with his fortune.”
“What is your idea, Mother?” Winifred asked.
“We will become a B-and-B,” Mother announced.
“A what?” The two astonished Poore children spoke together.
“A B-and-B.” Mother propped the broom against the side of the stove. “We simply need to do a little decorating. Winston, I want you to go to the storage closet immediately. Father’s encyclopedias are all there, of course. But also, you’ll find a leftover can of blue paint. I want you to touch up the shutters.
“And we’ll hang my old straw hat on the front door. Hats on doors is a very B-and-B thing.”2
“But, Mother,” Winifred said, “you do know what B-and-B stands for, don’t you? Bed-and-breakfast.”
“Of course, dear. Guests will use my bed and I’ll share yours. Would that be all right? We’ll be very cozy all cuddled up. We can tell each other stories in the dark.”
Winifred cringed. “Mother, you’re Marming again. And what about breakfast?” she asked.
“What about it? Move your foot, dear. You’re standing on some mouse poo.”
“Well, our breakfast is always just, ah, you know . . . gruel.” Winifred moved to the side so that her mother could attack the hardened mound with her dishrag.
“Hand me something to scrape with, Winston. It’s always so difficult to get this loose. I thought that in the summer heat it might have softened.” His mother took the kitchen knife that her son handed her and began to pry at the edges of the mound. “As for breakfast? We’ll find a way to fancy up the gruel a bit. Maybe raisins?”
That dark pellets loosened and scattered themselves on the floor. Mrs. Poore stood up, pleased with her efforts. “There,” she said. “I’ll just sweep those up.”
11
Far, far away, in a sparsely populated area of western Canada, a pickup truck pulled to the side of the road and stopped briefly. Ben Poore climbed down from the passenger seat, then reached in to take his heavy backpack, reflecting briefly that he was glad to have mailed the package of rocks. At least he didn’t have to carry that with him. He had saved only two; they lay in the bottom of his backpack, and now and then he glanced at them, reminding himself of how happy his children, especially Winifred, would be with the gift.
He looked up at the jagged mountains nearby. They were very beautiful, but he didn’t notice because he had been looking at mountains for weeks now, and they were all very beautiful, but he was tired of them. Above the mountains, he realized, black clouds were forming.
“Sorry I can’t take you any farther,” the driver told him. “Hope you get a ride before the rain starts.”
“You sure you don’t want to buy a set of encyclopedias? Last chance. Big discount.”
“Don’t ask me that again, mister. I already said no.”
“Sorry. Where I am, exactly?”
“Just outside Smithers,” the driver said.
“Does Smithers have a school?” he asked. Schoolteachers always seemed interested in encyclopedias. No schoolteacher had ever bought one, but they always looked with interest at his samples.
“Beats me. Guess it must,” the driver said.
“How far to Seattle?”
“Close to eight hundred miles.” The driver revved his engine. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Poore. Ben Poore.”
“Good luck to you, Mr. Poore.” The driver slammed the door and drove off in a cloud of exhaust fum
es.
Ben Poore slapped away a mosquito, wrestled his heavy pack onto his shoulders, and began to walk. He had started out in Anchorage, had been hitching rides now for four days, and was very tired.
Briefly, trudging along, he considered how he might lighten his load. Throw away the sample encyclopedia volumes, maybe? But (he was an optimist) he might still use them to make a big sale! Instead he should probably throw out the last of the weird-colored rocks that he’d been lugging around ever since he’d picked them up out of the water in Mineral Creek,1 back in Alaska. He sighed. He had already mailed most of them, and these last two were down at the very bottom of the pack; he’d have to take out all the books in order to find them. A nuisance. Anyway, they were pretty, with their shiny streaks. Maybe they’d bring him good luck. Or at least another ride before the rain began.
12
According to the directions they’d been given, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were very close to the Melanoff mansion, where, they’d been told, someone named Willoughby now lived. But when they passed a small park with some benches on its periphery, Mrs. Willoughby begged her husband to let her sit down.
“I’m all sweaty,” she said. “and my hair is a mess. And look! I’m getting a blister!” She wrenched off one of the too-small high-heeled shoes and showed him an inflamed place on her foot. He looked at it with distaste.
“You’ve never had attractive feet,” he commented.
“I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks back on you,” his wife chanted.
Henry Willoughby didn’t reply. How could he? There was no reply to that. Ignoring his wife, he picked up a folded newspaper that someone had left on the bench. Behind them, some teenage boys kicked a soccer ball around on some mowed grass. A missed return sent the ball off the playing field, and a player chased it to where it had landed near the bench where the Willoughbys sat.
“Sorry, sir,” the boy said, as he bent to retrieve the ball.
“Quite all right,” Mr. Willoughby said in his dignified banker voice. “Good game? Not going to blow it the way Argentina did?”1 He gave a hearty laugh, trying to sound athletic and masculine.
“What?” The boy looked confused.
“One to nothing, right? West Germany won it with a penalty kick!”
“What’s West Germany?” The boy asked, looking puzzled for a moment. “I could Google it, I guess,” he added. Then he tossed the ball toward his teammates and jogged over to the field.
Henry Willoughby leaned back on the bench. His shoulders were slumped. “Google it? I don’t know what anyone is talking about,” he complained. After a moment he looked at the newspaper he was still holding. “And this print is too small. If only I hadn’t lost my glasses on that dratted Alp!” He moved the paper closer to his face and squinted at the text.
“Oh my lord,” he groaned suddenly, and turned to his wife, who was continuing to rub her swollen foot. “Frances?”
“What?” She was a little terse, still annoyed about his previous remark about her feet. She thought her feet were quite attractive, actually, if you didn’t look at the blister.
“Look at this!” he said, and pointed to the newspaper. “We’re in serious trouble.”
“Why? Aside from my foot. And if I can just get some Band-Aids and better shoes, my foot’ll be all right.”
“Not your stupid foot. It’s us, both of us. We’re in the wrong year.”
“What on earth are you talking about? And my foot isn’t stupid.”
“We went on that vacation. Remember? With the Reprehensible Travel Company?”
“Of course I remember. There was the helicopter over the volcano, and the kayaking among crocodiles, and then the—”
He interrupted her. “How old were we?”
“Oh lord, I’m not good at math. We had those children. The oldest—what was his name?”
“Tim.”
“Yes, Tim. Dumb name. I can’t imagine why we chose it. Anyway, he was twelve when we went off. And he was born when I was twenty-four. That means I was . . . Help me here. You’re the banker. You’re supposed to be good at numbers.”
“That means you were thirty-six when we took the vacation. I would have been thirty-seven.”
“Okay. So what?”
“Well, look at us.”
Frances Willoughby was accustomed to doing whatever her husband told her to do. So she stared at him.
“How old do I look?” he asked, sitting up straight and pulling his shoulders back and his stomach in.
She shrugged. “Thirty-seven, I guess. How about me?”
“You’re a little broad in the beam,” he told her, “like a hippo. But you look thirty-six.”
“So?” She began to try to wedge her foot back into the shoe. “Why are we in serious trouble?”
“Don’t you get it?” he wailed. “Look at the date on this paper! It’s thirty years later! We were frozen for thirty years!”
Mrs. Willoughby looked very puzzled. “What?”
“We’re supposed to be in our late sixties! Close to seventy!”
His wife thought about that. Then, suddenly, she smiled. “So all the women I knew back then—like Margaret Simpson, remember her? I played bridge with her, and she cheated? And Elaine Cohen, across the street? Always gossiping? And the horrible PTA mothers? All of them—they’re almost seventy now?”
“Yes,” her husband said.
“And I’m not? I mean, we’re not?”
“That’s right.”
She leaned back and began to chortle.
“Don’t be so gleeful,” her husband said.
“Why not? They need face-lifts and I don’t. Ha ha on them!”
“Here’s the problem, Frances. Our children.”
“Them? Tim and . . . the others. I forget their names.”
“There were twins.”
“Yes, that’s right, Barnaby A and Barnaby B. It wasn’t fair that they looked alike. I could never tell them apart. Oh, and . . . now I’m remembering. Didn’t we also have a girl? She whined all the time.”
Mr. Willoughby’s facial expression softened. “Jane,” he said, and sighed. “I liked Jane.”2
“You’re a sucker for whiners. Anyway, what’s the problem with the children, aside from the fact that I suppose we have to be parents again, and it was never much fun?”
“The problem is this: They’re no longer children,” her husband said. “They’re our age. Or older.”
“Oh,” Frances Willoughby replied. “My goodness. How strange. But we won’t have to take care of them. I’m glad of that, at least.”
“I’m afraid they’ll have to take care of us,” Mr. Willoughby said, gritting his teeth. “They’ve inherited our money.”
There was a long silence. Then Mrs. Willoughby struggled to her feet, wincing a bit. “Well,” she said, “let’s find them, then. Because I need new shoes.”
13
Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby continued making their way to the Melanoff mansion. Henry Willoughby was squinting and peering at street signs, complaining again about his lost bifocals, trying to see which street they were to take next; beside him, his wife was shuffling, trying not to put pressure on her blistered foot. “Are we almost there yet?” she kept asking. “I’m hungry.” It reminded her husband of trips they had once taken occasionally with their children in the car, his wife in the passenger seat beside him and the four youngsters squabbling in the back seat and asking that same question over and over.
Youngsters, he mused, thinking about his own offspring. If only his four children still were! He would be nicer to them, he thought. He would not shortchange them on their allowances the way he had in the past. He would cheerfully read them bedtime stories. Occasionally, perhaps, he would take them to the zoo. They had always wanted to go to the zoo, he remembered, and he had always said no.
He thought of something, suddenly. “What was the date on the paper?” he asked his wife.
She gave a bi
tter laugh. “Thirty years later than we thought it was,” she said. “Thirty years later than when we went off on that ridiculous vacation in the Alps.”
“No, not the year. I mean what day is it?”
“Thursday, June seventeenth,” Mrs. Willoughby told him.
“What day is Father’s Day?1 Remember Father’s Day?”
“We never celebrated that, Henry. You always said it was a stupid holiday invited by greeting card manufacturers. One year the children all made you cards with their crayons and colored pencils and you told them they had wasted valuable paper and should crumple the cards and throw them away. I remember the girl cried.”
“Jane,” he said softly.
“Such a crybaby.”
“I liked Jane,” Mr. Willoughby said, and brushed at his eyes because they were beginning to tear up. “What day is Father’s Day?”
His wife sighed. “Third Sunday in June,” she told him. “So silly.”
“Wasn’t there a bookstore back on the last corner?” he asked.
“Yes, but we don’t like books, Henry. Remember the children always wanted us to read stories to them at bedtime but we told them no? You said they should read informational material. You bought them a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.”
“Let’s go back there,” he told her, “to where that bookstore was. They’ll have greeting cards. I want to look at the Father’s Day cards. It’s not the third Sunday yet.”
“Henry,” his wife said, “you have it backwards. Children give cards to their father. Not the other way around.”
But he had already turned and was heading back to the small store they had passed.
“And in any case,” Mrs. Willoughby went on, as she hurried, with a painful limp, to keep up with him, “you just told me that they aren’t children anymore. They’re all grown up. Why are you—?”
But he gestured to her to shush. He was already on the front step of the small bookstore, which had, in fact, a display of books about fathers2 in its window, along with a sign saying FATHER’S DAY: NEXT SUNDAY! So his wife followed him into the store.
