Grandpa Felix puts his big hand on my knee and presses down until my shoes are flat on the floor.
“Thanks. That was a close one. Can I have some of these?” I ask, pointing to the magazines and pictures.
He looks at me like he’s not sure he wants to let them go. But then he says OK, and I stuff them into my toolbox before he can change his mind.
He’s quiet for a while again, after. Talking to Grandpa Felix is kind of like waves in the ocean. There’s a big whoosh of words from him, words that are foamy and tickle your toes. And then, without knowing why, those words pull away, leaving your toes in the sand, dry and with nothing at all to do but wait for the next wave to come.
“An artist?” Whoosh.
I nod. “I have to do an arm coat for school. Coat of arms, I mean. One that has pictures of things that are important to our family.”
“What have you got so far?” he asks.
“Not much. I have to turn it in two days from now, but I don’t know what to draw exactly. Besides, I’ve been kind of busy trying to find you.” When Grandpa Felix doesn’t say anything, I keep on talking. “My arm coat, when I finish it, might get to be at the PORTWALLER-IN-BLOOM SPRING FESTIVAL. That’s a festival at my school where lots of people are invited,” I explain. “You could come.”
Grandpa Felix bites his lip. “Things important to your family, you say?” He gets up from the table then, weaving through the piles to the other side of the room. “Now, where did I put that?” He kneels next to a pile and goes through it one by one.
“What are you looking for?”
“Gotcha,” he says, waving a piece of paper at me. He lays the paper on the table. It’s a copy of a story from a newspaper. He taps his finger on the page, and says, “Read this here.”
“‘Troops Follow Nose to Victory.’” I read the words twice before I get what they mean. “Good gravy. Is this about you?”
“No, not quite,” he says. “This is about my father, your great-grandpa Albert. The one with the nose I was telling you about.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yes, he’s been dead a long time. Hasn’t anybody ever told you about him before?”
I shake my head and give him a look that says, Nobody Ever Told Me about YOU Before.
Chapter Eighteen
“Your great-grandfather Albert,” Grandpa Felix begins, “fought in a big war in Europe, many years ago. His unit was on a mission to find the enemy’s headquarters. For seven days they crept behind enemy lines, risking capture. If they were caught, they would face certain death.”
“Do you mean Graveyard Dead?” I say, drawing my finger across my throat.
Grandpa Felix nods slowly. “I do indeed.”
“My word.”
He holds the newspaper close to his face and reads: “‘On a cold November evening, PFC Crumb …’”
“PFC? I thought his name was Albert.”
“His name was Albert. PFC means ‘private first class,’” he explains, looking at me over the paper. “It’s a rank. Kind of like a title. You know, mister, miss, that sort of thing. But for the army.”
“Never heard of it,” I say, shrugging.
“May I continue?” he asks. I nod, and he goes on. “‘On a cold November evening, PFC Crumb, out scouting alone in hedgerows near Paris, caught a whiff of a delicious smell that was unfamiliar to his sensitive nostrils.’”
“Huh?”
Grandpa Felix says, “He smelled food cooking.”
“Oh. What kind of food?”
He puts down the newspaper. “How much do you plan on interrupting me?”
“That’s all,” I say. “Go ahead.”
Grandpa Felix eyeballs me like he’s waiting for me to say something else. But I just sit all good and quiet and wait for him to go on. He does. “Now, where was I? Let’s see.” He taps his fingers on the table again and then says, “Right. Here we are: ‘… unfamiliar to his sensitive nostrils. Crumb followed his nose to a knoll and hid there until nightfall, where just beyond lay the enemy’s headquarters.’”
A gasp comes out of my mouth just then. Grandpa Felix pauses, gives me a look, and I press my lips together tight. He continues: “‘When Crumb returned the next morning to rejoin his own troops, he was able to recount the enemy’s exact location, enabling the capture of more than one hundred German soldiers and helping to turn the battle in favour of the Allies.’”
I don’t understand that part, and Grandpa Felix must be able to tell because he says, “He sniffed out the bad guys.”
“Good gravy.”
“‘When asked how he knew it was the enemy’s cooking he smelled, Crumb said, “After day in and day out of bean rations, I just knew this had to be something from the other side. As it turns out, the Germans’ rinderbraten smells something like my aunt Becky’s steak pie.”’ When Grandpa Felix finishes reading, he places the paper back on the table.
“Let me get this straight,” I say. “The Crumb nose has smelling powers?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“But you said that Great-grandpa, umm …” I pat the paper with my hand.
“Albert.”
“Right, Albert,” I say. “You said that his nose smelled cooking. And that made him a war hero.”
“Well, yes,” he says, nodding. “That’s what happened.”
I’m up and out of the chair then. “So I’m like a superhero?”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“Why not? This is a Crumb nose,” I tell him, pointing to it. “Same as yours. Same as Great-grandpa Albert’s.”
“It is,” he says.
I put my hands on my hips. “Then a super nose is what I have.” And before he can tell me any different, I stick my nose in the air and try to see what I can smell. I sniff so hard I can almost suck up the stripes off the wallpaper, the dust off the lamps, the ink off the newspaper. I follow my nose around the room and holler out whatever smell crosses my path. “Old paper! Dust! More old paper!”
Grandpa Felix yells, “Be careful now!” And he is out of his chair, laughing.
“All right,” I say. And when I turn to look at him, I see my dad in his face. For the first time, I have real proof that Dad was here. That startles me and the next thing I know, my foot catches the edge of a pile, the one with a picture of a cornfield lying on top, and I’m tripping and falling, knocking over one pile, then another, and another, doing a nosedive until I hit the floor face-first.
Chapter Nineteen
I’ve never been to a hospital before (not counting when I was born on account of the fact that my brains were too small to remember). I haven’t been here long, but it’s long enough to know that I don’t like it one bit. Grandpa Felix doesn’t like it much either.
“I hate the way hospitals smell,” he says, while we wait to see the doctor in the emergency room. His leg is bouncing like it’s running a race that the rest of him forgot to enter.
I take off the bag of frozen peas Grandpa gave me and try to sniff. But nothing gets through. “I can’t smell anything.”
“Keep that on there,” Grandpa Felix tells me. “It will help keep the swelling down.”
“Swelling!”
“How does it feel?” he asks.
“Like an iceberg.” I take off the peas again and then wipe under my nose. “At least it’s not bleeding any more.”
Both Grandpa’s legs are going now. “I really don’t like hospitals.”
“You don’t look so good,” I say. “Want me to get you a magazine?”
He shakes his head. We watch other people, people without frozen peas on their faces, drift into the waiting room. “The last time I was in a hospital was with your father,” says Grandpa Felix.
“When he died,” I say, nodding.
He leans forward in his seat. “No, when he was born.” He rubs his head. “I wasn’t here when he got sick. I couldn’t help him.”
I reach my arm around his shoulders, like he’s the one who’
s hurt. “I couldn’t help him either. Nobody could.”
Grandpa clears his throat and gets to his feet, shrugging off my arm. “I’m afraid there’s no getting around it,” he says. “I’m going to have to call your mother.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t say a thing like that,” I say, tossing the peas onto his chair. “See, I’m fine. Let’s just go.” I get up and pull on his arm.
For a second he looks like he’ll say, “OK, my little darling, let’s go.” But then a lady with a clipboard pushes open the door to the waiting room and says, “Crumb? Penelope Crumb?”
She makes us follow her through a set of doors, down a hallway, and into a little room that has shower curtains for walls. She helps me onto a bed and tells me she’ll be right back. Grandpa Felix takes off his coat and sits in the chair next to my bed.
The push buttons on the bed keep me busy for a while, until Grandpa Felix tells me that my legs going up and down like a bucking bronco is making him sick. “You’re awful green,” I say.
“I’m going to step outside for a minute,” he says. “Get some air.”
I give him a look that says, You’re Coming Back, Aren’t You? but I don’t know if he sees me because the lady with the clipboard gets in the way and makes me stop pushing the buttons. She points to her name tag. “My name is Margaret. So, you bumped your nose, dear? Tell me how this happened.”
“Do people call you Marge?” I ask.
“Not if they want me to answer,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “Because the name Marge sort of looks like Margaret, only shorter. Kind of like Penny is short for Penelope. But I don’t like to be called Penny.”
“Good to know,” says Margaret not Marge, writing something on a folder.
“The reason I asked,” I explain, “is because my best friend, Patsy Cline, has an eyebrow named Marge. Your eyebrows don’t look like Marge, though. They look more like a Wendy.”
Margaret not Marge raises her Wendys at me and then writes some more.
“Patsy Cline, my best friend that I was telling you about,” I say, “is angry at me now, though. On account of the fact that I’m a defacer. She’s in this singing contest in a couple of days. Did I tell you she was a singer?”
Margaret doesn’t answer and instead asks me a lot of questions while she looks at my nose. I try to be brave and keep my eyes on the door for Grandpa Felix. “Is it swollen?” I ask.
“There’s a little swelling,” she says.
“I can’t smell anything.”
“That’s normal,” she says.
“Not for me,” I tell her. “Not for this nose.”
She laughs. Which I think is kind of a rude thing to do to somebody you hardly know and who is having the kind of day that lands you in the hospital.
“Can you go see if my grandpa is out there? I think maybe he forgot which shower curtain I’m in.”
Before she leaves, she takes my bag of peas away and gives me a cold pack wrapped in a white cloth. As she lays it across my nose I wonder how I’m going to keep this secret from my mum.
A long while later, the buttons on my bed have stopped being fun. I don’t know where Grandpa Felix has gone to, and Margaret not Marge has disappeared. Which makes me start to worry. I don’t know if they’ve forgotten about me, or if my nose is defaced forever. And what does that mean for my nose powers? “Hello! Hello!” I yell. “Somebody needs to fix my nose!”
A man in a white coat pulls back my shower curtain. He tells me that his name is Dr Linus and to please be quiet because I’m upsetting the other patients.
“Is my grandpa out there?” I ask.
“I didn’t see anyone,” he says. “I’ll check in a moment, OK?” He lifts up the cold pack.
“This is no ordinary nose,” I say. “I can’t smell anything. It’s broken and needs to be fixed.”
He touches my nose and wiggles it gently. “Well, it isn’t broken. Just bruised,” he says, smiling.
“But it is broken! The smeller doesn’t work.” I sniff at him. “Nothing.”
“You’ve got some swelling,” he says, “so that’s probably why. Don’t worry, it’s not permanent.”
The shower curtain opens again, and this time it’s Margaret not Marge. But she doesn’t have Grandpa Felix with her. She has my mum. And Terrible’s right behind her.
“Penelope!” Mum’s face has worry rubbed all over it. “Are you all right? What happened?”
I try to smile, but it hurts. “My nose ran into the floor.”
That makes Dr. Linus smile, but then he sees the look on my mum’s face that says, You Had Me Scared to Death, so he stops. Terrible keeps staring at me, and I’m waiting for him to say something about my swollen, big nose. But he doesn’t.
“She’s going to be fine,” Dr Linus tells Mum. “She should see her usual doctor in a few days just to make sure her nose is healing properly. Keep ice on it, Penelope. And don’t worry, your old nose should return in a couple of days.”
Mum thanks Dr Linus and pats my knee. “Come on, let’s get you home.”
“What about Grandpa?” I say. “We can’t leave without him. He doesn’t like hospitals.”
Mum reaches for my hand.
“No! We can’t leave without Grandpa.” I fight back the tears.
“He’s gone,” says Mum.
“He is not gone!” I tell her, pulling away. I point to the chair. “His coat is right there!” My voice cracks, and then I start to cry.
Mum sits beside me in the bed and takes my hand in hers. She looks at me, right at the heart of me. “I don’t want your feelings to be hurt, Penelope. But you should know that you cannot depend on Grandpa Felix.” She strokes my hair with her finger. “After your father died, Grandpa Felix didn’t want to see us. That was his choice. We needed him, and he left. Just like he did today.”
“So did Dad leave us,” I tell her, “and you’re not angry at him.”
“That’s different, Penelope.”
“Well, maybe he has a reason why he left,” I say. “Maybe if you just talked to him.”
“There aren’t words,” she says. “I wouldn’t know what to say to him after all this time.” She wipes the tears from my face and then from hers, and wraps her arms around me. She pulls me close, pressing her cheek against my head. I can feel her heart beating.
I think about seeing Dad in Grandpa Felix’s face. Proof that he was here. “I want to talk about Dad more.”
“All right,” she says. “Shhh now. It’s going to be all right.”
Over her shoulder, Terrible stares at us from the other side of the room. He gives me a smile, one that I haven’t seen on his face in a long time. And it says that my brother is back, at least for now.
Chapter Twenty
“I want to call Grandpa Felix,” I tell my mum as soon as we get home.
She gives me a look that says, Don’t Even Think about It. And then she tells me I’m to stay on the couch with ice on my face and not to get up for any reason. She also says that if I think she’s joking, I should just try her, missy.
Staying on the couch at first sounds pretty good because I pretend the couch is a pirate ship and I’m out at sea with eels all around me. The scary kind that can shoot electricity out of their eyeballs and turn your insides to soup. “Arrr! Would be a mighty fine day at sea, matey, if it weren’t for those blasted eels!” I say to Terrible.
Only, Terrible doesn’t talk pirate. He only talks alien. Because he says, “You’re a dork,” and then goes to his room.
After a while, I get hungry. Pirate hungry. I yell loud so that Mum can hear me all the way in the laundry room, “Ahoy! Bring me some grub, ya cockroach!”
And when she appears with her hands on her hips and calls me “missy” again, I know that’s the end of my pirate life. “Can I at least call Patsy Cline?” I ask her after she brings me apple slices with peanut butter. She tells me fine but then says that just because I’m injured and she’s bringing me snacks doesn’t mean s
he’s forgotten about how much trouble I’m in after not going to school for two days and sneaking around like I’ve been.
I tell her that I know she would never forget anything as important as that, and she gives me a look that says, Don’t Be Smart. Which I really wasn’t being.
“What’s the matter with your voice?” Patsy Cline asks me when I call her up. “You sound funny.”
“My nose is broke,” I tell her.
“You have a broken nose?”
“Not broken, just broke. I fell on top of it. And now I have to keep ice on my nose to keep it from swelling up to the size of Jupiter.”
“You’re just saying that so I’ll feel sorry for you and won’t be angry at you any more.”
“Am not,” I say. “But I did have to go to the hospital.”
“Stop your fibbing,” she says.
“There was blood coming out of my nose holes and everything.”
“Penelope.”
“True blue.”
Patsy Cline doesn’t say anything for a while. But I know she’s still there because I can hear the video of her from her last singing contest playing in the background. And her mum telling her to smile with her eyes at the people in the audience. Patsy Cline always says smiling with her eyes would be a lot easier if they had lips and teeth.
“I’ve got to go,” she says. “Mum wants me to meet with some people who’ll take pictures of me so I can get more singing jobs. You’re still coming to , aren’t you?”
I tell her that I’ll come if she’s not angry at me, and she says she won’t be angry if I come, so we’re back to being best friends again, thank lucky stars. And then I say, “Wait a minute, did you say you want someone to take pictures of you?”
“Not me, my mum does.”
“Patsy Cline,” I say, “I know the best person for the job.”
I tell her all about Grandpa Felix and his picture-taking business but leave out the part about Winston because he has a tail. Right after I hang up, Lizzie plops on the couch beside me. Her eyes get great big when she sees my nose. “You look like your face has been stampeded by an African rhinoceros.”
Penelope Crumb Follows Her Nose Page 8
