“Y-yes,” Dad said, stuttering slightly. “That’s exactly right, Lucy. In fact, I donated a large portion of Mom’s earnings to a cancer-research charity—that’s certainly one thing she would have done if she were still alive. I also set a chunk aside to help with college for you kids, and our house payments.” He sighed. “But I also thought Mom would like to see me use a small portion of the profits for fun. She was always encouraging me to take more risks and let loose a little. So, I put some of the money aside for us to use as a family—ten percent of what remained after taxes.”
“Ten percent of $1.3 million is $130,000,” Herb announced. They had been working on percentages in his special advanced math program that spring.
Lucy added, “So, assuming we need to save about forty percent of that for taxes, that means we have about seventy-five thousand bucks left over to use for fun stuff. Is that right?”
Dad nodded, looking delighted to see his kids’ math skills hard at work. Lucy gingerly poked a piece of shriveled lettuce with the toe of her shoe and muttered, “Dad…do you actually think this trip is going to get off the ground? Or is this just another one of your big ideas that’s going to fizzle in a few days?”
Herb’s head swiveled from his sister to his dad, waiting for Dad’s answer. Freddy, however, was nowhere to be seen. Herb had noticed that his brother often disappeared when they talked about Mom, or when Lucy and Dad started bickering.
In Lucy’s defense, Dad had come up with lots of ideas that had gone all wrong over the past few years. But maybe that was because Mom had been the fun, adventurous one and, well…Dad was great, too, but in a different way. After Mom died, Dad had talked about planning family trips to some of Mom’s favorite places—the Icehotel in Sweden, the Black Hills, Scotland, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—but they hadn’t happened yet. Then there was the skydiving trip for four that Dad had paid for, in full, before he realized he was the only one old enough to actually jump out of a plane (and Dad was scared of heights)—so that idea had been a bust, too. Herb still got sad whenever he thought about the cat, Cream, they’d adopted before realizing Freddy was allergic.
Dad cleared his throat. Patches of bright pink suddenly colored his pale cheeks. “Here’s the thing,” he began, his voice soft. “Many years ago, your mother and I used to plan for and dream about all of the nutty things we might someday do with our lives. When I was younger, I dreamed of writing short stories or dabbling in the arts. I took a sculpting class in college, you know?”
Freddy poked his head out from under the counter, where he’d been hiding. “You took an art class?”
“Indeed.” Dad nodded. “But once we started grad school and teaching, and got wrapped up in our research,” he said, running a shaking hand through his wispy hair, “there wasn’t time for that kind of nonsense anymore. Your mom continued to talk about those someday dreams—her hope of eventually sailing around the world, and exploring hidden cities in Europe. She longed to open a small inn, where she could get to know adventurous travelers from near and far. In the year before she died, she talked often about how much she would love to run a food truck as a family.” Dad propped his foot up on the truck’s giant back bumper. “She thought it would be something fun we could do together. Mom loved that a food truck offered the best parts of so many adventures: a chance to meet new people, travel, and experience the thrill of building something from the ground up.”
Herb wished he could remember his mom talking about this kind of stuff, but the truth was, he couldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, he remembered playing with an old plastic food truck with his mom. They would set up tiny plastic food on the counters and use his collection of LEGO people as customers. They had called the game Restaurant, and sometimes Mom would hide real treats inside the food truck for Herb to find—chocolate chips, silver and gold Hershey’s Kisses, a handwritten note wrapped around a piece of hard candy.
Dad’s voice broke into Herb’s memory. “Way back when, your mom put all her big ideas on hold so I could pursue my career,” he said. “I always promised her we would do some of those crazy things later.” He didn’t say it, but even Herb knew they were all thinking the same thing: there had been no later for Mom.
“Getting all this money from one of Mom’s big ideas…well, it feels like a sign,” Dad said with a shrug. “It’s like Mom is telling me it’s time to go for it.”
Herb didn’t remember as much about their mom as Freddy or Lucy did. He had just turned six when she died. One of his favorite memories was from a regular day when she’d brought him to the park, just the two of them. He’d been nervous to go down the biggest slide; it was tall and steep, and there was a mound of scratchy sand at the bottom of the plastic chute. But Mom had convinced him to try it. When he got all the way up to the top, he’d leaned down to see if she was watching. The wind was blowing her big, soft, fluffy hair all around, and Herb had giggled because it looked like a tumbleweed. She’d given him a thumbs-up and a big, confident smile, and said, “Go for it, Herbie.” Herb liked the idea of this food truck being some kind of sign, and he liked thinking about his mom telling them to go for it. “Then let’s go for it,” he whispered. “It can be our very own family experiment, for Mom. She always loved experimenting.”
Freddy crawled out from under the counter and crept closer to Dad, who was still standing alone outside the back door. “The Great Peach Experiment,” Freddy added with a little smile. “For Mom.” He nodded and whacked one of the counters with his fist. Then he got right down to business. “So, Dad…you’re saying we’re actually going to be running this food truck? What kind of food are we going to be selling?”
“Aha!” Dad hopped up to join the kids inside the truck. It suddenly felt quite squished with all four of them squeezed in together. And Dad had to stand slightly stooped; if he stretched up to his full height, his balding head scraped the ceiling. “I thought that could be our first order of business as a family. We need to pick a theme for our truck. Something catchy. And uniquely Peach.”
“You’re telling me you bought a food truck and are planning to start up a business with it, but you don’t know what kind of food we’re selling? And this is a good idea how?” Lucy asked. Herb caught his sister rolling her eyes. She muttered, “Maybe we should sell peaches?”
“Or peaches-and-cream ice cream!” Herb hoped the idea of ice cream might cheer his sister up. “And other ice cream and malts and stuff? Mom liked ice cream.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember her favorite flavor, but he couldn’t.
Lucy grinned at him. “Do you guys remember, her favorite flavor was Superman?” she asked, as if she’d read Herb’s mind. “Just like you, Herbie. Mom liked that it turned her tongue all kinds of funny colors.”
Herb giggled. “I like that, too.”
“And I like your spirit, Herb,” Dad said. “An ice cream truck is a nice idea, but we have this fancy, nearly new, multichambered oven and a stove in the truck. Seems like we should use them somehow.”
“Monster cookies!” Freddy suggested. “Or tacos. Maybe both! Everyone likes tacos and cookies.”
“I do like cookies and tacos,” Dad said. He scratched his bald spot, which was surrounded by fluffy puffs of blond hair. “Hmmm.”
“Or…,” said Lucy, “maybe we should pick a food we already know how to make and go with that?”
Herb shrugged. “But what do we know how to make?” Most nights, Lucy made him and Freddy grilled cheese or omelets or butter noodles or smoothies or soup for dinner. They were all yummy, but none of those items seemed special enough for a food truck.
There was a long silence, during which Dad swung a cabinet door back and forth, back and forth. It squeaked and sighed, filling the silence. No one said anything. Finally, Dad blurted out: “What about Aunt Lucinda’s wonderful peach pie? I haven’t made it in years, but she did teach me how to make it. It was your mom’s favorite.” He furrow
ed his brow and added quietly, “At least, she always told Lucinda it was her favorite….”
“Peach pie,” Freddy said, smiling. “That’s catchy.”
“Catchy,” echoed Herb.
Lucy shook her head, but then she muttered, “I guess it’s settled, then.”
“The Peach Pie Truck,” Herb cheered. “Yum yum.”
Just as Herb said that, the cabinet door Dad had been swinging back and forth popped off its hinges and clattered to the floor. In the silence that followed, Dad gave his kids a forced smile, and said, “This summer is going to be great!”
From the Sketchbook of Freddy Peach:
HOW TO SPEND A MILLION DOLLARS
When I have a million bucks of my own, I’m going to buy a limo and hire a private driver to drive me to school every day. It’ll have lasers, a personal soda dispenser, a hot tub in the back, and probably even a butler!
3
PIE FOR BREAKFAST
A few days later, at seven o’clock sharp on the first morning of summer break, Dad galloped through the second story of the Peach family’s small-but-cozy house, blasting “Reveille” from his phone. Freddy rubbed his eyes. Fourth grade was officially over, and summer was already off to a rollicking start.
Dad’s bugle wake-up music was most often used in the military, but it was also the ringtone for their father’s morning alarm. Though Dad had never served in the armed forces, his father had—and Walter Peach had grown up surrounded by some of his father’s old traditions. “Up and at ’em!” Dad cried while prancing up and down the hall. “All these peach pies are not gonna eat themselves!”
For Freddy, summer break usually meant ten weeks filled with art projects, fort making, epic cardboard-sword-and-shield battles with his friends Ethan and Henry, brushing his teeth sometime after noon each day (if at all), reading his favorite illustrated random facts book every afternoon (as well as researching his own random facts), and cereal for lunch. This summer, of course, things would have been a bit different than usual: Freddy had a hunch summer school teachers didn’t approve of kids who didn’t brush their teeth.
But as he listened to his father whooping and hollering out in the hall, Freddy quickly came to the conclusion that this summer was going to be a whole lot more different than he ever could have anticipated. He quickly shoved his blanket to the side, and then tossed stuffed animals down into his little brother’s bunk to try to wake him. But Herb could sleep through almost anything, which was fortunate, since he shared a room with Freddy.
Though Freddy and Lucy each had their own rooms when they were little, after Herb was born, the boys had been forced to share. Lucy—as the oldest—got the little bedroom to herself. Herb and Freddy squeezed into the big bedroom with bunk beds. Lately, Freddy and Herb’s room was even more crowded than usual. Herb had been building up a whole bunch of “collections,” and his piles and bins of stuff had expanded to the point that their room had almost no empty floor space left.
Freddy couldn’t help wondering: since the million bucks was off-limits, if they made back some—or all—of this “fun money” operating the food truck, would they buy a bigger house, where he might get his very own room? If Freddy ever sold some of his art to a fancy gallery or some rich art-collector lady, he had plenty of ideas for how to spend his million bucks. A house with a basketball hoop, maybe. Definitely a pool. An elaborate, thirteen-story tree house. And a butler!
For now, though, he would settle for his personal grand prize: no summer school. Freddy had been trying to act like going to summer school was no big deal. But deep down, he hated that he was the only Peach kid being forced to go. He was the only member of the family who had ever failed a math test, which made him a full-on failure. He was all art and creativity and big ideas and fun facts, while his siblings and Dad were focused and sensible and smart. Dad was a big-shot geology professor. Lucy was a verified genius and sometimes did homework for fun. Herb went to a special math class at the university, to give him an extra challenge, because second grade was so easy for him. Everything came easily to the rest of his family. It seemed like nothing important came easily to Freddy. He was a plum in a whole family of Peaches.
Freddy climbed out of bed and sat on his brother. Herb still didn’t stir. Freddy bounced on his brother’s bed a few times, bonked him on the head with a stuffed ostrich, and finally gave up. Herb was always grumpy when he got up too early, anyway.
“Did Dad say pie?” Freddy wondered aloud, yawning as he stumbled into the hall. He sniffed the air, smelled something yummy, and made his way toward the kitchen. “For breakfast?”
Sure enough, the wooden kitchen counter was full-to-bursting with pies. Small pies, large pies, single-serve pie pockets, crustless pies, crumble-top pies, and several burnt-to-a-crisp pies. Freddy rubbed his eyes again, certain they must be deceiving him.
“Dig in!” Dad instructed with a slightly crazed look about him. Freddy had only seen his dad look like this after spending a long night in his university lab with heaps and piles of research figures.
“Dad?” Freddy asked. “Did you bake all these pies? When?”
“I stayed up all night. Just like at work, when I’m on a roll, I don’t take breaks. We’ve no time to waste, Freddy-boy. The plan is for us to hit the road as soon as possible, so I wanted to start perfecting our recipe. We’ll stop to do more pie research along the way, of course, but a pie’s crust is its foundation. If the foundation is right, the pie will be all the better, and the mix of fat to flour is crucial for flakiness, and the ratio of…” He droned on and on, making less and less sense with each word he said. Dad usually went to bed at 10:26 on the dot (immediately after the local news weather forecast) and got up at exactly 6:00. He was not the kind of guy who stayed up all night baking pies.
Lucy shuffled into the kitchen, stopping short when she saw their dad’s collection of fresh-baked pies.
Freddy grabbed two forks and passed one to his sister. “It’s research for the Great Peach Experiment,” he explained, eagerly plunging his fork into the nearest pie. “Start eating. We’ve got a lot of tasting to do.”
While Lucy and Freddy sampled pie, Dad talked through the summer plan, which did indeed sound very different from their regular summer plan. For the past few years, Dad had spent long summer days at the university, helping to oversee a bunch of graduate students’ research projects. Lucy, Freddy, and Herb spent their summer breaks at the community center pool or roaming around the neighborhood, with Lucy in charge to help keep their lives somewhat organized.
For this summer adventure, Dad had written out a detailed route for their journey, along with a daily schedule of activities. It went as follows: They would spend the first weekend of summer break at home testing recipes, buying supplies, getting stuff packed for the trip, and painting and cleaning the food truck—which had sat in the driveway for the past few days, untouched. (The truck was apparently in “great working order and ready to roll,” according to their dad, who knew nothing about food trucks.)
After that, they would visit a bunch of different cities that Dad had picked out, stopping for a few days in each to sell pie. According to Dad’s schedule, every night would be dedicated to replenishing their supplies, rolling and baking crusts, and tidying up the food truck. Every morning they would finish making their pies for the day, drive to some special spot he had picked out in each city, and hang out in the food truck, selling slices of pie to strangers. There were no weekend days off in the schedule Dad had drawn up, and Freddy didn’t see a whole lot of room for fun. But he hoped that part of this adventure was a given, and Dad had simply forgotten to write the fun stuff down.
The whole Great Peach Experiment would last four weeks. “A month should give us just enough time to test out this food truck experiment and see if we’re any good at it. If we make some of our fun money back, well, then we’ll figure out how to use the leftover funds.”
Just then, Herb wandered into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. His footie pajamas were too small—he’d had to cut off the feet to make them fit—but Herb refused to toss them. The youngest Peach never got rid of anything. He took one look at the counter full of pie, and then grabbed a spoon to help with the taste testing.
“If all goes well this summer, and we figure out how to make enough money on this crazy venture that we can call it a success,” Dad added wistfully, “maybe it’ll be time for me to consider whether there’s a different kind of life out there for me—for us?”
Freddy’s eyes went wide. Had Dad—in his own odd way—just suggested that if their food truck made enough money, he might consider leaving his job? That he might, finally, be able to spend more fun time with them? That he might take some time away from his research to have family dinners, go hiking, and maybe even sometimes be there to see them off in the morning before school? If that was what Dad was suggesting, Freddy was even more resolved to make this venture successful. “What would you consider ’enough money’?” Freddy asked, curious to see if his Dad’s expectations lined up with reality.
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