by Lisa Graff
“Hello?” Rebecca said when she picked up the other line.
“Hi, it’s me. Don’t hang up.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
That’s when I realized that making up with someone who was still mad at you was harder than putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on. I knew I had to think of just the perfect thing to say so she’d like me again. Too bad all I could think of was “How come you were hanging out with Doug yesterday at the picnic? You told me once he smells like boiled broccoli, and you hate broccoli.”
Rebecca huffed out a giant puff of air. “Who else was I supposed to hang out with?” she said. “You’re not my friend anymore.”
I got an Ebola-feeling lurch in my stomach right then. “I’m not?” I said.
“No.” And she hung up the phone.
sixteen
Lunch was SpaghettiOs from a can. I chewed extra slow, making sure every bite was just mush before I swallowed it down, so I wouldn’t choke. Dad stared at his spoon the whole time he was eating, except when the spoon was in his mouth, when he stared at the air. He didn’t call me Moonbeam. He didn’t call me anything.
After Dad went back to his office, I decided I’d better fix my will since it had all people in it who I didn’t much want to leave stuff to anymore. But I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I found a yellow pad of paper and a pen on the coffee table in the living room, and I went out to the porch to write a new one.
Fifteen minutes later I was still sitting there, yellow paper staring at me blank, when from across the street I heard “Hello, Annie Z.!”
I looked up and there was Mrs. Finch, walking out her front door with a metal bucket full of stuff I couldn’t see. I waved at her.
“What are you doing with that bucket?” I called over.
She tilted it so I could see inside. “My new gardening tools,” she told me. “Care to help me do some weeding? This yard is a wreck.”
I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “But let me go change first.”
I picked up my pad of paper and went upstairs to change into long sleeves and pants. That’s because weeding meant flowers, and flowers meant bees, and I knew from the book that bees usually only stung you on bare skin, so it was best to be as covered up as possible. When I was done changing, I pulled my hair through the back of a baseball cap I found in the laundry room and went back outside.
“Aren’t you going to be hot in that?” Mrs. Finch said when I reached her lawn.
“I don’t want to get bee stings,” I told her. “I’ve never had one, so I could be deathly allergic—I don’t know.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” she said with a tiny nod. I noticed she wasn’t wearing her old-lady slacks like usual. Instead she had on khaki-colored overalls, with a bib and everything.
“So”—I plopped myself down next to her in front of her flower bed—“how do you weed?”
She handed me a tiny shovel thing and showed me how to dig up the plants so I got all the root parts. After a while I started to get really sweaty, and I figured since I hadn’t seen a single bee so far, it would probably be safe to roll up my sleeves at least, so I did.
After a bit more digging, Mrs. Finch said to me, “So have you been reading that book I lent you?”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, as I plonked my shovel down deep into the dirt. “I’ve been reading a lot. They just brought Wilbur to the fair.”
“Annie Z., I’m impressed!” Mrs. Finch tossed a weed into the garbage bag between us. “You’re almost to the end. Are you liking it so far?”
“It’s all right,” I said, tugging at a plant that didn’t want to be unstuck from the ground.
“Well, keep reading, okay? I know you’ll like it.”
We dug up weeds for a long time, until we were both smeared-all-over dirty. Mrs. Finch asked me all sorts of questions about the neighborhood, like who lived where and who was friendly and where my school was and what grocery store sold the freshest fruit and every sort of question like that. And we’d been digging and tugging and pulling for about an hour I guess, and there were still loads of weeds left, but all of a sudden Mrs. Finch yanked her hands out of the dirt and said, “These old fingers of mine are getting sore. What do you say we take a break?”
I wiped my hands on my pants and made two big dirt handprints. “Okay,” I said.
“Great.” She started to get to her feet creaky slow. “How about I make us a pot of tea?”
I reached out a hand to Mrs. Finch to help her, because I was already standing and she still had one leg to go. “The same kind of tea as you gave me last time?” I asked as I pulled her up. “For my arm scrape, I mean?”
She stood up all the way, leaning on me. “I can make that one again, if you’d like.”
“Well…” I thought about it. “I mean, it tasted good and everything. But do you have any…do you have any tea for Ebola?”
“Ebola?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I might have it.” Because even though my head didn’t hurt much anymore and my stomachache was a little bit better too, Ebola wasn’t something that went away. I figured the real bad symptoms were going to kick in any minute.
Mrs. Finch scratched at her nose. “Ebola tea?” she asked me.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Annie Z.” And we went inside.
I was surprised when I saw the living room, because almost all the boxes were gone already and everything practically was put away—books on the bookshelves, rugs on the floor. When Rebecca moved to our neighborhood, her family had boxes sitting around for weeks, with stuff spewing out the tops and onto the carpet. “Wow,” I told Mrs. Finch. “You’re a quick unpacker.”
She laughed. “I guess I don’t have much else to do with myself,” she said.
There was still one box left, and it hadn’t been opened at all—the tape was still stuck to the top tight. It was the box on the table by the fireplace, the one that said FRAGILE! And even though I kind of knew Mrs. Finch didn’t want to talk about it, I pointed to it anyway. “You want help unpacking that one?” I asked.
Mrs. Finch just said, “Let’s put the water on, shall we?” and walked into the kitchen. Which I could tell meant we were done talking about the box, but it sure didn’t make me stop being curious.
While Mrs. Finch was putting water in the pot, I sat down at the kitchen table and asked, “Mrs. Finch? Do your fingers get sore because you have arthritis?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said, turning off the faucet. “Rheumatoid arthritis. I’ve had it for years.”
I nodded. “I read about that one,” I told her. “You’re supposed to drink lots of water. And eat pineapple, too. I don’t know why. But the book said that helped.”
“Huh.” Mrs. Finch smiled at me as she set the pot on the stove. “I didn’t know about the pineapple. I’ll have to try that. Thanks, Annie Z.”
“Sure.”
While we were waiting for the water to get hot, Mrs. Finch got out a deck of cards so we could play go fish. We played four games and I won three. Then, when Mrs. Finch was pouring me another cup of Ebola tea, she said, “Time for a new game. I’m going to teach you how to play gin rummy.”
“Gin rummy? What’s that?”
“It’s very fun. I think you’ll like it. Here, hand me the deck. I’ll shuffle.”
Mrs. Finch showed me how to play gin rummy, and she was right—it was fun. She even showed me how to do betting. We bet a penny for every point, only they were imaginary pennies that Mrs. Finch wrote down on a pad of paper, because I was just a kid.
“Next time I come over, I’m gonna bring a bag of gummy bears,” I told Mrs. Finch as I swiped up her three of diamonds from the table. “Then we can bet for those. And we can call it gummy rummy.”
“Gummy rummy.” Mrs. Finch laughed. “I like that.”
It was funny, I thought, that here I was sitting playing cards in the haunted house, when just the week before I’d been t
rying to peek in the windows. I put down an ace. “You want to hear something, Mrs. Finch?”
“Absolutely,” she said, and she looked at her cards with her eyes squinched together close, trying to figure out which one to get rid of, I guess.
“My friend Rebecca thinks your house is haunted.”
She plopped a seven into the pile. “She does?”
“Yeah,” I said, fanning out my cards to look at them better. “She thinks there’s ghosts and everything. Rebecca’s crazy about ghosts. She’s wanted to come inside here ever since the Krazinskys moved out.”
“Well, why don’t you invite her over then? I love having company.”
I scooped up a card from the pile and tucked it into my hand. “I don’t think she’d come if I asked her.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I think she hates me.”
“Now why on earth would she hate you?”
I picked the jack of diamonds out of my hand, because that was the card I wanted to get rid of. But I didn’t set it down right away. I just sort of stared at it.
“Mrs. Finch?” I said after a little while staring. “Hamsters are different than brothers, right?”
She took a sip of her tea and then put her teacup back with a quiet clank in the saucer. “I don’t think I understand the question, Annie Z.”
“It’s just…I mean, hamsters are pets, right? And when they die it’s sad and maybe you have a funeral and you miss them and everything. And I know that. But when brothers…” I took another long gulp of tea. “When brothers die…” I swirled the last of the tea around the bottom of my cup.
“Annie?”
I looked up at Mrs. Finch then. “Jared died,” I told her. “My brother Jared. He died.”
“Oh, honey.” She reached across the table and set her hand on top of mine, nice and warm. She looked me square in the eyeballs. “I already knew,” she told me. “Mrs. Harper told me when I moved in. I should have said something earlier, I guess. But I thought you might not want to talk about it. I’m sorry.”
“You knew?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“But then how come you never gave me the dead-brother look?”
“Annie Z.,” Mrs. Finch said after another while of quiet, “I think I’d like to show you something.”
“What?”
“It’s in the living room. Why don’t we refill our cups first?”
So Mrs. Finch poured us both more Ebola tea, and we left our cards facedown on the table, and we went into the living room with our teacups.
“Well,” Mrs. Finch said when we got there, “would you like to open it, or should I?”
She was pointing to the box by the fireplace.
seventeen
I didn’t know what was going to be in that box. Something FRAGILE!, that’s all I knew for sure. Maybe it would be a whole bunch of porcelain dolls like the ones Mrs. Harper collected in a big glass case. Only I sort of hoped not, because their eyes were kind of creepy, and anyway what was the point of dolls you couldn’t play with?
Mrs. Finch found some scissors in a drawer, and she handed them to me to cut the tape with. “You can set your tea on the floor,” she said. “Right there, that’s it.”
I took an itty-bitty sip of Ebola tea and put my cup on the floor, like Mrs. Finch said, and I cut a big slit in the tape. Then I pried open the two sides of the lid.
“Careful now,” Mrs. Finch said. “Careful.” She put her head right next to mine, and together we peeked inside.
It wasn’t creepy porcelain dolls inside the box. I wasn’t sure what it was, actually. All I could see was newspapers.
“What is it?” I asked Mrs. Finch.
She didn’t answer, just took out one of the newspaper-wrapped things on top. It was long and flat in the shape of a rectangle, about the size of my big green book. She unwrapped it slowly and held it up so I could see.
It was a photograph of fish. A photo of a fish stuck in a frame. The fish was orange with thick white stripes outlined in black, and it was way up close, so you could see its fishy fins and all its fishy scales, and the water behind it was bright swimming-pool blue.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked me.
“Um,” I said, “sure.”
I guess it was kind of neat, if you liked fish. But I didn’t think it was exactly the sort of thing I’d call “beautiful.”
Mrs. Finch was unwrapping another thing, about the same size as the orange fish photo, so I figured it was probably another picture in a frame. I thought maybe it would be of a giraffe or a polar bear or something cool like that, but when she showed it to me, it was another fish. Lime green with yellow zigzags. She took out three more photos and unwrapped them and lined them up one by one on top of the box. She did it real careful, like they were babies.
And every single one of them was of fish.
“They’re tropical,” Mrs. Finch said, looking down at them and smiling. “Gorgeous, aren’t they? This one’s a clown fish, and this one’s an angelfish, and this one’s a golden neon goby.”
“Mmm,” I said.
I peeked inside the box while Mrs. Finch was busy getting google-eyed over her clown fish photo. There must’ve been thirty of them in there.
“My husband took them,” she said.
I looked over at her face right then, and it was real sad, the saddest I’d ever seen her.
“What was his name?” I asked her.
“Nathan. He died about a year ago.”
I nodded, slow up and down. “Did it happen all of a sudden?”
“No,” she said. “He was very sick for a long time. He had cancer.”
“Jared died all of a sudden,” I told her. “There was a problem with his heart.”
We just stood there for a while, the two of us, looking at those fish photos. But then Mrs. Finch grabbed a piece of newspaper and started wrapping it around the clown fish photo and placed it back in the box. Then she wrapped up the other ones too.
“You should put them up on the walls,” I said. “They’re really”—I tried to remember a good word from Dr. Young’s word wall—“stupefying. You have lots of good places to put them.”
She put the last photo in the box and then smoothed the lid closed. “Oh, I don’t know.” She picked her teacup off the floor and took a long drink. “Maybe,” she said, looking at me thoughtful. “Yes, maybe one day.” She nodded then, like she really meant it. “But I’m not quite sure I’m ready yet.” She took another sip. “Would you like to finish that game of cards now?”
So we went back to the kitchen and Mrs. Finch put on another pot of water for tea. I picked up my cards and looked at them, remembering what they all were. “Whose turn was it?” I asked.
“Yours, I think. To discard.”
“Oh yeah.” I set down my jack of diamonds. “What was your husband like?” I asked Mrs. Finch. “Nathan.”
She picked up the jack and put it in her own hand. “He was very short,” she said. “And he told terrible jokes. But he was incredibly smart. He was a scientist.”
“Did he study lightning like Ben Franklin?” I asked. “We learned about Ben Franklin last year in school.”
“He studied fish.”
“Oh.” I guess that made sense.
“What was Jared like?”
“He was…” I thought about it. It was hard to think up a way to talk about a person, when all you had was words to say it. “He was nice. He was the best brother ever.”
Mrs. Finch smiled. “What sorts of things did he like to do?” she asked me, putting down a three of clubs.
“He liked to hang out with Tommy Lippowitz and play tackle baseball. Sometimes tackle dominoes.” Mrs. Finch laughed. “Oh, and also”—I sat up straighter so I could tell the next part really good—“we used to play this one game all the time. Jared invented it. It’s called the burrito game.”
“The burrito game?”
“Uh-huh.” I picked up a queen and got rid of a
two. “The way you play is you put a blanket on the floor and you lie down on one side and hold on tight to the blanket and then roll over until you’re wrapped up so hard you can barely breathe. The blanket is the tortilla and you’re the beany filling. Then you have to stand up, which is the hard part, because burritos can’t bend their knees, but after you’re both standing, you get to dance around and sing the burrito song that Jared made up. It goes like this: ‘Isn’t it neat-o to be a giant, giant burrito?’” I sang it the best I could, and Mrs. Finch laughed so hard, I thought maybe she’d drop all her cards, but I kept going because I wasn’t done yet. “And when you get sick of singing, you bump your burrito stomachs together for a while like burrito sumo wrestlers, and after that you unroll yourself and eat chocolate pudding.”
“Why chocolate pudding?” Mrs. Finch asked.
“’Cause it tastes good.” I stared at my cards for a minute, but I wasn’t really looking at them. Suddenly all sorts of thoughts about Jared were swirling around my brain, thoughts about the burrito game and bowling and his locked-up bedroom. “His birthday’s this Sunday, you know,” I said after a while.
“Oh, honey.”
I set my cards facedown on the table and tilted my teacup a bit even though there wasn’t tea in it anymore. “Mrs. Finch? Do you think…well, what do you think you’re supposed to do on someone’s birthday? If they’re not around anymore, I mean. ’Cause, well, you can’t have a birthday party, but it still is their birthday, right?”
She thought about that, tapping her cards on the edge of the table. “Maybe the best thing to do for Jared is simply to remember him,” she said.
“But I remember Jared all the time,” I told her. “And that doesn’t feel like enough.”
“Well…” Mrs. Finch kept on tapping her cards. “There are all sorts of ways to remember someone. For instance”—she plucked a card from the draw pile and slid it in between the ones in her hand—“Nathan and I lived in Sicily for a time. That’s in Italy, in the south. There are several remarkable species of fish there.” I nodded like I already knew that before, even though I didn’t. Mrs. Finch put a four of spades down in the discard pile. “Anyway, in Italy, when someone dies, that person’s family and friends write up a sort of story about him—all the nice things he did, and how great he was, and how much everyone loved him.”
