by Linda Crew
Down below, I could hear Dad talking to Mom in the bathroom while they wrestled the babies into their jammies. He sounded pretty jazzed up about his gourmet production.
“I thought salmon, for sure. And that sautéed mushroom recipe? The one that calls for the spendy chanterelles? That’d be impressive. They don’t have to know we went out and picked them ourselves! Lucy, stop wriggling! We have plenty of frozen raspberries, right? And we ought to get a local wine …”
“How about some fancy dessert cheeses?”
Cheese for dessert. Now there’s an idea that should have been squashed the first time some lame-brain put it into words. I don’t care if Tillamook cheese is a big deal around here. Dessert ought to be chocolate. Period. Oh well, I wouldn’t be eating it …
After the kids were dressed, Mom started reading them Home for a Bunny, one of my old books. I always thought it was too sad … that bunny going down the road and down the road, looking for a home. I never let Mom read long enough to find out he got his home in the end.
But Freddie and Lucy like it. I lay there on my quilt, staring at the ceiling, listening. Funny, I’d heard her read this story to them hundreds of times by now, but I’d never noticed before how much that mean old groundhog sounded like Orin Downard. “No, you can’t come in my log!”
After the story, Lucy and Freddie padded over and hollered for me to climb down and give them their good-night hugs.
“Well, Robby,” Dad said when we had them all tucked in. “This is kind of exciting, isn’t it? A fancy dinner for the new Nekomah Creek counselor.”
“What?”
“The new counselor,” Mom said. “Didn’t you notice she was the one who bought your dad’s dinner?”
My eyes bugged out. I felt my jaw working but no words came.
“What’s the matter?” Mom said.
Dad was watching me with a puzzled smile. He leaned toward Mom. “Looks like a fish thrown up on a streambank. What’s the matter, Robby? Don’t you have any confidence in your old dad?”
They laughed and turned away.
“Maybe this is her way of thanking you,” Mom said to Dad. “She probably realizes it was your impassioned testimony that convinced the school board to hire a counselor in the first place.”
“You think so?” Dad said. “No, I’ll bet she’s just interested in fine dining.”
Nobody seemed to notice that the gasping fish on the bank—me—was in total shock.
Because I knew the real reason Mrs. Van Gent wanted to come here.
She wanted to spy on our family!
4
Pig Snouts and Other Worries
A shadow fell across my desk. I looked up from the picture I was working on.
“Aw, ain’t that cute!” Orin said. “Look at all them little animals.”
I went stiff.
He aimed a pretend rifle at my picture. “Blam! Blam!”
I jerked my arms across the paper as if his make-believe bullets could really hurt.
“Run, li’l Bambi! Run!”
Mrs. Perkins was frowning over some papers. She had a way of acting real busy whenever Orin goofed off.
Somebody said she was his mom’s second cousin or something. Could be. Lots of people whose families have lived around here a long time are related to each other. So maybe that’s why he got away with stuff. Maybe she liked him.
He cackled all the way back to his seat.
Rose Windom and I traded looks. Rose had only started at Nekomah Creek this year, and already she’d had her fill of Orin Downard. No wonder. On the first day, Orin sized up her clothes and said, “Oh, great, another hippie.”
He called a lot of us hippies—anybody whose father wasn’t a farmer or a logger or a fisherman. He wasn’t nice to kids like Jason, either, the ones who lived in big split-level houses and had parents who worked in Douglas Bay. “City boy!” he called Jason.
Why was he like that? Beats me. Most of the kids didn’t much care whose parents did what. They hung around with certain people because they both liked baseball or Nintendo. But Orin kept wanting to sort people out and divide them up.
“You think you can come here and tell us how to run things,” he was always saying. “ ‘Don’t cut down them trees, don’t go huntin’ no more.’ ”
I never said any of that to him. Those were things the grown-ups argued about. But one time I got mad and I did say, “Hey, I’ve been here as long as you have. I’ve lived here all my life too.”
“So? Your Grampa wasn’t born right here in Tillamook County, was he?”
He had me there. I had one grampa in Southern California and I used to have one in Yakima, Washington. They weren’t born here and they weren’t loggers.
“He’s just spouting what he hears his father say,” my folks told me. “Ignore him.”
Parents always say that. Have you ever tried doing it?
Lately, I couldn’t ignore him. Because now it wasn’t just his usual line—Nobody’s as tough as a logger. Now it was: Your dad is a wimp and so are you.
Ever since the auction, I’d been thinking about dads who cook. About dads in general.
I should have just said “Oh, who gives a rip what Orin Downard thinks?” But it bugged me enough that I made the mistake of bringing it up to my friend Ben one day in the cafeteria after Orin had walked by and shoved me.
“Orin’s such a jerk,” I said. “Tries to make a federal case out of it just because my dad does all our cooking.”
Now this is where Ben was supposed to say, “That’s dumb.”
Instead he said, “Your dad does all the cooking? That’s weird.”
“Ben.”
“Well, don’t you think it is? A little?”
Ben’s opinion mattered a lot more than Orin’s. So calling us weird kind of hurt. Even if he hadn’t meant to be mean.
“Why doesn’t your mother cook?” he asked.
My peanut butter sandwich stuck to the roof of my mouth. “She doesn’t like to.” I swallowed hard. “And she’s no good at it, either.”
“What does she do, then?”
“Ben. She’s an artist, you know that. You’ve seen her studio at the house.”
“Yeah, but …”
“And last month she went back to work at the printing shop.”
“Yeah?” He twisted the top off his orange Squeezit. “So who’s taking care of the twins?”
“My dad. Mostly.”
“Oh.” He looked like he wasn’t sure about this.
I stuck out my chin. “What’s the matter with that?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Nothing, I guess.”
Were we weird? I watched him bite into one of those yummy cupcakes his mother makes. I guess we were different from his family, anyway. They ran this dairy on the other side of Tillicum Head—green pastures full of black and white cows. His dad drove a big old tractor and wore a baseball hat with a John Deere patch on it.
I liked going to the Hammonds’. It wasn’t a wild kind of fun because Ben’s dad was usually busy working. But Ben’s mom was nice and their house was … organized. And quiet. You could read there. Staying overnight with them was like visiting another planet.
But just because we weren’t like Ben’s family didn’t automatically make us weird, did it?
Next I tried Jason Corwin. His folks were both realtors. They lived in a huge house perched up where they got a terrific view of the ocean. Their place was quiet too, compared to ours. So many rooms, you could never fill them up with noise or mess. Not that I didn’t feel like trying! Every time I walked in the front door, I got this strange urge to start throwing pillows around or something.
As far as food, most of what I saw at Jason’s house was take-home stuff brought by one of his parents after work.
This time I didn’t beat around the bush. “Jason,” I said, “does your dad cook?”
“Sure.”
Good. Then my dad wasn’t the only one.
“He does all our
barbecuing in the summer.”
“Oh.” I sighed. That wasn’t the same at all.
Right then Amber Hixon came by with her empty lunch tray. She stopped.
“Don’t worry, Robby.” She leaned in close to me. “My dad does all our cooking too.”
Shock zapped the roots of my hair. She’d been listening from the next table! Watching her walk away, I wished she’d never seen me at the counselor’s, because this new buddy-buddy business gave me the shivers. I mean, was it supposed to perk me up that her dad cooked? Well, it didn’t. Not if her family was the reason she had to go to counseling sessions in the first place.
Now, finishing up my drawing, I was glad when Mrs. Perkins announced that the art teacher was coming the next day and we’d be starting a special project. We were supposed to bring shoe boxes from home to make these little dioramas. You’d peek through a hole and see the scene inside. I thought it sounded great. I put all my worries right out of my mind and started planning what kind of a scene I’d do.
After school that day Rose was waiting for me by the bike racks. Darn. I was hoping she’d forget I promised to stop by her place on the way home. I’d been up there when it was Aaron Stingley’s house, and it gave me the creeps. Pretty sad looking, as I recall, and it smelled funny. I didn’t like to think of Rose living there.
But she was all smiles. She opened the big cloth bag she always carried. “I forgot. I brought this for you.” It was a paperback of one of those Little House on the Prairie books. Looked like it had been read about a million times.
“Thanks.” Our school library was not that huge, so I was always glad for more books.
Rose felt the same way. I guess that’s how we got friendly so fast.
Mrs. Perkins thought books were important too, as long as you read them during assigned reading time. We had this bulletin board with a paper triangle ice cream cone for each person. Every time you read a book, you got to pin another scoop on your cone. Rose and I had a lot more scoops than anybody else. One day Mrs. Perkins told the class that at this rate, Rose and I would probably be the only ones to earn the reward of real ice cream. Rose and I had looked at each other and gulped, partly proud, partly embarrassed. Think how everyone would hate us if that happened! Ever since then I’ve been reading tons of books on the sly, only turning in enough book reports to keep Mrs. Perkins from getting suspicious.
But back to Rose … She has this long, dark, tangly hair. Her eyes are big and … well, I don’t want to sound mushy—I’m only telling you this so you’ll know. Have you ever seen sunlight shining through a 7-Up bottle, so green and pretty? Well, that’s the color of Rose’s eyes.
She has a whole bunch of sisters. You can recognize them because they all dress the same—long flowered skirts and big bulky hand-knit sweaters. When it’s cold they wear hats made out of leftover yarn knitted in fancy patterns—like Indians of the Andes in National Geographic magazine.
Now some of the girls in my class seem kind of silly. Like Monica Sturdivant, who has to have these little matching kitties on all her notebooks and pencils and boxes of tissue. Whenever I tell some interesting fact I’ve read, she screws up her face and goes, “Nyuh uu-uh!”
But Rose isn’t like that. Rose even likes Encyclopedia Brown.
Kids were streaming past us now, some lining up for the bus, a few unlocking their bikes. Rose’s two older sisters headed down the road, and her younger one—the first grader with the baggy tights—waited to go with us. Her name was Cassie.
When Amber Hixon walked by she gave me that smirk again, the one I was beginning to think of as the I-know-something-about-you look. I wished she’d quit it.
She started to go on. Then, like she’d had a second thought, she stopped and turned back to us. Her chin did that little sticking out thing. “I have to hurry,” she announced, “because my Mom’s taking me to buy a pony today.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I already have the bridle,” she went on. “It’s purple and covered with jewels.”
Rose and I glanced at each other.
“Well, they aren’t real diamonds. I never said that. Just rhinestones. But it costed a lot anyways.”
What could we say? What could you ever say when she blurted out stuff like this?
She pushed back her cowlick and jerked her chin again. Then she headed toward a long, shiny car that was pulling up. She’d barely got in before it peeled out.
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Rose said as I twirled the combination lock on my bike. “About the bridle.”
“She admitted they weren’t diamonds.”
“Still …”
We started down the road, me pushing my bike, Rose’s sister trailing behind, banging a rusty Care-Bears lunchbox on her knee. It was a pretty day, the sun lighting up the orange vine maple at the edge of the forest.
“Look out, girls!” Orin swooped by on his bike, making us all jump toward the ditch.
“That jerk,” I said. My shin hurt where I’d bashed it against my bike pedal.
We walked through the covered bridge without talking, the bam bam of the lunchbox echoing behind us. I’d be glad when we were safely up Rose’s driveway and out of sight. I didn’t want people noticing me going home with her. Maybe she felt funny too.
“Robby?” she finally said. “Do you think you might have an extra shoe box I could use? For the art project?”
“Probably.” I was puzzled. “Why?”
She kicked at a rock with the worn toe of her boot. “We don’t get many shoes new. In boxes.”
“Oh. Well, sure. I’ll find one for you.”
“Thanks.”
We walked some more, then I decided to try her on my question of the day.
“Rose? Does your dad cook?”
She turned those big green eyes on me. “I don’t have a dad.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I did, but he’s gone. I don’t remember him cooking though. Why?”
I looked at her a moment. “I just wondered.”
But now I wasn’t thinking about having a dad who cooked. I was thinking about having no dad at all. Without my dad, our family would have a big hole in it.
“My dad was okay,” Rose said, as if I’d asked her. “Not mean or anything. Mom says he just wouldn’t settle down.”
“Oh.” I had never talked to anyone whose dad had up and run off before. I wasn’t sure what a person was supposed to say.
“Do you know where he is now?”
“California, we think. My mom’s trying to find him because he’s supposed to be sending money for me. I hope she does. If I can’t have a dad, I’d at least like to have some new shoes!”
My mouth twitched, trying to smile. Nice she could joke about it, I guess. Maybe he left so long ago she was used to the idea.
“Instead of a dad and mom,” Rose said, “I sort of have two moms right now. When my mom’s friend Shelley got divorced, she and my mom decided to go together and rent a house up here to save money.”
“Wow.” I pictured my mother double, telling me to pull up my socks, put my stuff away … “Two moms. Don’t they drive you crazy?”
Rose thought. “No, not really. It’s okay. I’d rather have a father … If I could have a good one, but … actually, it’s okay.”
“Wait a minute.” I glanced behind us and lowered my voice. “What about all these sisters?”
She smiled. “Haven’t you heard of stepsisters?”
“Uh, mostly wicked ones.”
“That’s fairy tales. In real life, mine have been kind of fun.” She turned to check on Cassie. “They’re not for-real stepsisters, of course, but it probably feels about the same.”
I watched her stoop to tie Cassie’s shoe. Funny, when you thought about it, the different ways a family could be.
We turned up her muddy drive now. I felt better when I saw the house. The weathered shingle siding was the same, but they’d given the trim a fresh coat of red. Wood smoke curled from th
e chimney.
I wiped the mud off my shoes and followed Rose inside. I stared. The place looked so different. They’d hung quilts on the walls and draped afghans over the sofas. This wasn’t a house—it was a nest! Little embroidered pictures were everywhere. I swear, anything you could do with a needle and thread, these people did.
Now for best smells in the world, you have to put baking bread right up there at the top, and that’s what Rose’s house smelled like. Her mother was just taking it out of the oven. She cut a thick, hot slice for each of us kids, and poured glasses of fresh-pressed apple cider.
After that Rose showed me her wooden crate bookshelves where she kept her books, and then we went outside. Now that we were at her house, away from the other kids at school, I didn’t feel so shy about talking.
Rose stood in the tire swing and spun, leaning back, staring up through the tree branches. “Are you coming to the Halloween party next week?”
“Sure. You?”
“Mmm hmm.” She jumped down. “How about your dad?”
“Yeah, he’s coming too.” I climbed onto the tire. “He signed up to be in charge of the apple bobbing.”
“Oh.” Rose seemed pleased. I think she likes my dad. She sat with us on the bus for the field trip up to the cheese factory and Dad had her giggling all the way to Tillamook with these coin tricks he does.
I pumped the swing higher, remembering that. Then I remembered something else—Amber, on the bus with us. “My dad does that same trick,” she’d said. “And he stays home and takes care of my baby brother just like you do, Mr. Hummer.”
Darn. I stopped swinging. I wished I’d quit hearing everything Amber Hixon ever said coming back to me. And wait a minute—baby brother? Now that I thought of it, I was sure Amber had said her mom was going to have twins. She’d whispered it to me the day I gave everyone chocolate cigars to celebrate Freddie and Lucy getting born. Well, that was two years ago. I’m no expert, but shouldn’t those twins have been born by now? She only mentioned this baby brother, and how was I to know? I couldn’t remember seeing her family at any school programs, and I’d never heard anybody talking about going over to her house. Amber only mentioned her family in these little bulletins about what they were going to do or buy.
