Kristy's Book

by Ann M. Martin

  By the time I rode my bike up our driveway I’d decided that my relationship with Dad would be a lot better when he was living in Stoneybrook. I even had a solution for the glove problem. After I mowed the lawn, I’d go to the sporting goods store in town and exchange it for a left-handed one. Then, if anyone asked me where I got my new glove, I’d say I finally had enough saved up for it. Everyone knew I was saving for one. For now it would be my secret that my dad — my very own dad — had given it to me.

  I heard the chug-chug of our lawn mower and wondered if Watson was doing my job. He was. When he saw me he turned off the motor.

  “Thanks for starting the lawn,” I said. “I can finish it now.”

  “Okay.” He wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and smiled at me in the old familiar way. Nothing seemed unusual. He didn’t question me, either. I wondered if he’d told Mom that I’d lied about baby-sitting.

  As I took off my backpack, the baseball glove fell out. Watson picked it up, studied it for a second, and handed it back to me without saying anything. I quickly stuffed the glove in my pack again and restarted the lawn mower.

  When I finished mowing, I went inside to wash up. Mom was making lunch. “Hi, honey,” she said. “How did your job with the Barrett kids go?”

  “Fine,” I answered. “Nothing unusual.”

  When she accepted that, I knew Watson hadn’t told on me.

  That afternoon I told my mother I was going over to Mary Anne’s house, which was true. I didn’t tell her that first I was going to go to the sporting goods store to exchange my new glove.

  As I walked into the store I was feeling pretty good. I’d have the baseball glove I needed and it would sort of be from my dad. I handed the new glove to the clerk. “I’d like to exchange this,” I said. “It’s a righty and I’m a lefty. The person who gave it to me didn’t know.”

  The clerk looked the glove over, inside and out. “You sure he got it here?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “It’s a Rawlings,” he said. “And we carry those. But this glove wasn’t bought here.”

  “Could you exchange it anyway?” I asked. “It’s new and you carry Rawlings gloves.”

  “Look, Miss,” he said. “It seems to me that you’re trying to pull a fast one on me.”

  My heart started pounding. Did he think I had shoplifted the glove and was now trying to exchange it? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  He looked me in the eye and seemed to be thinking something over. Finally he said, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you don’t know.”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “This glove has been personalized,” he explained. “Something’s printed inside.” He held the glove open so I could see the print inside the heel. It read, “California Sportswriters Annual Awards Dinner.”

  “Your glove was a giveaway at some banquet,” he continued. “Rawlings must have given them to all the journalists. You know, like a party favor. Is your friend a sportswriter?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  The clerk handed me back the glove. I left the store in a hurry and rode to Mary Anne’s. We went to her room so we could be private and I told her the whole story.

  “It’d be different if he’d been honest with me,” I told her. “I mean if he’d said, ‘I got this glove at a banquet and I thought you could use it.’ But to say, ‘It’s a present for some of the birthdays I missed.’ And then not to tell me it was a present someone gave him. I hate it. It’s all wrong.”

  “Maybe it’ll be different when he’s living here,” Mary Anne said. “Maybe you have to give him a second chance. He’s probably not used to thinking about how other people feel.”

  “What really bothers me,” I went on, “is that I can’t tell him how he hurt me. I didn’t even tell him I’m a lefty. To me if someone doesn’t take the trouble to know you, that means they don’t want to know you.”

  “I’m sorry he did that to you,” Mary Anne said. She was crying.

  “Come on, Mary Anne,” I said. “Don’t cry.”

  She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I’m sorry.”

  “And don’t be sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry I said I’m sorry.”

  That made us both smile.

  “You were right,” I told her. “Patrick is immature. He must have made a terrible husband for my mom.”

  “She had better luck with Watson,” Mary Anne agreed. “He’s pretty neat. You’re lucky to have him for a stepfather.”

  “I guess,” I said. Then I told her how Watson knew I had lied about baby-sitting that morning and hadn’t told my mother.

  I met Patrick for about an hour before my baby-sitting job the next evening. I still didn’t tell him about the glove. I couldn’t find the right words.

  As it turned out, I never had a chance to tell him that his one and only daughter was a lefty. Because two days later Patrick Thomas skipped town and I haven’t heard from him since. He didn’t tell me he was leaving. He just didn’t show up when I was supposed to meet him. He’d checked out of the hotel and was gone.

  That’s when I finally told my mother the whole story. She forgave me for all the lying I had done. “I wish you’d told me Patrick was here, though,” she said. “I could have warned you a little about him.”

  “I don’t think I would have listened to you,” I said. “And you know what? I’m glad it happened. Now I really know what he’s like.”

  I talked to Watson about what happened with my father, too. And I thanked him for keeping my secret when he caught me in a lie. He brushed off my thank you. “It was the thing to do in the situation,” he said. “Besides, Kristy, you’re a person I know and trust.”

  I thought, You’re a person I know and trust, too. But all I said was “Well, thanks anyway.”

  Even though my mom and Watson were so nice to me, I felt pretty glum about all that had happened with Patrick. I’d built up a fantasy about what my life would be like if my real father lived in Stoneybrook. I also had a fantasy about what kind of person he was and how he felt about me. Now my fantasies had been replaced by reality.

  When I came downstairs for dinner not long after Patrick skipped town, everyone in our family was already in the dining room. I pulled out my seat. A big box with a purple ribbon was on it. I looked up. Everyone was grinning at me. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “A present,” said Charlie.

  “It’s from Daddy,” Andrew added.

  “It is from all of us,” Karen corrected him. “Daddy just picked it out.”

  I looked around at my family. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Open it,” said my mother.

  I put the box on the table in front of me, untied the ribbon, pulled off the cover, and looked inside. “A baseball glove,” I said. “Just what I needed.”

  Everyone laughed because I’d been saying I needed a new baseball glove for weeks. It was a glove for a lefty. I put it on. Then I hugged Watson and patted him on the shoulder with the mitt. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Use it in good health,” he said. “And make a lot of catches.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  My real father may have disappointed me. But my stepfather would not. He knew me. He loved me. And he was there for me.

  I finished my autobiography late Sunday night and turned it in on Monday morning. When I had started my autobiography I thought I wouldn’t have enough to write about. But by the time I finished it I’d thought of a dozen more stories about my life that I might have worked in. I could have written a five-hundred-page book on the first thirteen years of my life!

  After I turned in my autobiography I found myself still thinking about it. At lunch on Monday I reminded Mary Anne and Claudia about the time we made the snowpeople and bought Mimi a scarf for her birthday.

  “I wished I’d thought to write about that in my autobiography,” said Claudia
. “That was so much fun.”

  “I remember thinking how smart you were, Kristy,” said Mary Anne. “Having a snow-person-building business was brilliant. You’re the only person I know who could come up with an idea like that.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  That night, at dinner, I reminded my brothers of the time I went to the soccer game and to see Car Man with them. We ended up telling our whole family the plot of that movie. Everyone was cracking up. Especially when Andrew tried to fit into Emily’s toddler car so he could be Car Man. Charlie told him he had a better idea for being Car Man. He pinned one of Andrew’s toy cars to the top of a baseball cap and put it on Andrew’s head. “Wear this when you transform into Car Man,” he told Andrew. “It fits you better than Emily’s car.”

  Andrew va-room-ed and honk-honk-ed around the house with the plastic car bobbing on his head. Karen was the arch-villain, Fire Breath.

  On Wednesday afternoon I had a Krushers practice game. To save time I told the kids to take the same sides they had taken at our last practice. By the third inning of the game I noticed that the two teams were not being very nice to one another. It reminded me of the Bluejays and the Robins at Camp Topnotch. I called a time-out and announced, “It’s story hour.”

  The kids laughed at the idea of a story hour during softball practice, but they were happy to sit around me to hear a story. I noticed that they sat in two groups according to their practice teams. The bad feeling hung in the air between them.

  “This story is about something that happened to a girl named Kristy,” I began. “She went to a summer camp where you could play softball all day long.” Then I told the Krushers the story of my experiences at Camp Topnotch. They laughed a lot at the pranks the Robins and Bluejays played on one another, but they were shocked when the coach quit.

  “Are you going to quit because we’re fighting?” Buddy Barrett asked.

  “Should I?” I asked.

  “No!” the Krushers shouted.

  After that story, the rest of the practice game went very smoothly.

  On Thursday I mowed our lawn after school. Watson came outside when I was about halfway through and trimmed the edges with the weed-eater. When we were putting the lawn mower and weed-eater back in the garage he asked me if I had gotten my autobiography back.

  “We’re getting them back tomorrow,” I answered. “I wrote about you in mine. About when you surprised me with the new baseball glove.”

  “Hey, thanks,” he said. He bowed. “I’m honored to be in your autobiography.”

  As we were going into the house I told him about the time our old dog Louie was sprayed by a skunk. And how Charlie, Sam, and I gave Louie a tomato juice bath. Watson thought that was pretty funny. Then he told me that a light spray of clear vinegar is a much better antidote for skunk smell. “Put clear vinegar in a spray bottle and spray the animal,” he said, “but be careful not to get any in his eyes. And you don’t have to rinse the vinegar off.”

  “Thanks,” I told Watson. “I hope I never have to use your advice for Shannon.” Just then I thought I saw a skunk running under a bush. We ran into the house, laughing.

  But the next morning during English class I wasn’t laughing. I was nervous about the grade I would get on my autobiography. I’d worked hard on it and I thought it was pretty good. But what if Mrs. Simon didn’t agree with me? Maybe I had written too much about softball. Maybe she wouldn’t understand why I had lied to my wonderful mother to protect my not-so-wonderful father. Would she take off points if she disapproved of me? I crossed my fingers under my desk and waited as Mrs. Simon called my classmates one by one to collect their graded autobiographies from her desk.

  Finally, she called my name. I carried Thirteen Years in the Life of Kristin Amanda Thomas back to my desk, opened the front cover, and read:

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Jeanne Betancourt

  for her help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN M. MARTIN is the acclaimed and bestselling author of a number of novels and series, including Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), A Dog’s Life, Here Today, P.S. Longer Letter Later (written with Paula Danziger), the Family Tree series, the Doll People series (written with Laura Godwin), the Main Street series, and the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club. She lives in New York.

  Copyright © 1996 by Ann M. Martin

  Interior art and cover drawing by Angelo Tillery

  Cover painting by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, 1996

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-09283-7