Fearless, Ben scooped up the hamster with one hand, plopped him inside that ball, and snapped the little door closed. Then he ran to the light switch and turned out the lights so we could sit cross-legged on Ben’s bed-that-looked-like-a-race-car and watch the ball glow and roll around the bedroom floor. It was surreal, but I’ll tell you, I about died laughing.
I had time to think back on all this because it was taking Mrs. DiAngelo an age to answer the door. Suddenly, though, I heard footsteps and the sound of the lock being turned from the inside.
“Brady,” Mrs. DiAngelo said, opening the door.
I hoped it wasn’t rude the way I dropped my mouth, but I almost didn’t recognize her she looked so bad. Like a bedraggled ghost, you could say. Her skin was pale as chalk and her eyes puffy with big, dark bags underneath. Even her hair, usually so thick and curly, was pulled back severely, held at the nape of her neck with a cloth scrunchie like a lot of the girls wear at school.
“Come in,” she said, stepping back.
I brushed off my baseball cap as I entered.
She smiled a little when she took the muffins. Since she was dressed in sweatpants and an oversize flannel shirt, I thought maybe we’d go straight to the yard to start working, but she led me through the house to the kitchen.
The DiAngelos’ kitchen is twice the size of our living room, with its own fireplace and glass doors that open onto a patio. There’s a spectacular view overlooking the creek. I glanced at it—you can’t help it—but mostly I was keeping an eye on Mrs. DiAngelo, hoping she wouldn’t get too sad or anything.
“I do want to thank you,” she said.
I knew she didn’t mean the muffins.
“It was no trouble,” I replied, immediately thinking how stupid that sounded. “I mean that I did my best, Mrs. DiAngelo.”
“I’m sure you did, Brady.” She sat and looked out the window.
Unzipping my jacket, I sat down, too. But it was awkward. I didn’t feel as though I had said enough, or the right thing. And you could feel her sorrow. It filled every molecule of air in that room. But man, I did not know what to say! Somehow, we laid out a plan for me coming over to take care of the yard. And even though I’d told her I just wanted to help, she insisted on paying me, and I agreed. I agreed with everything because I didn’t want to argue with her.
That afternoon, I began work by cutting the lawn, which took me about four hours with their riding lawn mower. When I was finished, Mrs. DiAngelo fed me lunch—a sandwich, chips, and lemonade—on her patio. Then she asked if I would take Ben’s hamster.
“Take him. You mean keep him?” I asked.
She nodded quickly, and I could see her eyes filling up.
“Sure—oh, it’s fine!” I assured her, realizing how Tiny Tim must be a constant reminder of Ben. “I’ll take him right now, if you want.”
We strode silently, the two of us, through the house to Ben’s room upstairs. The door was closed, and we stopped outside of it.
“I can’t go in, Brady. But here—” She thrust some money into my hands. “For food and things that he needs.”
I looked at the money, a thick wad of folded bills.
“Please,” she repeated. “I’ll get my car and meet you out front, okay?”
She turned and moved quickly down the stairs. I heard her clogs clomp across the marble foyer, then the front door open and close. Only then did I stuff the money in my pocket and turn the doorknob to enter Ben’s room.
It was just as I remembered it from when I baby-sat several weeks ago. There were LEGOs all over the place, including part of the castle we’d built. A wooden train was set up. The car bed was neatly made, with a stuffed dinosaur leaning against the pillow, which was in the shape of a tire. Pajamas were laid out on the bed. And a pair of fuzzy duck slippers sat waiting on the floor.
I felt extremely sad being in that room. I could understand why Mrs. DiAngelo didn’t want to go in. The hamster was beginning to smell, too. Only then did I wonder what my mother was going to say when I walked in with a hamster. A rodent.
At home, I set the hamster cage on a newspaper-covered card table in my room. Tilly was delighted to have Tiny Tim with us, and Mom didn’t care, it turned out. “Just keep it clean,” she warned. But the first night the hamster made so much noise running around in his wheel that I had to move him down to the basement. How could Ben stand all that racket? I wondered. As it was, I still had trouble sleeping.
I threw myself into working for Mrs. DiAngelo. After school. Saturdays. Sometimes, when I arrived on the weekend, she wasn’t even out of bed. She hid a key in the garage so I could get into the house to use the bathroom or get a drink, and one morning, when I let myself in, I heard her upstairs throwing up. I worried she was making herself sick from being so depressed, and so alone. Her mother, her sister, a friend—they’d all come and gone. But I was afraid to talk to her and so just kept myself busy.
And boy, there was plenty to do at the DiAngelos’ place. Every other week I mowed the lawn and trimmed, which took all day. Then I mulched the gardens, weeded, planted, and watered everything. She had a whole truckload of stuff delivered: impatiens, marigolds, geraniums, miniature roses. She showed me where she wanted everything planted, and the day she stood there, pointing around at her garden, was the first time she seemed just a little bit better.
I guess I got caught up in the moment. “You get a lot of sun here. You ought to plant yourself a butterfly garden—like my mom,” I suggested.
“A butterfly garden,” she repeated, like it was a real enchanting idea.
She crossed her arms, thinking, while I dug a hole for one of the rosebushes. “We get a lot of butterflies,” I said, angling the shovel.
“There are certain plants, then, that they like?”
“Oh! Are you kidding?” I had to stop for a second, to expound a little, because I knew a lot about butterflies. “First off, they don’t like red. They like yellow and purple—and blue the best.”
“Really?”
“Clusters, too,” I said, encouraged by her interest. “You know, as opposed to, like, a single plant. And they need some flat rocks—so they can warm up before they take off. Plus a low-lying source of water. You could put in a lily-pad pond or just a birdbath if you didn’t want to go to the trouble.”
She glanced around the yard. “How about by the pool?”
“Perfect! Any place that gets a lot of sun.”
I grinned and went back to digging.
“How long has your mom had a butterfly garden?” she asked.
I had to stop and think. “Six years,” I replied, dumping the earth beside the hole. “Ever since my sister died.”
Boy, I knew the instant I said it that I shouldn’t have because it would make her think of Ben. And there I was—digging holes! Warily, I looked up.
Mrs. DiAngelo looked startled. “You lost a sister, Brady?”
“Yeah,” I acknowledged with a sigh. “When she was five months old.”
She put a hand up on her chest.
“It’s okay now!” I rushed to assure her, even though it wasn’t really true. “I mean that it was a long time ago. And the butterfly garden has helped.”
Her wide, mournful eyes had settled on me, and I could tell they weren’t going anywhere until I explained that a little better.
“Mom—my mom—she believes that butterflies are like little spirits. Who knows? Maybe even my sister’s,” I said, shrugging because I’d never been sure about that.
Mrs. DiAngelo nodded. “Would you excuse me, Brady?” she said before rushing off.
I kicked the shovel because I knew I’d stirred things up. I wondered if she’d want me back after that. But she did. She even started asking me what I liked for sandwiches and drinks, and at noon, she’d sit down with me to chitchat for a few minutes while I ate. One day, we talked about butterflies again, and I told her about butterfly eyes.
“They can look forward and backward at the same time,” I said. �
�It’s true because they have hundreds of separate lenses. It’s like looking out from a bowl—a fish-eye, panoramic view of the world.”
Her dark eyes sparkled.
“You don’t believe me? Try sneaking up on a butterfly!” I challenged her.
“Oh, I believe you!”
I have to say, it was terrific to see her smile again even if she did still look pretty run-down.
Digger was still being a total jerk, avoiding me. But J.T. started talking to me in school. “We need to get together,” he kept saying. But neither one of us picked up the phone. I was busy, and I figured he was, too, working his butt off on that chicken farm after school—plus we had final exams coming up. It’s funny. Even though I came home exhausted every day that I worked for Mrs. DiAngelo, I was getting some of my old energy back. Evenings, I threw the ball for Tilly, helped Dad repair some of his broken crab pots, and even offered to help my mother with the dishes one night when it wasn’t my turn.
“Mrs. DiAngelo is curious about your garden,” I told Mom as I plunged my hands into the soapy water.
My mother was putting leftovers away. “She is?”
“Yeah, she’s been reading up on it. Just today she asked about your foundation shrubs. So I told her about the butterfly bush and that smaller one, the purple one.”
“Lavender,” Mom gently reminded me as she snapped the lid on a bowl of leftover coleslaw. “Lots of different shrubs would work, though: azaleas, rhododendrons, spice-bush—a wisteria vine.”
“Mom, I told her about the butterfly bush and the lavender because they get a lot of butterflies. I didn’t know all the other names. You do, though. Maybe you could go over one day and give her some advice.”
“Me?” Mom put the bowl in the refrigerator and stood, closing the door, with her back to me.
“Yeah, you, Mom. It might be nice. I mean, no one ever goes to see her. A couple of people from her church now and then. But they don’t stay long.” I rinsed a pot and set it in the dish drainer.
She turned around. “Marcellus hasn’t come back?”
“No. She even told me one day he blames her for what happened.”
Mom winced. “She did?”
“Yeah, I guess she wanted me to know why he wasn’t there. I feel sorry for her because she’s so alone. She spends the first half of the day in bed, then she just sort of goes through the motions the rest of the day.”
Mom retrieved a basket from the table and put the leftover rolls in a Ziploc bag. “The poor thing, she must be so depressed.”
“I don’t know about depressed,” I said, scrubbing hard on a blackened skillet. “But she sure is sick a lot. Almost every morning she throws up—”
“Brady!” Mom swung around to look at me.
“What?”
“Is Mrs. DiAngelo pregnant?”
I stopped scrubbing. “How would I know?!”
Mom’s eyes flitted sideways. She ran a hand back through her hair. “I’m sorry. Of course you wouldn’t know. But those are pretty classic symptoms, you know—morning nausea, fatigue.”
I didn’t say anything. Just went back to cleaning that skillet.
“Well, is there something you can do for her?” Mom persisted.
That’s what got me. I stopped scrubbing and turned around to confront my mother. “I don’t know what more I can do, but you know what? Maybe you could try to help her, too. I mean, gee whiz—you’re a mother! You lost a kid! You have things to say to her that I can’t!”
Never had I spoken to my mother like that before. Never. I let my breath out and stared at the faucets, then rested my wrists on the edge of the sink, bracing myself for Mom’s angry reaction. But it never came.
“You’re right,” Mom said quietly. She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “I should go see her.” She untied her apron, folded it, and set it on the counter. “I should go see her right now.”
And I watched her go.
Across the kitchen. And out the door.
I don’t know what Mom said, but I do know this: A few days later, Mrs. DiAngelo had one fine butterfly garden out there by her pool. I know because I planted it! She had a butterfly bush and yellow sunflowers, cosmos, daisies, daylilies, two birdbaths full of water. I even planted some milkweed, violets, and wispy salt grass for the caterpillars—you know, when butterflies are in the larval stage. Then I bordered all of it with dozens of miniature marigolds.
Not that I was keeping track, but it had been six weeks since Ben died, and I was beginning to feel things shift just a little for the better.
At the end of May, the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I planned on working a few hours for Mrs. DiAngelo, then I was going to knock off early and go to a picnic at my uncle Henry’s. Get this—I was even thinking of asking J.T. to come with us.
Memorial Day weekend. I’ll never forget it. Because just when things started to come back together, they came undone in a Big Way.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was a hot day, that Saturday. I had mowed the lawn the weekend before, so Mrs. DiAngelo said she had something else for me to do. “Down at the dock,” she said, “there’s a lovely old boathouse that we’ve never cleaned out.”
She didn’t realize that I knew the old boathouse like the back of my hand. When Digger’s grandfather owned the property, J.T., Digger, and I played pirates in that boathouse and used our dinghy for the pirate ship.
“I wondered if you could get things into some kind of order,” Mrs. DiAngelo said. “Pull everything out, sort it. If there’s anything salvageable, put it aside. Make a pile for the dump. Then just rake up around there. It’s such a mess.”
“Sure,” I replied.
“Another thing,” she said. “I’ll be away for a couple of days.”
“You will?” I was surprised.
“Yes.” She started to smile. “Thanks to your mother. She’s the one who talked a little sense into me. I’m going in to Washington. My husband and I have been talking. We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”
I was confused.
“What I mean,” she explained, “is that there is another baby on the way and we need to prepare for that.”
“A baby?” I was stunned.
She dropped her eyes. “We’ll never get over what happened, Brady. Never.” Looking up at me, she added, “But life does go on.”
I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open because Mrs. DiAngelo slowly grinned at my reaction. “Your mother knows about the baby. Now you do, too.”
“Wow. I mean con-congratulations,” I stammered. Truly, I was happy for her. “That’s really good news!”
“Yes.” She glanced around her. “Well. Anyway—Brady, would you mind just coming over and checking on things while I’m gone?”
“Not at all.”
“You could turn the sprinkler on one evening, maybe. And take the mail and newspapers in. I’ll be away until Tuesday.”
“No problem,” I said, beaming. “It’s no problem at all.”
She touched my arm. “Thanks. You’ve been such a help to me.”
I took a rake and a couple big garbage bags and headed on down the hill behind the three-car garage to the dock. The DiAngelos’ sailboat bobbed nearby in its slip, and their powerboat sat gleaming on a boat lift beside it. On shore was a dark green canoe, flipped over. And off toward some bushes were two wooden sawhorses, a few feet apart. The sawhorses were where Mr. DiAngelo had rested the red kayak when it was out of the water.
Opening the door to the boathouse, I stepped inside. Besides a lot of dust, a bunch of old memories drifted around me. Not just the pirate games we used to play, but the morning J.T. cut his knee on a piece of broken glass and had to get stitches. And the time Digger ran away from home and made a bed for himself on a bunch of empty grain sacks in one corner. I had to shake my head, remembering how we all brought him food—sandwiches and cookies and stuff, but his sojourn didn’t last much beyond dinnertime. When bats started flying around at dusk, he
got scared and went on home.
Peering inside a wooden barrel full of bailing twine, I recalled the rope ladders we used to make for our pirate getaways and how one time the flimsy twine ladder broke, sending me into the water with a big splash while J.T. and Digger howled from the dock above.
“Whew!” I needed to plow through the nostalgia and get to work. But where to start? Junk in that boathouse was piled ten feet high. Old wicker lawn furniture, tattered fruit baskets, a large, cracked headboard. Overwhelmed, I decided to clean around the outside first.
Grabbing the rake, I began pulling debris away from the sides of the boathouse. Dried-up leaves, piles of brush, big pieces of plastic from a kids’ old swimming pool. It wasn’t going to be fun or easy, I concluded pretty quickly. But I gritted my teeth and went at it so I could knock off and go home early.
“Good-bye, Brady!” Mrs. DiAngelo called out from the hill. She had sunglasses on, her hair up in a little bun, a tote bag in her hand.
I waved back. “Have a good trip!”
After she left, I went clear down one side of the boathouse, raking, making piles, and periodically stuffing the junk into one of the two black leaf bags. Already sweat was trickling down my face and neck. My hands were slick inside the heavy work gloves I wore. I took them off so my hands could breathe for a while, tossed the gloves on a nearby tree stump, and took a long drink of ice water from the plastic jug I’d brought with me.
Out of the blue, I smiled. Truth was, I was pretty happy about the baby. I knew it wouldn’t replace Ben. But it had to help. I started whistling a song I liked from the radio as I went back to work.
It was when I turned the corner on the boathouse and pulled the rake through a tangle of prickers that I saw something reflect the sun. At first I thought it might be a knife, some kind of a silver knife. I stopped whistling. But when I reached over to pull it out of the weeds, I saw it wasn’t a knife at all. It was a drill. My father’s cordless drill. The one he said he was missing a while back.
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