Sweeping Up the Heart

by Kevin Henkes

  Dedication

  For Clara

  Epigraph

  The whole secret is something

  very few people ever discover.

  —William Maxwell, The Heavenly Tenants

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Poor Thing

  2. Mrs. O’Brien

  3. Knobby Knees

  4. The Nephew

  5. Rabbit

  6. Gwen and Charlie Till Death Do Us Part

  7. Feather

  8. Dr. Cotton

  9. Poetry Group

  10. Quiz

  11. A Lot

  12. Frosting and Lamb Chop

  13. Epiphany

  14. The Wind

  15. Lucky Penny

  16. Scenario

  17. Too Big

  18. Nothing

  19. Heart

  20. Real

  21. Tree

  22. The Mystery of the Situation

  23. Sidestepping

  24. White Horse

  25. Sleepover

  26. A Barrage of Questions

  27. Sweeping

  28. Gone

  29. A Letter and a Cake

  30. What Was Actually Happening

  31. Nonsense and Sorrow

  32. Just Right

  33. Human Frailty

  34. Postcard

  35. Needed

  About the Author

  Books by Kevin Henkes

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1 • Poor Thing

  Poor Amelia Albright.

  Gordon Albright’s daughter.

  Poor thing, people said.

  It was Mrs. O’Brien who said it most often. Nearly every day.

  Right now Amelia couldn’t agree more with the sentiment. Poor me, she thought. It was the beginning of spring break. Saturday. She should have been happy, excited to be free of the curse of seventh grade for a week, but she felt a nagging disappointment in general, and sharp pinpricks of anger specifically directed toward her father.

  She’d begged him for months to take her on a trip during break. Rarely did her vacation and his fall upon the same dates. When she’d discovered that they did, in fact, coincide this year, her vision became crystal, and she’d begun her campaign for a trip to Florida. It seemed everyone at school was going to Florida, a place she’d never been. The other place she wanted to go was France, to visit her friend who was living there for a year, but she didn’t dare suggest it; his going along with that idea seemed as unlikely as her mother showing up at the front door.

  “Florida?” her father had said, the word placed gently, but like a roadblock, between them. “Too hot.”

  “Too crowded,” he’d said later.

  “Too touristy,” he’d said later still.

  He’d barely mentioned the drawing of the seashell or the ceramic dolphin she’d made and left at the door to his study.

  The last time she’d asked him, he’d pursed his lips thoughtfully, then said, “You know I don’t like to travel.” He sighed his typical sigh, then added in his typically measured voice, “We’ll have a nice quiet time at home.”

  “That’s all I ever have,” said Amelia. “That’s my life—a nice quiet time at home. Minus the ‘nice.’”

  He looked her firmly in the eye. His gaze was sympathetic, but weighty. “It could be worse. I do the best I can.”

  At that point she walked out of the room, knowing it was a lost cause. She didn’t want to hear it. She’d heard it too many times before. He’d say that he understood how hard it was for her. But that it was just as hard if not harder for him. How do you argue with that? Although she could never do it, one day she thought she might like to scream at him, “Get over it!”

  When Amelia Albright was two years old, her mother died of cancer. She didn’t remember her mother at all. The only life she knew was her life with her melancholy father and Mrs. O’Brien.

  2 • Mrs. O’Brien

  Mrs. O’Brien moved around the kitchen like a leaf in the wind. With a quick bouncing step, she went from the cupboard to the refrigerator to the counter to the table. She served Amelia a homemade bran muffin, a bowl of strawberries, and a glass of chocolate milk.

  “What will the day hold for you?” asked Mrs. O’Brien.

  “Well, I won’t be getting a suntan on the beach,” said Amelia.

  “I know,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I know.” She kissed the air above Amelia’s head. “Poor thing.”

  Amelia ate without speaking. She picked apart the warm muffin with her fingers, then ate the pieces with a fork. No surprise: the muffin was delicious, but Amelia kept her compliments to herself. Nothing against Mrs. O’Brien. Amelia’s mood was to blame for her silence.

  Mrs. O’Brien was busy at the sink with her back to Amelia. She was an expert at gauging Amelia’s frame of mind. She knew when to probe and when to leave her alone.

  As usual, Mrs. O’Brien was wearing what Amelia thought of as her uniform: tan sweatpants, puffy white shoes that reminded Amelia of marshmallows, a baggy short-sleeved men’s polo shirt in a pastel color, and her pearl necklace. Her hair was the shape and color of a mushroom cap.

  Mrs. O’Brien seemed ageless. She looked the same as she did when she first came to cook and clean ten years ago. It was an interesting arrangement. Mrs. O’Brien lived across the street, but she was at the Albrights’ every day. As reliable as the sun, she arrived before Amelia got up in the morning. And she didn’t leave until Amelia had gone to bed at night.

  “Where’s the Professor?” Amelia asked suddenly.

  Mrs. O’Brien turned from the sink toward Amelia. Sunlight caught the side of her face, making her look ethereal. “Your father’s at his office on campus. He left early.”

  Amelia rolled her eyes. “It figures,” she said. “Who else would be working during break? And, it’s Saturday.”

  “Now, now.”

  “I mean, it would be one thing if he were curing some disease or ending world hunger. But he’s probably just sitting at his messy desk in his dark office reading Jane Austen or The Canterbury Tales for the five hundredth time. For fun!” she added bitterly.

  Mrs. O’Brien laughed. She approached Amelia and touched her lightly on her arm, gave a gentle squeeze. She left her hand there for an extra moment as if to absorb all bad feelings. “I do wish Natalie were home.”

  “Me, too.”

  Natalie Vandermeer was Amelia’s best friend. She was gone for the whole school year. The Vandermeers were living in France and wouldn’t be back until August. Amelia missed Natalie terribly. At first they stayed in touch regularly with postcards and letters sent back and forth. But as the weeks and months passed, their communication was less and less frequent. She hoped they were still best friends.

  “What would lift your spirits?” asked Mrs. O’Brien.

  Amelia shrugged. She knew that she could make any request and Mrs. O’Brien would try her best to fulfill it. Mrs. O’Brien was the adult in her life who made her feel most safe, most cared for. Amelia wore Mrs. O’Brien’s loving watchfulness like a protective cloak. “I’m going to the clay studio. Hopefully that’ll lift my spirits.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

  “What about lunch?”

  “I’ll figure it out. The Professor gave me money yesterday.”

  Amelia finished breakfast quickly, put her dishes in the sink, threw on her jacket, slung her backpack over her shoulder, yelled goodbye, and was out the door.

  “Make something pretty for me,” called Mrs. O’Brien.

  3 • Knobby Knees

&n
bsp; The clay studio was Amelia’s second home, especially with Natalie away. It was only five blocks from her house, in the middle of a row of small, neat, brick-faced shops that also included a grocery, a coffee shop, an antique store, a florist’s, and a dry-cleaning business.

  Amelia had been introduced to the studio when she was six. Her father had enrolled her in an after-school program. Something clicked the very first day of that very first class. From the moment she plunged her fingers into the squishy gray blob placed before her and began forming a pinch pot for Mrs. O’Brien, she was hooked.

  Afterward she pleaded with her father to let her take any and every available class, and he was happy to oblige her. Although she learned how to use the potter’s wheel and throw fairly accomplished bowls and vases, what she came to love best was building small pieces by hand, animals of all kinds: birds, rabbits, elephants, whales. And so, lately, that’s what she’d been doing nearly every day after school and on Saturdays. Her growing menagerie seemed to multiply spontaneously. She kept it in her bedroom and on bookshelves and windowsills throughout the house.

  Amelia covered the short distance at a clip, an oddly rhythmic clip. She was moving quickly because she was eager to work, but more to the point she was reinventing her walk, trying to make it faster and more graceful. Purposeful. Her legs had grown so much lately that she felt out of sync, as if her body belonged to someone or something else. And she’d recently decided that she hated her knees. They were big and knobby. Like a camel’s. She was skipping, or something close to it, when she tripped on the curb. She didn’t fall and no one was around to see her, but she could feel her face redden nonetheless. She slowed down and tried not to think about walking.

  It was early April. The low cement skies of winter had lifted, but it was still chilly, cold even—a far cry from how she pictured Florida. Something about the weather put her in a wistful mood. She slipped into thinking about her mother. She had no memory of her. Nothing. Nothing lay curled in her mind; there was nothing to draw up and remember. Her father rarely talked about her; neither did Mrs. O’Brien. When Amelia thought of her mother, images from a few photographs were what she saw in her head, and what she experienced was a general, mild loneliness. Can you be lonely for someone you never knew?

  A car backing out of a driveway honked, startling her. Then she wondered about herself—something she was doing a lot lately. She wondered about her own place in the world. What would it be? Who would she become? Would she stay in Madison, Wisconsin, all her life? Or would she travel widely and move far away?

  She wondered why she, Amelia Epiphany Albright, often felt so unlike everyone else. She wondered when her real life—the one she’d been waiting for—would finally begin.

  It was 1999. Where would she be in a year? In ten? In less than nine months it would be 2000. All the numbers in the year would be changing. That seemed important to Amelia. Maybe, soon, something important will happen to me, she thought.

  She wondered if knowing her mother would have provided answers to all that was unsolved within her. And then she wondered if her mother had had knobby knees, too.

  All of it—life, the world, her knees—was so strange if you thought about it long enough. And whenever she felt like she understood even a tiny piece of the world, the understanding disappeared right away like a light shutting off.

  A sudden gust of steely wind brought her attention back to the present. She considered what animal she might make today. And, once again, she concentrated on her walk, picking up her pace, doing a combination trot-shuffle the rest of the way.

  4 • The Nephew

  Amelia sensed that something was different the minute she opened the door. She walked through the front of the clay studio—the part that was a gallery—and straight back to the workroom. She was right—something was different. Louise Kirkwood, the owner, was nowhere in sight, and sitting in Amelia’s favorite place at the table in the far corner was a boy.

  The boy was wearing headphones. He was hunched over a sketchbook, but he wasn’t drawing. He was drumming out a rhythm with a pencil, eyes closed, one pinkie hooked in the corner of his mouth, his head jerking about to the beat of whatever he was listening to. His hair was a thick dark tumble. His curls bounced as he moved.

  Seeing someone in her spot caused a dropping sensation in Amelia’s chest. From across the room she cleared her throat.

  No response.

  She came closer, tugging the collar of her jacket.

  Nothing.

  She tucked a strand of her long gingery hair behind her ear and bit her lower lip. She snapped the rubber band around her wrist.

  When the boy finally saw her, he froze, giving her a long look. Then he yanked off the headphones and stood, scraping his chair on the floor. “You must be Amelia,” he said, blushing. He blinked as if he were waking from a nap or emerging from water. “My aunt, Louise, said you might be coming.”

  Besides his impressive hair, Amelia took note of his pale, perfect skin and his blue, blue eyes. The other thing that caught her attention was his shirt: a gray T-shirt with a big white wedding cake on it. There was something written on the cake, but she couldn’t make out the letters, and she didn’t want to stare.

  The boy, noticing her glance, looked downward and said, “Oh, I made it—the shirt. Long story.” Then he sat again.

  That was it for a moment. Neither spoke. The introduction was left awkwardly unfinished.

  Amelia’s throat tightened with disappointment. She had envisioned this morning differently. She had seen herself blissfully alone (except for Louise) at her usual spot, absorbed in her work. And now she was faced with the nephew in the wedding cake shirt, hogging the table with his enormous sketchbook and several large photography and art books opened to pictures of the Eiffel Tower. Why the Eiffel Tower? “Where is Louise?” she asked, her voice oddly pitched.

  “Right here.”

  Amelia turned around to see Louise bracketed by the doorframe for a second before she stepped into the workroom. Louise’s entrance was a bright spot in what was already a not-so-bright day. It was the suddenness of the entrance that made it all the brighter.

  “Breakfast,” said Louise, smiling. With one hand she raised a bag from the coffee shop down the street; her other hand held a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid. Her round, welcoming face was vivid from the crisp air. When she crossed the room to her desk in the back, Amelia could smell the lovely, sugary smell of bakery. Louise set down the bag and took a sip from her cup. “So you’ve met—yes?”

  After a pause, Amelia said, “Not really.”

  “Sort of,” said the boy.

  “All right,” said Louise. “Amelia Albright, meet my nephew, Casey Kirkwood-Cole.” A kindly smile. “And, Casey—this is Amelia.” Louise nodded to each. “Casey’s staying with me all week. So he’ll be here—working, making art, keeping me company. . . .” She gave him a significant look, eyes widening, a look Amelia thought was full of love and sadness. “And—you’re both twelve,” she added with a little too much exuberance, as if this had just occurred to her and was particularly meaningful.

  Casey cocked his head slightly—a kind of shrug.

  Amelia tried to hide her feelings. She hugged herself. Her expectations for the day—the week!—had crumbled. “Hi,” she managed to say.

  Casey said, “Hey,” and motioned with his hand, his pencil/drumstick laced between his fingers.

  “I got doughnuts at the coffee shop,” said Louise. “Who’s hungry?”

  “I am,” said Casey, perking up, rubbing his hands together like a fly, having stuck his pencil into his mass of hair.

  It—this morning—wasn’t what she’d planned on, that was certain, but it was what it was. She had nowhere to go, nothing else to do. She’d stay. She’d already shrugged off her jacket and scoped out a new place to work at another table. She really wasn’t hungry, but in an effort to turn the day around, she lied. “Me, too.”

  5 • Rabbit

 
Amelia stared at the lump of clay for about a hundred years. And then she forgot it was a lump of clay and she pushed and pulled and pinched and poked. She smoothed and carved and smoothed. She concentrated. She smashed it flat and began again.

  What started out being a slender deer turned into a long-necked bird and then a squat rabbit with ears like paddles. The rabbit was good. She liked it. She gave it eyes and a tail.

  She’d forgotten about Casey Kirkwood-Cole and Florida. She’d entered a space of her own making—a bubble—and was lost in a private reverie. It was strange—the rabbit was a real thing now and she was part of it and it was part of her. Fully absorbed, she watched it, watched her fingers reshape and shift things—the tail, the nose—ever so slightly. And then she felt as if she were the one being watched.

  Casey.

  “You’re good,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Really good.”

  She felt the bubble thin to nothing. She was back—alone with Casey.

  Amelia turned her head, scanning the room. She wondered where Louise was. She’d been in the background all morning—flitting in and out of Amelia’s awareness like music—preparing for an afternoon class for little kids on the other side of the workroom, mixing big buckets of glaze, and making trips to the basement to unload and load the kiln.

  Casey rose and walked over to Amelia. He bent down to get a better look at her rabbit. “Aunt Louise said you were a good artist,” he told her, nodding.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Yours is much better than mine,” said Casey. “I’ll show you.”

  Amelia followed him reluctantly back to his work area, thinking it was the polite thing to do.

  “Ta-da,” said Casey, gesturing with his open hands, hamming it up ironically.

  They stared at his creation. It was kind of a mess. Amelia was at a loss for words.

  “I’m better at drawing than I am with clay,” Casey explained.

  Amelia rubbed her chin with the back of her wrist, her brain whirring, trying to come up with something to say that wouldn’t offend him but that wasn’t a lie, either.