Special Delivery

by Ann M. Martin

Uh-oh, thought Olivia.

  The song continued, but Ruby’s face had turned an alarming shade of red, which didn’t fade until well after her second and much longer solo had ended.

  Olivia was fascinated. She felt bad for her friend, but she had never seen Ruby make such a mistake. She had seen her cover up other people’s mistakes — and onstage, too, right during performances. But this was unprecedented. Ruby had blundered, and her blunder had stood out like a monarch butterfly in a snowstorm.

  When the concert ended, Olivia had tried to make her way to Flora and Ruby. What she would have said to Ruby, she wasn’t sure. But maybe Ruby would have offered some sort of explanation, and if she had, Olivia would have wanted to hear it. “Mom,” Olivia had said urgently, “I have to talk to Ruby for a minute.”

  “All right, but hurry back. We need to leave for your grandparents’.”

  “Okay.” Olivia had hustled, but she was still two rows away from her friends when she saw Ruby grab Min and pull her toward the exit.

  “Ruby!” Olivia had called. “Ruby!”

  But Ruby had barged ahead as if she hadn’t heard Olivia — and Olivia had used her loudest voice.

  “Huh,” said Olivia.

  She turned back to her own family and quickly forgot about Ruby. Today was Thanksgiving, and Olivia had been looking forward to it ever since her parents had told her and her brothers that this year their family would be spending Thanksgiving with Olivia’s mother’s parents, her other grandparents. Olivia saw Gigi and Poppy, her father’s parents, frequently. They lived in Camden Falls, and Needle and Thread was located three doors down from Sincerely Yours. But visits to Paw and Nana, Mrs. Walter’s parents, even though they lived just twenty minutes away, were less frequent.

  “Who else is going to be at Paw and Nana’s?” Olivia had asked, barely able to contain her excitement.

  “Let me see. Gigi and Poppy,” her mother had said.

  “Yay!” Henry had cried.

  “And Aunt Stella and Uncle Will.”

  “Does that mean Ashley will be there?” Olivia had asked, already feeling both shy and excited by the very thought of seeing her sixteen-year-old cousin. Ashley was the kind of sophisticated teenager Olivia aspired to be — and had a good feeling she might never be. Still, it was thrilling to be around her.

  “Yes,” her mother had replied. “Dawson, too.” Dawson was Ashley’s brother, who was even older — eighteen — and who always had time for his younger cousins.

  “Yippee!” Jack had exclaimed.

  And Henry had added, “I wonder if Dawson got his motorcycle yet.”

  “Lord, I hope not,” Olivia’s mother had said.

  There were to be other cousins and aunts and uncles at Thanksgiving as well, and as the big day had drawn nearer, Olivia had grown more and more excited. With the knowledge that Ashley would be present, she had chosen her outfit for the day with great care. She had, in fact, chosen and discarded no fewer than twenty-six outfits, various combinations of pants and skirts and shirts and sweaters and vests and shoes.

  “You girls sure make a big deal out of clothes,” Jack had remarked as Olivia had entered the kitchen one evening, wearing yet another ensemble.

  Olivia had ignored him. “What about this one?” she had asked her mother.

  “I love it!” Mrs. Walter had exclaimed. (She had loved every single one of Olivia’s outfits.)

  “I thought you only got worked up about outfits for Jaaaaacoooooob,” Henry had said. (He’d dragged out the syllables of “Jacob” until the name sounded ridiculously long.)

  “Mom!” Olivia had cried. “Why does he bring up Jacob all the time?”

  “Because it’s fun to tease you about your boyfriend,” Henry had said. “That’s boyfriend. B-O-Y-F-R —”

  “Mom!” Olivia had wailed again.

  “Ignore, ignore, ignore,” Mrs. Walter had whispered in her daughter’s ear. “He only teases you because you react. Now, go back upstairs. You look lovely. I think this is the outfit you should wear to Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Olivia had laid it carefully over the back of her chair and then had changed her mind nine more times.

  Now it was Thanksgiving Day and the Children’s Chorus concert had ended. Time for Paw and Nana’s. Olivia and her family walked back to their house and loaded their van with their contributions to the meal — homemade rolls and glazed carrots and an enormous boxful of Olivia’s mother’s special chocolates, molded into the shapes of turkeys and oak leaves and pumpkins and even slices of pie.

  In the van, which smelled tantalizingly of chocolate and fresh bread, Olivia’s emotions seesawed between elation at the thought of seeing Ashley and Dawson and mortification over the outfit she had ultimately decided upon — a crocheted lavender vest over a black shirt, black velvet bell-bottoms, and a purple engineer’s cap. Olivia was suddenly certain it was horribly wrong, possibly outlandish. She slumped in her seat. Thanksgiving was ruined before it had even started.

  Then her family pulled into Paw and Nana’s driveway and Olivia’s spirits soared. There were Ashley and Dawson. They were helping Aunt Stella and Uncle Will unload pans of food from their car, but when they saw the Walters, they set their things down and waved.

  “Hey, cousins!” Dawson called cheerfully.

  Ashley enveloped Olivia (who had ditched her hat at the last second) in a warm hug as Olivia emerged from the van. Then she held her at arm’s length and cried, “Olivia, you look fantastic! When did you get so tall?”

  If anyone else had said this to Olivia, she would have shuddered — if for no other reason than because although she had grown a bit, she was still the tiniest kid in her entire school. But when Ashley said it, Olivia felt her face grow warm with plea sure.

  “I love your outfit,” Ashley continued. “Wow. You aren’t my little baby cousin anymore.”

  Olivia beamed. And when Jack piped up, “She has a boyfriend,” Olivia actually felt grateful to him.

  “A boyfriend?! Already?! No way!” said Dawson.

  “You have to tell me all about him,” Ashley added. And she took Olivia by the elbow and led her inside, saying, “Time for some serious girl talk.”

  But the girl talk had to wait. The moment Ashley and Olivia entered the house, they were ambushed by relatives. They were gathered in great bearlike hugs and fussed over and admired and kissed. After a particularly scratchy kiss from her mustachioed uncle Ham, Olivia rubbed her cheek and was then put to work in the kitchen, peeling apples for a salad. She had already lost track of her parents and brothers, and couldn’t see Ashley, either. In fact, she found it hard to see much of anything around the two buxom aunties who were chopping vegetables across the table.

  This is a perfect holiday, thought Olivia as she breathed in the aroma of cloves and sweet potatoes and roasting turkey and melting butter. The kitchen was crowded with bodies, and everyone was talking at top volume. Olivia thought the radio might be playing, too, but it was hard to tell. Outside the window, Olivia could just barely glimpse the blue sky, but even from inside, the air somehow looked cold, and that morning, as she had walked to the community center with her family, she had thought she could smell snow. She hoped for a winter full of blizzards and storms.

  “Hey there!”

  Someone tapped Olivia on the shoulder and she turned around.

  Ashley stood behind her. “I want to hear about Jacob.” She turned to Nana. “Olivia’s finished,” she proclaimed, and tugged her cousin out of the kitchen and into the living room, where they made room for themselves on the end of a sofa. “Okay,” said Ashley. “Tell me everything.”

  Olivia could feel herself blushing, something she wished she had some control over. “Well …” She wasn’t sure where to begin. “I met him when school started,” she said finally. “He’s in some of my classes and we’re both in the book club at school.” Here Olivia hesitated, unsure what Ashley would think of a book club, but her cousin merely nodded encouragingly. “He calls me on the phone a
lot,” Olivia added.

  “Excellent,” said Ashley.

  “And we …” (Olivia knew her blush was deepening) “we went on a date. To a dance at school.”

  “Girl, no way!”

  “Yes. And almost no one else had a date for the dance,” Olivia continued, “but Jacob asked me. And later he gave me a birthday card and signed it ‘Love, Jacob.’”

  “And then they kissed and got married,” said a voice from behind the sofa.

  Enraged, Olivia jumped to her feet. “Jack!”

  But Ashley laid a hand on her arm. “I think he’s jealous,” she said in a voice just loud enough for Jack to hear. “He wants a girlfriend, but —”

  “I do not!” Jack shrieked, and fled from the room.

  The front door opened then, ushering in more cousins. After a while, the grown-ups settled themselves in the living room, the younger children were encouraged to run off steam outdoors, and the middle cousins, Olivia included, gathered in the den. All the girls wanted to hear about Jacob, and Olivia told the story of the dance several more times, ignoring the urge to embellish it.

  At last the feast was served, and Olivia’s large family gathered around three tables, each laden with food. Olivia noted, with immense plea sure, that this was the first year she was not seated at the children’s table. She found herself instead among Ashley and Dawson and the other teenagers. To her right, the younger cousins were trying to make Jack laugh hard enough to spray milk out of his nose. To her left, the adults were telling tales from their childhoods. She listened with interest when she heard her mother recall the Thanksgiving dinner — when her mother was a little girl living in their Row House — that had to be postponed because of an autumn blizzard. “Frannie and I were terribly disappointed,” she said, and Olivia realized she was talking about Flora and Ruby’s mother.

  The afternoon spiraled by, darkness falling so that the candles on the dining room table seemed to glow more brightly. The turkey and vegetables and breads were taken away, and just when Olivia thought she was as stuffed as the turkey had been, out came pies and ice cream and the chocolates. Olivia groaned, but she popped one of her mother’s chocolate pumpkins in her mouth anyway. The phone rang then, and Paw stood up to answer it.

  Nana put her hand on his arm. “Let it be,” she said.

  “But it might be someone calling to say ‘Happy Thanksgiving.’” Paw strode into the kitchen. Moments later, he returned to the dining room and handed the phone to Olivia. “For you,” he said.

  “I’ll bet it’s Jacob!” exclaimed Henry.

  It took exactly half of one second for Olivia’s blush to return. “Hello?” she said. She struggled out of her chair and carried the phone into the bathroom.

  “Hi! It’s me!” said Jacob. “I just wanted to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” Olivia replied. “How did you find me here?”

  “I have my ways.”

  When Olivia returned to the table, she was given a look of pure awe from her ten-year-old cousin Tara, and was clapped on the back by Dawson.

  Darkness fell, and one by one the relatives left. As the house quieted, Olivia thought about Jacob. Were they really boyfriend and girlfriend? Henry and Jack teased her about having a boyfriend, but she and Jacob never discussed the exact nature of their relationship, although she and Flora and Nikki talked about it. (Olivia suspected that boys didn’t concern themselves with such things nearly as often as girls did.)

  Was she old enough to have a boyfriend? Did she truly want a boyfriend? She knew she could discuss these questions with Ashley, but the only person she really wanted to call was Flora, and she planned to do just that as soon as she was safely in her bedroom that night.

  Several times on the drive from Camden Falls to Three Oaks, Flora snuck a look at Ruby, who was riding sulkily next to her in the backseat of Mr. Pennington’s car. Ruby had barely spoken a word since hustling Min out of the community center after the concert. When, on the walk back to Aiken Avenue, Min had said, “So — would you like to talk about what happened this morning?” Ruby had snapped, “No.” Her mood had not improved when Min had taken Mr. Pennington by the elbow, laughed, and whispered something about drama queens.

  The car rolled lazily through the countryside. Flora contemplated the fir trees and imagined them with snow-covered branches sweeping the winter ground. She turned, glanced at her sister, and tried to take her hand, but Ruby jerked it away. “I just wanted to —” Flora began to say.

  “Well, don’t!” hissed Ruby. She looked quickly at the front seat and added loudly, “And don’t anyone say anything about drama queens.”

  Min made a great show of zipping her lip, and Ruby scowled and stared at her shoes.

  When they arrived at Three Oaks, Flora was pleased to find a smiling Mr. Willet waiting in the lobby. He was dressed in a navy suit and a silk tie embroidered with turkeys. Flora was even more pleased when Mr. Willet said that she and Ruby could have the job of bringing Mrs. Willet upstairs to the dining room. “She should be ready and waiting,” he added. “I told the nurse on duty that you would be coming for her.”

  Ruby perked up. “We can go get her ourselves?”

  “Yes. Flora, you know what to do, don’t you?”

  Flora, who had spent more time at Three Oaks than Ruby had, nodded. “When we’re on the elevator, I’ll be sure to set the brakes on her wheelchair,” she said importantly. She took Ruby’s hand. “Come on. We have to go down to the lower level.” She led her sister along a hall. “Three Oaks is a nice place, don’t you think? I wouldn’t mind living here.”

  “Remember when you thought it was depressing?”

  “I didn’t think Three Oaks was depressing, I thought Mr. Willet’s apartment was depressing when it was empty and hadn’t been painted yet. Doesn’t Mr. Willet seem happy now?”

  Ruby considered this. “Yes. He does seem happy.”

  “Okay. Here’s the elevator.”

  The girls rode down to the lower level, which, because Three Oaks was built on a little hill, was not underground. (Ruby found this confusing.)

  Flora led the way down another long hall, past a nurses’ station, and stopped when she reached a locked door. She expertly entered a code on a keypad by the door and then pushed the door open. She remembered the first time she had seen the door and the keypad and how she had been horrified by the thought of Mrs. Willet locked into her wing. But she understood why Mrs. Willet and the other people with Alzheimer’s couldn’t leave their safe quarters. More important, she saw that Mrs. Willet seemed as happy in her new home as Mr. Willet did.

  “There she is!” exclaimed Ruby, and she ran across the lobby to a sleepy-eyed Mrs. Willet, who was strapped into her wheelchair.

  Mrs. Willet widened her eyes at the sound of Ruby’s voice, but her expression remained stony, and Flora had the strange thought that Mrs. Willet looked like a lion, with her proud, sad, motionless face.

  Flora approached Mrs. Willet more quietly. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said. She bent to kiss Mrs. Willet’s soft, powdery cheek. “You got all dressed up,” Flora added, even though she knew that the nurses had dressed her. “Doesn’t she look nice?” she said to Ruby, and Ruby nodded. “You’re wearing stockings and jewelry and everything, Mrs. Willet. And I think you got your hair done. Did you go to the beauty parlor?”

  “Bum-bum-bum-bum,” said Mrs. Willet.

  Flora caught the eye of a nurse. “Is it okay if I take Mrs. Willet upstairs now?” she asked.

  The nurse smiled. “She’s all ready to go.”

  “Can I push her?” Ruby asked, reaching for the handles on the back of the wheelchair.

  “Sure. But go slowly. She gets scared if you go too fast…. Hey, Mrs. Willet is smiling! Happy Thanksgiving, Mrs. Willet,” said Flora again.

  “Hi,” replied Mrs. Willet, sounding as if she had just woken from a nap.

  Ruby tapped Flora’s shoulder and whispered, “Does she know who we are?”


  Flora shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Ruby looked thoughtful. “Okay.”

  Flora unlocked the door, Ruby pushed the wheelchair through it, and Mrs. Willet said, “Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum” very softly under her breath.

  When they reached the lobby upstairs, Min and Mr. Pennington and Mr. Willet were sitting side by side on a couch, leaning toward one another and talking, and Flora thought of the times she had seen them, the three old friends, do just that in Min’s living room in the Row House.

  Min caught sight of Flora and Ruby and Mrs. Willet and stood up slowly. “There she is!” she said brightly. “Mary Lou, don’t you look lovely. Happy Thanksgiving, dear.”

  “Bum-bum-bum.”

  “You’re in your holiday finest,” Mr. Pennington added, and was rewarded with a sudden glowing smile.

  “I think she remembers you,” Ruby whispered to Mr. Pennington.

  “Come look in the dining room,” said Mr. Willet to his guests, and he kissed his wife and gently took the wheelchair from Ruby.

  When they reached the dining room, Flora peeked inside. She had no idea that at an inn in Maine, just an hour earlier, her friend Willow Hamilton had walked into a dining room that looked almost identical to the one at Three Oaks. “Oh,” said Flora. “It’s beautiful.”

  Mr. Willet beamed. “It is nice, isn’t it? I wasn’t sure what to expect when I moved here, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised.”

  “This is elegant,” said Min approvingly.

  “Nikki’s mom is in charge of the dining room,” said Flora. “That’s her job.”

  “Which table is ours?” asked Ruby, wide-eyed.

  “Follow me,” said Mr. Willet, and he led the way to a round table by a picture window. “We’re right here.”

  “Ooh! Chocolate turkeys!” exclaimed Ruby, sizing up the decorations.

  “I bought those specially,” said Mr. Willet. “They came from Sincerely Yours.”

  “Min? Could I go find Mrs. Sherman?” asked Flora. “Ruby and I want to wish her a happy Thanksgiving.”

  Min granted permission, and Flora and Ruby walked around the bustling dining room until they caught sight of Nikki’s mother giving instructions to a group of waiters. They waved discreetly to her and called, “Happy Thanksgiving!”