“Okay . . . I call this my triple-curve speed throw.” Pulling back his tongue, Smalls unleashed another clover. This one shot straight into the air, twisting left and right as it rose higher and higher.
“Mine!” Tilda hollered. She sprint-hopped after it, fur flopping and ears bouncing. She probably would have caught it too, if a familiar voice hadn’t made her stop short.
“Well look at you, honey.”
Tilda’s eyes flew to the sky. Hovering above her was a blue-feathered bird, the silver lining of her wings flashing in the sunlight. “Kay!”
“No longer a damsel in distress, I see.”
Tilda fluffed out her still-soiled fur. “I’m a damsel in control,” she said solemnly. “And this,” she said, hopping over to Wombat, “is my reason for escaping.”
Kay fluttered her wings at Wombat. “I’d forgotten how handsome he is. Look at you, sweetie. You went and snagged yourself a hottie!”
Wombat ducked his head. “I greatly appreciate the sentiment, ma’am.”
“Ma’am!” Kay hooted. “This one’s a keeper.”
Tilda cast a sidelong glance at Wombat. “I know,” she said, almost shyly. She looked back at Kay. “What happened to flying south for the winter?”
“It’s funny you should ask.” By now the other animals had gathered around. Smalls settled down in the grass with Rigby leaning against him. Kay circled slowly through the air, clearly enjoying having an audience. “My flock and I had just taken off on our cross-country flight when we came across the strangest lot of animals in the woods. Normally we wouldn’t let something like that distract us, but believe me when I say this was a menagerie of animals worth looking at!”
“A menagerie?” Tilda cut in.
“It’s a rare or unusual collection of animals,” Kay explained.
“I know what it means,” Tilda sniffed. “I’m part of one!”
Kay paused, glancing around at the cluster of animals beneath her. “Huh, I guess you are.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, we couldn’t help but slow down and stare at these animals. I mean, there were lions there! As we were flying past, I heard one of the group—a zebra—say the strangest thing. He was talking about how he hoped his ‘bunny bumpkins,’ Tilda, was doing okay, wherever she was. Now I thought to myself: How many bunnies named Tilda are there in this world? Chances are he’s referring to my Tilda.
“Believe me when I tell you how badly I wanted to stop and ask him. But in a flock we make decisions together, and I was overruled. ‘We have balmy weather and beaches waiting for us,’ the others kept saying. ‘Who cares about a zebra and some bunny?’ But honey, I cared. It was eating me up inside. I had to know: Did sweet little Tilda have a fling with a zebra? So I turned around and I came back. I figure I can survive an extra day in fall weather for a delicious tidbit of gossip like that. So, you have to tell me, T. Do you have a steamy past with a zebra?”
Tilda let out a scandalized gasp. “Of course not! My heart has always, and will always, belong to Wombat.”
“So then what?” Kay snapped her beak eagerly. “Was he some kind of secret admirer?”
“You could say that,” Tilda replied.
“Minus the secret part,” Rigby interjected.
Smalls pawed at the four-leaf clovers sprouting up from the ground. He never had been one for gossip, but Kay’s story had sent a chill running through him. “So you saw a zebra in the woods?” he asked. “And two lions?”
“That’s right,” Kay confirmed. “Couldn’t believe my own eyes.”
“Were there any other animals with them?” Smalls asked carefully.
“Yes!” Kay squawked. “There were two little hedgehogs lounging on the back of one of the lions, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And you won’t believe this one.” She paused dramatically. “There was an elephant! A real, live, actual elephant! Right in Maplehedge Woods. The funny thing was, I could swear I heard the others call him Lord something-or-other, as if he were some kind of royalty.”
Smalls went rigid. Next to him, Rigby sucked in a breath.
“Lord Jest?” Wombat asked slowly.
“That was it!” Kay did a swoop through the air. “Lord Jest, a real, live elephant, plucking acorns off the tallest tree as if it was nothing but a shrub.”
“So, he was okay?” Smalls pressed. “Not injured or hurt . . . ?”
“He seemed fine to me,” Kay said. “He kept trumpeting at the top of his lungs, like he thought he owned the woods.”
Smalls closed his eyes, relief flooding through him. Lord Jest was okay. He had found the other Lifers—and apparently Aflie and Gem, too. They were all together, free. His paws felt as wobbly as jelly as he pushed himself to standing. Next to him, Rigby’s tail was wagging frantically and Tilda’s nose was twitching happily and Wombat’s big, round eyes were filled with what he could swear were tears. “Holy horseshoe,” he said, speaking for all of them. “That’s good to hear.”
• • •
Susan knew she had to leave Toddle’s. After Bertie had told her everything—about getting kicked off the train and chased through the city and, finally, sneaking into Toddle’s—she’d gone for a walk around the property, trying to convince herself to go home. But the idea of leaving Bertie and Rigby and all the others behind, just to return to a silent, shuttered house . . . it left her feeling hollow inside, like a cupboard with no food.
“It’s her. It’s really her.”
The voice drifted over to Susan, cutting through the laughter and noise spilling out from the Emporium. She froze. She would know that voice anywhere, would recognize its soft lilt and the rise and fall of its words. She spun around, every inch of her body tingling.
There she was, standing in the exit of the Emporium. There they were.
“We got your note,” her mom said.
“We came as fast as we could,” her dad said.
They looked so normal, her mom with her long, blond braid, her dad with his deep, easy laugh lines, as if it hadn’t been six whole months since she’d seen them last. She was racing toward them before she even realized it, a wild kind of run, arms flying, legs spinning. She threw herself at them with full force. “Mom,” she whispered. “Dad.” And then they were nothing but a tangle: arms and legs and hair and tears, unable to tell where one ended and the others began.
“Finally,” her mom said.
And as it so often goes between mothers and daughters, it happened to be the very thing Susan was thinking too. Finally, finally, finally.
Home
Inside the yellow cottage, Bertie was leaning against a buttery yellow wall. He shielded his eyes from the sun as he looked out through the wide picture window. On the other side of the room, Stan was talking on the telephone, murmurs of “Uh huh” and “Mmm hmm” rising around him. A distant bark floated toward the house, punctuating an especially excited “Of course!”
Through the window, Bertie could see the fence the Toddles had put up to rein in the wild beasts, as Mrs. Toddle kept calling them. But the animals themselves barely seemed to notice it. Rigby was running frenzied laps around his friends; Smalls kept winging four-leaf clovers off his tongue; and Tilda was catching them happily as Wombat picked scraps of garbage out of her fur.
Bertie had never seen the animals look so relaxed. He cringed at the thought of them being sent away to another circus or a zoo—a place where they couldn’t play or run or, worse, be together. Outside, Smalls tossed his head back, flinging up several clovers. As they spiraled into the air, he glanced toward the yellow cottage. For a second, his eyes met Bertie’s.
Bertie thought of a dozen things at once: a warm bed and a real meal and a soft pillow and home, a word that used to mean nothing—to ring empty—and now suddenly meant everything to him. Smalls let out a happy grunt, and Bertie imagined him saying, Me too.
“Thank you!” Stan said loudly, jolting Bertie back to the present. A smile stretched across Stan’s face as he hung up the phone. “It’s official,” he told B
ertie. “Starting next week, you’ll be enrolled in Tophorn Elementary, the local public school. It was a little touch and go there for a minute, since the school year has already started, but I think our spectacular story of finding each other swayed them.” He let out a deep belly laugh. Bertie was amazed that such a huge laugh could come from such a small man. “Of course, we’re going to have a lot to do before then,” Stan continued. “You’ll need freshly sharpened pencils and new notebooks and all the books for the school year.”
Bertie fidgeted with the photograph of his mom, which Stan had said he could keep. He had no memory of attending school, of learning instead of working, reading instead of shoveling manure. He wondered if there would be a cafeteria like he’d heard Susan talk about once. He wondered if he’d get to eat real, hot lunches served on freshly scrubbed trays, instead of dry oats out of dirty glasses. “That’s great,” he said softly.
“And then there’s the matter of your bedroom,” Stan went on. He put a hand on Bertie’s shoulder and led him to a room at the end of the hall. It was small, but it contained a real bed and a wooden desk and a chest of drawers, and it was all his. “We’ll need to get it set up to your liking. Maybe we can go shopping for some new things later today? Toddle’s has a whole bedroom department. Plus, we’ll pick up a few new toys.” He winked at Bertie. “A perk of living on the Toddles’ compound is that the toy store’s never far away.” Stan paused, eyeing the dirty, torn, shrunken outfit that Bertie had been wearing for days on end. “Let’s add some new clothes to our shopping list too.”
Bertie nodded mutely. He found he couldn’t talk; his words were too heavy with emotion to lift them on his tongue. So instead, he walked around the room, imagining sleeping in his bed and pulling clothes out of his drawers. Stan came over and squeezed his hand. “Are you doing all right?” he asked softly. “I know this is a lot to take in at once.”
Bertie looked up at Stan. He had spidery wrinkles around his eyes that gave him the look of being just about to smile. There was a faint smattering of freckles across his nose, and when he did smile, really smile, Bertie was suddenly five years old again, and for a split second he could remember: a grandfather who pulled him onto his lap and whispered silly stories into his ear. “I’m just amazed,” he said finally. “I never had a real room of my own at the circus. Or even a real bed.”
A look of pain settled into the peaks and valleys of Stan’s face. “If I had known you were alive, Bertie, I would never have allowed Claude . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “But he told me you died in the motorcar crash. He was the one there; I never thought he’d lie . . .” He cleared his throat. “Things will be different now, I promise.” He gave Bertie a tight hug. He smelled like wood shavings and peanut butter sandwiches and something else too, something soft and grandfatherly. “We’re getting a second chance. And speaking of second chances . . .” He reached into his pocket and extracted a small wooden dog: roughly carved but unmistakably Rigby.
Bertie could feel his face heating up. “I wasn’t planning on using your equipment,” he explained sheepishly. “I just saw it and . . . I couldn’t help myself.”
Stan waved a hand dismissively through the air. “Spoken like a true carver.” He turned the dog over in his hand. “I haven’t seen this kind of raw talent since Esme—your mom—was a little girl. I taught her to carve, you know. She was the one who first made the little red-haired wooden boy. She based it on you, of course. She thought she’d sell a few here or there; I don’t think she could have ever guessed how popular they’d become! Soon, I was helping her carve them to keep up with all the demand. It’s a special thing, working with your daughter.” A hint of tears shone in his eyes and he paused, composing himself.
“How did you end up working at Toddle’s?” Bertie asked.
“Mr. Toddle himself called me up.” Stan smiled at the memory. “He asked if I would like to become the Emporium’s resident carver. I would sell my wooden carvings exclusively through Toddle’s. I didn’t have to think twice about it. Before your mom died, selling at Toddle’s had been her dream. Now, carving these dolls, selling them here . . . it makes me feel like, in some way, part of her is still with me.”
He tossed the wooden dog to Bertie, who caught it automatically. The wood felt rough beneath his fingers, and he suddenly wanted desperately to learn how to smooth it out, to make the carving truly come to life. “Maybe now you can help me with it,” Stan said.
Bertie smiled up at his grandfather. “I’d like that.”
For All the Vegetables
Later that day, the Toddle family stood huddled together behind the fence. “Oh my,” Mrs. Toddle kept saying. “Oh my, my, my. What in the world are we going to do with these animals?”
“I suppose we could sell them to the Howard Brothers Circus,” Mr. Toddle said thoughtfully. He scratched his pointy, bald head, his ever-present frown deepening. “Or maybe we could donate them to a zoo. I bet it would earn us quite a tax write-off.”
“No way!” Chrysanthemum stomped a sparkly shoed foot against the ground. “I don’t want Tilda and her friends going to some zoo!”
“Please don’t shriek, Chrysanthemum,” Mrs. Toddle pleaded. “You can keep Tilda if you’d like, but the others . . .” Her watery eyes flickered toward the menagerie. “They’re wild beasts! They have to go where wild beasts belong.”
“Which is behind bars,” Mr. Toddle said firmly.
As Mr. and Mrs. Toddle launched into a debate over the merits of a circus versus a zoo, a strange thing happened. One by one, people began migrating over from the Emporium—kids and parents and even a few employees—all to catch a glimpse of the incredible menagerie taking up residence behind the Toddles’ house.
“Look at that, Ma!” a pigtailed girl toting a huge Toddle’s bag shouted as Smalls rose onto his hind legs, juggling several clovers on his tongue.
“Believe me,” Smalls said. “After fire sticks, this is nothing.” Soon, there was a full-fledged crowd gathered around the fence, cheering on the animals as they cavorted and played. “This is step twelve of my sixteen-step grooming process,” Tilda informed a group of squealing girls as she buffed her tail against the grass.
“As you can see, I can burrow at almost precisely the speed of light,” Wombat said. He sprayed a wall of dirt behind him as he burrowed away amid a barrage of cheers.
Next to him, Rigby played peek-a-boo beneath his fur and Smalls tossed and caught clover after clover. Outside the fence, kids laughed and applauded and begged for more.
“Well, if you insist,” Wombat said, starting on a second hole.
The Toddles were so busy debating what to do about the animals that they didn’t even notice the crowd. But Chrysanthemum did. She narrowed her eyes, stepping closer.
“I want a sun bear just like him!” she heard a little boy beg.
“Me too, Ma,” the pigtailed girl declared. “Let’s go back to the store and get a sun bear stuffed animal!”
“We don’t sell sun bear stuffed animals,” Chrysanthemum told them automatically. She took a step back. “But maybe we should.” She looked over at her parents, who were still deep in conversation. “Of course,” she said excitedly. “It’s perfect.”
Spinning on her heels, she marched back to them. “Mom, Dad, I have a solution,” she announced, cutting off her dad’s detailed analysis of hard money versus a tax write-off. “We should keep the animals right here.”
Mrs. Toddle shrieked. Mr. Toddle frowned. “That’s not an option,” he said sternly.
Chrysanthemum gestured toward the people swarming the fence. “But think of how many shoppers they’ll attract! And once the kids see the animals, they’ll want to go back to the store to buy their very own toy versions for themselves.”
Her dad was quiet for a minute, observing the group around the animals, which was growing larger by the minute. “Hmmm,” he murmured.
“Plus,” Chrysanthemum pressed, “I promise to eat every vegetable you ever
give me if we can keep them. Think of how many fewer toys you’d have to take from the store!”
“Hmmm,” her dad said again. His face was scrunched up in his I’m-busy-calculating look.
“Don’t tell me you’re considering this, dear.” Mrs. Toddle winced. “Toys for her vegetables are one thing, but these are wild beasts! Just look at that bear! He can’t be trusted.”
At the sound of the word bear, Smalls swiveled around.
Chrysanthemum stomped her feet against the ground. “You told me I could have anything I want if I eat my vegetables. Well. I. Want. The. ANIMALS!” She glared at her mom, her voice rising dangerously. “This is for all the vegetables!”
“Please don’t shriek,” her mom said nervously, plugging up her ears. “We simply can’t keep wild beasts on the premises, Chrysanthemum,” she continued, her voice growing louder the harder she plugged her ears. “We’ll be ridiculed! We’ll be sued! We’ll be—oh!”
She let out a gasp. While she was busy yelling, Smalls had wandered over and was now standing right in front of her, his front paws resting on top of the fence. He looked at her with his big, warm, chocolate-brown eyes. “Wild is all relative,” he said. He unfurled his long tongue and gave her a lick on the cheek.
Mrs. Toddle let out another gasp. “Well . . . I never . . .”
Smalls licked her again.
“Oh my!” Her cheeks flushed bright red. “You . . . you certainly are a charmer, aren’t you?”
“I do try to live by the golden rule,” Smalls said modestly.
A tiny laugh suddenly escaped from Mrs. Toddle. Her hand flew to her mouth, as if she were trying to hold it in. “Those grunts! You’d think he was talking to me!”
“. . . and when you add the cost of food but subtract the cost of transportation and add the cost of grooming but subtract the cost of new toys for Chrysanthemum . . .” Mr. Toddle ticked numbers off on his fingers, oblivious to the bear standing right in front of him.
A Valiant Quest for the Misfit Menagerie Page 19
