It’s Valentine’s Day, and I am ready to let my heart speak for me instead of keeping a huge piece of tape over its mouth.
This is why I am standing in the cafeteria holding the following items:
1) An oversized homemade card
2) A plastic rose that cost a buck at the Pit Stop
3) A piece of stationery (fancy) with my own poem on it
4) A heart-shaped box of chocolates with only one piece missing because Marshall didn’t know it was for Summer, and it was caramel
I don’t care that it’s Tuna-Noodle Casserole Day. My stomach is all nervous, which is because of all the excitement about finally telling Summer Goodman how I feel. I wait until she is at her favorite table by the window, and then I walk over and say the thing I have practiced in the mirror.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Summer.” I’m impressed that the words come out exactly as rehearsed, which is the last thing that goes as planned.
All of a sudden, instead of hearing her say Oh, Milo my ears are ringing with Summer laughing really hard. And loud.
“You’re kidding me, right?” is what she is saying to me, and I don’t know where I can go to hide or disappear from sight forever.
Dabney St. Claire says love is blind, so I guess I have some excuse because I probably need a new prescription for my glasses, but I really should start listening to Marshall because he never has moments like these in front of the whole cafeteria where a girl or anyone laughs so loud that even the teacher on duty, who usually doesn’t notice anything, stops picking the meat loaf stain off his jacket and stares at the reason for the ruckus—which is YOU.
I just wish I could rewind the tape and do it all over, but not with Summer—with a girl who would react right, and that could mean lots of different ways, not just the most obvious.
And right now—after the laughter finally is down to a giggle and kids have stopped staring at me and I can sort of feel my face not being bright red anymore—you know what I miss the most? It isn’t my mom, though of course she’s in the top two. What I miss the most is it being Valentine’s Day and opening my lunch box and finding a pink frosted cupcake with cinnamon hearts that spell out the words I LUV YOU.
That’s what she did. Every year. Just for me. And right now I’d give anything to find that cupcake—or any cupcake—in my lunch, but since I buy lunch every day, the closest thing to a pink frosted cupcake is a square of stale cake with cracked yellow frosting and an ancient candy heart on top that looks like it would break your tooth if you dared bite into it.
There’s only one logical choice: I have to escape! So I go to the office, grab my stomach, and say, “Uooogh. I think I feel sick.”
“That’s too bad,” Mrs. Cranston, who is the lady who answers the phones and hands out late slips, says. “Too many Valentine’s Day sweets, huh, buddy?”
I answer her question with a nod, even though it’s a lie. My stomach is burning from not enough sweets.
A phone call to my dad later, I am riding the bus home, staring out the window and wishing I had two parents so one of them could pick me up when I need a ride home in the middle of the day. Of course, I wish that the other parent would be my mom, but at times like this I almost think it could be anyone with a valid driver’s license and access to a car.
Settling in for the ride home, I look around and make a list of some of the people who ride the 138 bus in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon:
Two old ladies wearing bulky coats that make me think they are hiding whole chickens or babies
A businessman listening to an iPod (which just seems weird), and it has to be classical music even though he is tapping his foot fast
The mom with her baby, who has decided to start crying—maybe because he knows about the smuggled babies hidden in the old ladies’ coats
Weird guy, who carries a huge garbage bag of something that smells as bad as he does, and he is talking to the invisible friend next to him
The cool thing that hits me is this: Not counting the screaming baby, whose face looks like it wants to explode, I am the only kid on the bus!
Three stops later I have a choice to make because we are about to be at the Pit Stop and I could get off here and buy something junk-foody for the ten-minute walk back home, or I could stay on the bus and then only have to walk from the top of my street to my house. It’s a no-brainer and I pull the cord above me.
As soon as the bus pulls away, I realize it’s wicked cold outside and maybe stopping for the candy was a bad idea, which doesn’t matter now that I’m standing here shivering in the parking lot, so I push against the wind and make my way to the oasis of the Pit Stop.
Inside I notice two things right away:
1) Awful, loud music isn’t playing on the radio behind the counter.
2) Pete is also not behind the counter.
“Where’s Pete?” I ask the lady smoking a cigarette, even though there are signs everywhere that say no smoking.
“Who’s Pete?” she says, blowing smoke right at me, which I avoid by holding my breath until all the smoke clears because secondhand smoke kills.
“Pete runs the Pit Stop. Do you work for him?”
This must be a funny thing because the lady laughs so hard, she ends up coughing, and it’s that juicy, hacking smoker’s cough that sounds like maybe a piece of her is about to come flying out if she can’t stop. So I take two steps back just in case. Luckily, she stops one hack short of her lungs popping out.
“Kid,” she says, “you’re in Pit Stop number 342. I think you want Pit Stop number 281 down on Chandler Street. I’m pretty sure some guy named Pete works there.”
Of course! I’m such a knucklehead! There are two Pit Stops on my bus ride home, and I am so used to riding the bus sitting with Marshall and not old ladies and screaming babies and businessmen with iPods that I got off at the first one instead of the second one, and now I’m really far from my house.
“Milo?” I turn and see it’s Sylvia Poole, my crazy old lady neighbor who isn’t crazy or old. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” She asks this maybe a little too much like she thinks I’m skipping school or something bad.
“Got sick,” I say. “Stomachache.” Then I watch her eyes and they look down at my hand, which is clutching a Cruncho caramel candy bar I picked up when I walked into the store. “Um, I’m better now.”
Sylvia nods and now the smile is there. “Well, I’m just getting a few ingredients and then heading back home. Want a lift?”
And I do want a lift—but I wish it were with the invisible person who won’t ask me a ton of questions and not with her because she smiles a lot and seems nice but will probably yak nonstop. Of course, weighing out the weight of my backpack and the long freezing walk home versus sitting in her warm car and answering a few dumb questions, I have to make the smart choice and say, “Why not?”
Driving home isn’t that bad because instead of asking me anything, she tells me things: “I just got back from a trip to China,” she says.
I nod my head.
“It was amazing. All the pictures you see—they just don’t even come close to what’s really there.”
“I bet.” This is as easy as riding with my dad.
She starts talking about the Great Wall and how Chinese food in China isn’t at all like going to the Beijing Palace All-You-Can-Eat Buffet down by the bus station, and I listen politely, which means smiling but not really hearing.
And then I sneak a look in her plastic Pit Stop bag that sits between us and see a small bag of cinnamon hearts and a can of pink frosting, and suddenly all I want to do is talk.
disappearing act
IT MUST BE A WEEK THAT GOES BY BEFORE I’m unpacking my school bag and find a small envelope stuck inside my Spanish book with my name on it. Milo.
Of course, my first thought is that Summer Goodman has written a Valentine apology, and after I cross my arms and think Nothing you can say will undo my pain, I get so excited, I am almost shaking
inside.
But even Dabney St. Claire tells me to hold my horses. And so I take a closer look at the small envelope and see that the handwriting doesn’t match how Summer always writes, with bright colored pens she carries in a tiny green case with her name written in gold marker on the side.
The envelope just says Milo and the pen is nothing special and I’m kind of scared to solve the mystery because what if it’s a note telling me I have a disease?
I slide my finger under the part of the envelope that isn’t sticky and tear the top enough so I can get inside. Pulling the card out, I see it’s a note card. With a flower on it. I hold my breath because I know in a second the mystery of who sent it will be solved, and then I count to three . . . and open the card.
It’s from my across-the-street neighbor, who must’ve slipped it inside my bag the other day—Valentine’s Day, when I was in her house.
Eating a warm cupcake decorated with pink frosting and cinnamon hearts, Sylvia Poole tells me about her husband, Paul.
“Paul loved the beach.” . . . “Paul had a thing for pomegranates.” . . . “If anyone could ruin a song by singing it out loud, it was Paul.”
She just can’t stop telling me about the man who is in all those pictures on her kitchen wall, and to be honest, I don’t mind listening. It’s Valentine’s Day and the cupcakes are still gooey, and besides, I don’t have a house key so it’s a lucky thing to be stuck in her warm old-lady house instead of freezing my butt off waiting for my sister to get out of school.
I’m in the middle of my second cupcake when I hear, “Do you miss your mom, Milo?” And I stop mid-chew because her question comes at me from left field, and as good as everything tastes, I suddenly want to be anywhere else in the whole world but in this moment.
I can’t look at her, so instead I look down at the table and stare at the plate and focus really hard to make sure that’s all that I see. Luckily, I don’t have to answer her because she’s the next one to talk.
“I miss Paul,” she says. “He sure loved Valentine’s Day. What a sweetie.”
My eyes work overtime to keep staring at my plate, which is white but has a blue stripe around the edge and the cupcake crumbs are all scattered within the circle.
I sense that Sylvia is now sitting down at the table with me, and I feel trapped and there’s no way I can leave without talking, and talking is something that right now feels impossible. And even though I promised myself I wouldn’t, I look up from the plate and see this lady I hardly know is crying.
Soft. Slow. But definitely crying.
“Oh, did we have some fun times,” she is saying, maybe to me or maybe to the photographs. I can’t tell. She lifts the corner of the apron she wears and dabs her wet eyes twice.
Her eyes catch mine, which was a mistake on my part—but once the deed is done, I look back and see that she is actually smiling. And it’s weird that she looks so happy even with eyes that have just cried.
“He was a good man, Milo,” she sighs. “And I miss him every day.”
In my brain I say something just to myself, but I make the mistake of also saying it out loud: “How could you not miss him every day. He’s everywhere you look!”
For a second I worry this sounds a little snotty, so I gaze up at the Wall of Paul, and even I miss him a little bit even though I’ve never met him.
Sylvia smiles and I can tell she is done crying. “I want him to be everywhere I look. I want to remember him. All the time, Milo. All the time.”
I nod.
“And you know what else, Milo?”
I don’t. So I say nothing.
“That’s how I keep him alive. By making sure I think about him every day.”
I am on the edge of my chair partly because I want to say something and partly because I want to escape. Dabney St. Claire nudges me. Say it, he tells me, and so I ease back fully onto the red vinyl cushion and follow his advice.
“Truth is,” I say in a small voice, “I don’t really remember a ton about her. Just that she’s gone.”
“Oh, Milo,” Sylvia says to me as she looks at my face from across the table with such kindness that I quickly inspect the floor for anything but words. “That must feel like being lost somewhere between one place and another.”
I’m now sitting on my bed holding the card from Sylvia Poole, reading the words again that she obviously wants me to have: Don’t forget her.
At first it makes me mad that Sylvia slipped this message to me, but then I picture all of the photographs inside her kitchen and all of the stories she told me and I can feel how alive her dead husband is while my dead mother is just dead.
And I’m flooded with wanting to look at pictures of us as a family or to hold some of her broken jewelry or to wrap myself in her smell—but I know that there’s nothing left. It’s all been given away or sold or thrown in the garbage, leaving only memories—real “in your brain” memories that are starting to fade and become fuzzy no matter how hard I try to hold on to them.
After the funeral my dad gave away a lot of her stuff. Dresses, hats, a pair of her favorite winter boots. That made sense because there were ladies who were poor and didn’t have things. And that’s why he called one of those places that come to your house to take away the garbage bags full of clothes and then give them to people who need what you no longer do.
Soon after that I’d see ladies walking around in the supermarket or in the mall and I’d look real hard to see if any of them were wearing her stuff, and I guess I was secretly hoping I’d get to see a piece of my mom roaming around like she was still around, only in someone else’s body. But I never saw anyone wearing my mom’s ghost clothes, and pretty soon I stopped thinking about it.
The clothes giveaway seemed like a good idea, and even though I missed seeing her fuzzy bathrobe and long winter coat and other Mom-clothes around the house, I didn’t really care. But my dad started getting rid of other stuff, too. A whole set of dishes disappeared—and it was the set with the flower pattern around the edges that looked like spaceships if you mashed your creamed corn on top . . . and then some of the paintings in frames we used to have weren’t there . . . and even a shaggy rug that used to be in front of the TV went away one day while I was at school.
“What’s up?” I asked my sister, who knew everything back then.
“Dad’s cleaning the house of Mom,” she told me. “He’s making her disappear.”
By the time we’d moved from the Fog House into House #5, every one of our family portraits—even the cheesy one we did at Sears, where the backdrop was blue clouds and we all wore fake smiles—all of them were gone too. Then he bought new pots and pans without even thinking about all the meals we ate together that got cooked in the old ones, and then the silverware went missing too. The silverware!
Don’t forget her, Sylvia tells me.
And I wonder how I can keep my mom from fading away when everything that reminds me of her is already gone.
Don’t forget her.
But I feel like I already am, and I search my mind for all the things we no longer have that connect her to me.
burned popcorn
IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, AND MARSHALL, HILLARY, and I decide to rent a DVD, which means Hillary’s dad drives us to the Movie Scene. That’s the video store that’s located next to Los Tacos, a Mexican restaurant that makes all the movies smell like arroz con pollo, which is rice with chicken, which I know from learning “Me llamo Milo. Yo gusto arroz con pollo. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?”
Hillary’s dad doesn’t come in with us. He just waits in the car listening to a book on tape, something I don’t quite understand because I see he has the paperback version right there on the dashboard. Hillary says that’s because after every book-on-tape chapter, he likes to stop and read those pages to make sure the guy reading the book out loud doesn’t skip any of the good parts.
Even though it almost makes sense, I decide he is way weird.
We wander the aisles, and it take
s us about forty-five minutes to come to some decision that doesn’t include anything with too much blood or the undead (which Hillary says is a deal breaker).
“I want a comedy,” she says.
“Things that go BOOM!” Marshall is excited.
“No subtitles.” This is my demand.
We go for a classic—Galaxy Quest, which is a really funny outer-space movie in a dumb kind of way.
“This one’s on me,” Marshall says, strutting all the way up to the bored-looking teenager at the cash register. “Birthday cash stash!”
Back in the car we realize it’s time to decide whose house has the best “Triple Threat.” The Triple Threat is the system you use to decide where you are actually going to watch the DVD, and it boils down to three important things:
It’s a no-brainer about the snacks issue because my house never has good stuff, mostly because my dad never buys any. Hillary reminds us she’s allowed three nonhealthy snacks a week, so right away you know her house will have just apples and nuts, and that leaves Marshall, whose mom stocks the place to the roof with artificial colors and flavors.
As for butt comfort, it’s Hillary’s house hands down. TV size, too, because they have a whole room just for watching stuff, and it’s got a wide-screen TV in it and a really great couch and a matching chair that swivels in circles.
“Snacks over TV,” I say, already hungry for the sight of Marshall’s cupboard, where the cupcakes and licorice twists are calling to me.
“Can’t do it,” Marshall says. “I just remembered my folks are having friends over to play cards or something dumb like that. Who plays cards, anyway?”
Hillary turns to her dad. “Can we watch it at our house?”
There’s a second of hesitation on her father’s part, which can only mean one thing: No way. And his excuse for it is totally lame: “Your mother and I have plans to watch a global warming documentary on the big TV. You kids can go in the basement, though.”
Milo Page 8
