Very Rich

by Polly Horvath

  AN OCCASIONAL COW

  (Pictures by Gioia Fiammenghi)

  NO MORE CORNFLAKES

  THE HAPPY YELLOW CAR

  WHEN THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN

  THE TROLLS

  EVERYTHING ON A WAFFLE

  THE CANNING SEASON

  THE VACATION

  THE PEPINS AND THEIR PROBLEMS

  (Pictures by Marylin Hafner)

  THE CORPS OF THE BARE-BONED PLANE

  MY ONE HUNDRED ADVENTURES

  NORTHWARD TO THE MOON

  MR. AND MRS. BUNNY—DETECTIVES EXTRAORDINAIRE!

  (Pictures by Sophie Blackall)

  ONE YEAR IN COAL HARBOR

  LORD AND LADY BUNNY—ALMOST ROYALTY!

  (Pictures by Sophie Blackall)

  THE NIGHT GARDEN

  PUFFIN

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  Published in hardcover by Puffin Canada, 2018

  Published simultaneously in the United States by Margaret Ferguson Books, an imprint of Holiday House, New York

  Copyright © 2018 by Polly Horvath

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Sarah Watts

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Horvath, Polly, author

  Very rich / Polly Horvath.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780143198611 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780143198628 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8565.O747V47 2018 jC813’.54 C2017-905576-3

  C2017-905577-1

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  To Arnie, Emily, Andrew, Zayda, Bonny, and Mildred

  Cover

  Also by Polly Horvath

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  THE MISTAKE

  A DINNER INVITATION

  THE GAMES

  ONE LAST QUESTION

  THE PLAN

  FLOATING

  THE TIME MACHINE

  CONEY ISLAND

  FREDDY AND DELIA

  AUNT HAZELNUT’S JEWELS

  KIDNAPPED

  NEW LIVES

  THE SUIT

  THE PRESIDENT

  HIDING

  A FRIEND

  SURPRISE

  MANY THANKS TO

  RUPERT BROWN came from a large family. They lived in a very plain small house on the edge of Steelville, Ohio. Rupert had so many brothers and sisters that it was like living in a small city-state. They crawled over the furniture. They ran in and out of doors. They were big and small and male and female. They all had sandy-brown hair, pinched noses, high cheekbones and narrow lips. They were all thin.

  There were so many children in the Brown family that Mrs. Brown claimed not to be able to remember all their names. She often addressed them by “Hey you.” Rupert had siblings he rarely talked to and hardly knew. There were many different alliances within the family, many secrets, many separate lives. Close proximity does not always make for coziness. Sometimes it is just crowded.

  Rupert was ten, and he moved among his family largely unnoticed except by his favorite sister, six-year-old Elise. She, like Rupert, was quiet and shy and spent a lot of time trying to keep out of everyone’s way.

  One day before Christmas, Rupert’s teenage brothers John and Dirk came home with a cat. Because they were often bringing home stolen cats, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the origin of this cat. It was not a stray. Perhaps they secretly longed for a pet and this is why they did it, although what they told the family was that it was sport.

  “Catch and release. Like fly-fishing. Only with cats,” explained John as he held the new one up for his mother to see. There was a wistful look in his eyes. Rupert wondered if he was hoping that his mother would fall in love with it and let them keep it.

  “Did I not tell you to stop doing that!” shrieked Mrs. Brown, just home from her job cleaning the offices in the steelworks.

  She tore across the room, grabbed the cat, and threw it into the backyard. Then she slammed the door.

  Elise looked out the window in concern. “The cat isn’t moving,” she whispered as Rupert joined her.

  “I’ll check,” Rupert whispered back. Their mother had gone to the kitchen to make the thin gruel of oatmeal that, along with other people’s kitchen scraps that their father collected every day, passed for dinner nightly.

  All the Brown children tiptoed around their mother. Sometimes she lashed out. Sometimes she hoisted one of the younger Browns onto her lap to watch television and cuddled them as if this, this soft and comforting jolly person, was who she really was. Because you never knew which mother would emerge, it was better to err on the side of caution.

  It was cold outside and as Rupert approached the cat he was filled with dread. Suppose the cat was injured? What would they do with it? He knew his mother wouldn’t let them keep another mouth that needed feeding. He knew there was no money for a vet. He couldn’t just let the cat lie there in pain, could he? Would he himself have to kill the cat to put it out of its misery? He didn’t know how to do this. What if he had to nurse the cat while keeping his mother at bay? What if the cat was dead, then what?

  Just as he got close enough to the cat to see that it was still breathing, a cop car came down the road and pulled up in front of the Browns’ house. Rupert could see it from where he stood hovering over the cat. The patrol car doors opened and two officers got out and went up the walkway. Oh no, oh no! They were coming for his brothers for sure. If they found the cat would they arrest all three of them, John and Dirk and their mother the cat thrower?

  As Rupert reached down, the cat looked up in alarm and heaved itself to its feet to limp off across the yard. One of its legs must have been hurt in the fall. Rupert ran to the cat, partly to help it and partly with the thought of hiding it from the police. He picked it up and carried it to an empty toolshed in the corner of the yard just as the back door opened and Dirk and John ran through the yard, jumped the fence, and took off across the neighbor’s property.

  “I’ll come back for you later, I promise,” Rupert murmured to the cat. Then he went swiftly and silently into the house.

  “How dare you!” he heard his mother saying to the police officers at the front door. “Hounding us day and night over cats.”

  “Mrs. Fraser said she saw your sons very clearly pick up the cat and run away with it,” said one of the officers, who looked weary.

  “Well, search the place!” cried Mrs. Brown. “Search the darn place from top to bottom then and good luck finding your cat!”

  “Are you saying you’ve let the cat go?” asked the other officer, who also looked weary. Both of the policemen had tired, unhappy cop eyes. The eyes of people who had seen all the sad ways people misbehaved and the terrible things they did to each other but who knew that no matter how tired or sad they became, they must keep knocking on doors to sort things out.

  Elise went over to Rupert and took his hand. He squeezed hers. Just then Mr. Brown appeared on the porch with a big bag of kitchen scraps.

  “The cops aga
in?” He pushed his way between them and into the slightly less chilly clime of the house. “Want a half-eaten taco?” he asked one of the cops with expansive hospitality, rooting through his bag among the carrot greens and almost empty chip bags. “It’s here somewhere. It’s got most of the meat in it still.”

  “No, thanks,” said the officer, putting up a hand. “I just ate.”

  “Part of a Twinkie?”

  “No, really.”

  “Here’s a bottle of blueberry syrup. I guess they tried it and didn’t like it,” Mr. Brown said.

  “There’s a layer of mold on it,” said the officer.

  Mr. Brown opened the bottle and took a swig. “Tangy!” he reported.

  “About your sons, Mrs. Brown,” the officer tried again.

  Mrs. Brown looked daggers at him. The officers glanced at each other. Their eyes took in everything: the broken-down furniture, the dirty children in their filthy, ragged clothes, the freezing air of the house, Elise and Rupert’s frightened faces, the other children who had been one by one creeping up the stairs away from the police and their mother’s wrath.

  “We’d like to have a brief chat with them, Mrs. Brown,” said one of the officers. “They can’t keep this behavior up. Everyone knows they steal cats. People are saying they want something done.”

  “Yeah, and I bet those people all got their cats back,” said Mrs. Brown. “People leave their cats to wander the city and poop in other people’s yards, but no one arrests the cats or the cat owners for that. I say, if you leave your cat to wander the streets, is it any wonder it occasionally goes missing? You people are always picking on the poor. Coming here saying my children are thieves. You never have any proof, have you? Why don’t you spend less time picking on innocent people and more time hustling up some real turkeys for the Christmas turkey baskets. That would be useful. That would be a public service. Every year it’s the same. You deliver a basket that you call a Christmas turkey basket. But where’s the turkey, I’d like to know? A chicken is more like it. And not even a roaster. A fryer.”

  “Ma’am, they’re just called Christmas turkey baskets because, well, that’s what they’ve always been called. Some of the baskets have turkeys. Some have chickens. It depends on what’s donated. Now where are your sons?”

  “How should I know?” asked Mrs. Brown.

  “You tell them to watch themselves,” said the officer, shrugging and clearly giving up. “Give the cat back to Mrs. Fraser and we’ll let it go this time. But if they do it again, we’re taking them in.”

  “Yeah, right, I’ll do that,” said Mrs. Brown. “If you had any proof, you would have arrested them by now. I wasn’t born yesterday.” And she slammed the door.

  When the car had driven away, Elise whispered to Rupert, “How’s the cat?”

  “Lame,” whispered Rupert before he had a chance to think.

  “Lame!” cried Elise.

  “What’s lame?” barked Mrs. Brown, turning a truly terrible face toward them.

  “The cat,” whispered Rupert.

  “Where?”

  “In the toolshed,” whispered Rupert, shrinking back to the wall.

  “Well, get rid of it!” shrieked Mrs. Brown.

  “Your mother’s strong as a rock,” Mr. Brown said, and then snorted with suppressed glee at his own wit. “You know her secret? She’s got no feelings! HAR HAR HAR!” He doubled over with exploding laughter.

  “She seems to have anger down pat,” muttered Dirk, who was coming through the back door, followed by John.

  Mrs. Brown glared at both of them so horribly that Mr. Brown choked back his laugh and turned on the television. Dirk and John joined him on the ramshackle couch and slowly the other children began to drift down the stairs.

  Mrs. Brown moved toward the kitchen to sort out the kitchen scraps. As she passed Elise, who was crying quietly over the injured cat and the police visit, she snapped, “Stop that!”

  Elise put her thumb in her mouth. She was too old to suck her thumb, but sometimes around her mother it made its way there.

  Rupert went out to the toolshed. The cat was lying down licking its front paw. He picked it up and walked the ten blocks to the Frasers’ house. It was a harrowing walk, for every moment he expected the cop car to round the corner, see him, and accuse him of stealing the cat. He was so worried about this that twice he almost turned around for home, but in the end he feared the police less than he did his mother. Fortunately, he met no one but a man getting off a bus, too focused on scurrying home to wonder what that Brown child was doing with a cat.

  When Rupert got to the Frasers’ front yard, he gently lowered the cat to the ground, prepared to watch it until it had made its limping way safely to its own door. But the cat had apparently cashed in, if not one of its nine lives, one of its nine recoveries, for whatever limp the cat had had was gone and it ran away from Rupert as quickly as it could.

  Rupert found this comforting but worried that the cat would forever after be fearful of people. Perhaps his family had even created a monster who would hiss and scratch anyone who came near. He trudged back home with a heavy heart.

  “Is the cat returned?” asked Elise, who was waiting by the front door for him.

  “Yes, it’s fine and the limp is gone. Go,” he whispered fiercely, for his mother had just come out of the kitchen after washing the dinner dishes and was casting an eye about looking for an excuse to yell at someone.

  Elise ran up to bed.

  “What took you so long?” said his mother. “Dinner is over.”

  There was never enough food for anyone. They ate quickly when it was ready and without ceremony. Everyone was always hungry. Now, without dinner in his stomach, Rupert felt not just hungry but starving. How long could you starve like this, he wondered as he dragged himself up to bed, before your body began to devour your own bones? He went to sleep and all night dreamt of slithering boneless along the ground.

  The next morning Rupert waited in front of the school for Elise, who always walked there a little later than Rupert, who liked to be early. When she approached he went up to her and said, “We could try lining up for the free breakfast again.”

  “I’m too scared,” said Elise.

  “Yeah, me too,” said Rupert, and went to lean by the entrance until the bell rang. Elise ran off to her classroom in a different wing.

  There was a free breakfast program for hungry children, but he never got to partake of it because the lunch lady who served it didn’t like the Browns either. John and Dirk had stolen her cat and it took three days for it to return to her. She never forgave them. As far as she was concerned, all the Browns were tarred with the same larcenous brush. The one time Rupert showed up in line for his free breakfast she gave him such a look that he was shaken to his core and never returned. Neither did his brothers or sisters.

  Because Rupert was so thin he should have felt as if he were bursting with health. Doctors now tell you very thin is a healthy state to be in. The healthiest state, really. If you ask them, they will tell you that it would do all of us some good to fast a couple of days a week. It kills off your bad cells so your good cells can flourish. But Rupert, thin as he was, fairly bursting with good cells and no room in his body for the bad ones, didn’t feel healthy. Every day he walked home from school, desperately trying to make it to his own porch before the dizziness of hunger overcame him. And every day when he got there he felt like he might faint right on his doorstep.

  Once he got home, he would go to his bedroom. There were three bedrooms in the house. One for the boys, one for the girls, and one for Mr. and Mrs. Brown. In the boys’ and girls’ bedrooms, the younger children slept in the beds and the older ones slept under them. Rupert shared the underneath of a bed with John and Dirk. After school Rupert often lay under the boys’ bed garnering his energy so he would have enough to drag himself downstairs when the dinner oatmeal was ready. Then the oatmeal gave him just enough energy to crawl back upstairs and fall asleep. This was his
life. A life spent hoping he wouldn’t disgrace himself by fainting.

  Then one day it happened. He did faint. It happened on a day of very deep snow.

  Rupert got up and left for school as usual. In order to get there, he would start out from his house in the very poor people’s area on the outskirts of town by the railroad tracks and power station. Houses there were derelict. Then he would pass through the poor but proud part where people with little money made a decent effort to keep their lawns tidy and their steps swept. Next, he came to the middle-class houses, brimming with hedges and gardens and tidy shutters framing what Rupert imagined were only happy, well-fed people, then to the more opulent houses of the rich. And finally, before he got to the school, he trekked past the houses of the very rich.

  As he set out, Rupert thought it odd that his mother hadn’t made the sparse spoonful-per-person morning oatmeal that morning. And odd that no one had made any tracks before him on the sidewalk. He had to step high and cut through the deep drifts of heavy, wet snow. This was especially taxing as he had no boots, only tennis shoes, but he didn’t dare walk in the road. They were never plowed properly and cars were always dovetailing on their slick surfaces. A boy was too apt to be run over there, although this day there seemed to be little traffic and that was yet another odd thing.

  Rupert considered giving up and missing school, but he wanted to grow up to do something special. He wasn’t sure what yet, but he knew you couldn’t do any kind of special thing without school. So he forced himself to trudge forward. Mind over matter, he chanted to himself, mind over matter. At one point, he sat down and a drift of snow collapsed over him. The wet snow turned his neck red because he had no scarf or hat. He had no coat either. He had to make do by wearing all three shirts he owned, one on top of the other, and a hole-ridden sweatshirt over all. This worked okay until the dead of winter. Then he was not only always hungry, he was always cold. He was nearly frostbitten when he stood up again. So much so, he wasn’t sure he could go on. But the happy thought that any moment he would be inside the heated school kept him going. It was just around the next corner.