Home Sweet Motel

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Kids all over America come to Florida for Spring Break. Where are we supposed to go?”

  “You guys are always welcome here,” I told him.

  “No disrespect, P.T.,” said Julie Scarboro, “but after you play one hundred rounds of your grand-father’s Pirate Pete’s Putt-Putt course, it sort of loses its thrill.”

  “All Spring Break means for us,” whined Pinky, “is longer lines at McDonald’s, longer lines at the movie theater, and longer lines at every stoplight between McDonald’s and the movie theater.”

  “Spring Break also means no school,” I said, because as you’ll see, I like to look on the bright side, even when it’s darker than the inside of my pants pockets at midnight.

  Not that I’ve ever actually looked inside my pants pockets that late at night, but you get the idea. I’m an optimist. It’s hard not to be when you live in a place where a giant peanut can magically become a Hawaiian Happy-Stinky Fruit with a face.

  “Besides,” I said, “Spring Break means no Mr. Frumpkes for a whole week.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Grumpface,” said Julie, checking the time on her smartphone, “I’d better head home. Time to work on my Ponce de León essay…”

  And that’s when the new kid, Brendan Sullivan Barrett, piped up.

  “Is it true what Mr. Frumpkes said?” Brendan asked with a twang. He and his family had just moved to Florida from Texas. “Your dad doesn’t ever go to parent-teacher conferences?”

  “Nope,” I said. “He can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I pointed to the rocket ship perched on the other side of the pool fence.

  “NASA won’t let him,” I explained.

  “You mean the space people? Like we had in Houston?”

  “That’s right. NASA’s here in Florida, too. Over at Cape Canaveral. My dad is what they call an undercover astronaut.”

  “Huh,” said Julie. “I thought you told us he was on the road with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus.”

  “That’s his cover story,” I said. “NASA cooked it up to explain why he hasn’t been home for so long. But between you and me, Brendan, there’s a reason my grandfather erected that rocket ship twelve years ago, on the day I was born. It’s to remind us all that my dad volunteered for a mission that no other astronaut was brave enough to undertake—a mission that will, one day, benefit you and me and all of humanity.”

  “You’re making this up,” said Brendan.

  “No, Brendan. Sometimes I wish I were. Do you know how long it takes our fastest spaceship to reach Nigel Fifteen?”

  “Nigel Fifteen? Who’s he?”

  “It’s not a he,” I said.

  “It’s a planet in a nearby solar system,” said Pinky, who’d heard me tell this story before. “Right in the Goldilocks Zone!”

  I nodded. “What Pinky means is that Nigel Fifteen is an Earth-type planet orbiting its star at a distance that makes it not too hot, not too cold. It’s just right for human life. Unfortunately, it takes eleven years to fly there, even if you use the gravitational pull of Jupiter to slingshot your supersecret high-speed spacecraft out of our solar system.”

  “Wow,” said Brendan.

  “NASA figures Dad will land sometime next year. Probably right around Christmas. If Nigel Fifteen lives up to its promise, then those of us in middle school right now might be the first colonists to live on that distant planet in twenty or thirty years.”

  “So we could be like Ponce de León,” said Brendan, sounding excited. “Only instead of exploring Florida, we could go explore Nigel Fifteen!”

  “Ponce de León,” groaned Julie. “Essay. Yuck.”

  “Gotta go,” said Pinky. “School’s always trying to ruin my life.”

  “Yeah,” said everybody else.

  “Thanks for the ice cream,” said Brendan. “And tonight when all the stars come out, guess what I’m going to do, P.T.”

  “Make a wish?”

  “Nope. I’m gonna wave at your dad!”

  By five o’clock, everybody was gone—leaving me alone with a gurgling ice-cream machine, a trickling waterslide, Grandpa’s fiberglass rocket ship, and a made-up story that was starting to seem a lot more real than my dad ever had.

  The next day, we were all right back in history class with Mr. Frumpkes.

  “Who would like to be the first to give his or her oral report on Ponce de León?” he asked with manic glee.

  “Oral report?” said Julie. “You just said we had to write an essay.”

  “I changed my mind. Teacher’s prerogative. We reserve the right to change our minds whenever the mood strikes.”

  All of us (including me) slumped down in our seats with our eyes glued to the tops of our desks.

  “Fine,” said Mr. Frumpkes. “I’ll choose for you.”

  He did this annoying thing he does sometimes, where he closes his eyes and swirls his finger around and around over his grade book.

  “Helicopter, helicopter, who gets to go?”

  After about three more rotations, he jabbed his finger down on the page and read the name it landed on.

  “Peter Paul Nelligan?”

  Pinky.

  “I knew he’d call on me,” Pinky grumbled as he rose beside his desk. He cleared his throat. Ruffled his paper. The tips of his ears turned pink.

  “ Juan Ponce de León had a very unusual name, ” he read from his essay. “ You don’t meet many guys named Juan Ponce these days. I wonder if his parents named him that because he only had one pair of pants. You know, One Pants/Juan Ponce…”

  “Mr. Nelligan?” said Mr. Frumpkes. “Did you even write an essay?”

  “Yes, sir.” Pinky showed the teacher his paper. The lines were filled with blue ink. “I guess I was kind of hung up on his name.”

  “And I guess I’m going to have to give you an F.”

  Mr. Frumpkes had his pen poised over his grade book.

  “An F?” I said, standing up. “Pinky—I mean, Peter Paul—is just a little nervous, sir. Heck, I would be, too, if I had to go first.”

  “Are you volunteering to read your essay, Mr. Wilkie?”

  “Sure. Right after I read Pinky’s so you can hear how good it is and why he deserves an A, not an F.”

  I reached out my hand. Pinky gave me his paper.

  “Thanks, man,” he mumbled.

  I shot him a wink. “I’ve got this,” I whispered back.

  It was time for another triumph of fiction over fact. After all, I was the one who’d gotten us into this essay-writing mess. Voice booming, I pretended to read the report Pinky had written, but mostly I was improvising, making junk up.

  “Young Juan Ponce de León, the boy with the funny first name, dreamed of becoming El Conquistador Valiente. And so, one day—or ‘Juan day’—he put on his one pair of puffy pants, his feathered helmet, and his armor and set sail with Christopher Columbus. Yes, it is a little-known fact that Juan Ponce de León, who was born in Spain in 1460, began his career as an explorer as part of Columbus’s second expedition to the New World in 1493.”

  Okay. I had done my homework. Our motel also has free Wi-Fi. I just hoped I could pretend to read Pinky’s paper long enough that I wouldn’t have to read any of my own, because basically it had all the same stuff in it.

  “Ponce de León gave Florida its name because, much like a florist’s shop, it was a ‘place of flowers.’ ”

  “That’s not true,” said Mr. Frumpkes.

  “Oh, but it is, Mr. Frumpkes,” I said with a smile. “ ‘La Florida’ means ‘the flowery land.’ Probably because Ponce de León first spotted our fair peninsula on April 2, 1513, during the flowery Easter season, which is known in Spanish as Pascua Florida. If he had arrived closer to Christmas, we might all be living in the state of Feliznavida.”

  “Huh,” grunted Mr. Frumpkes. “I did not know that.”

  I could’ve gloated, but I just kept going.

  “However, what Ponce de León was re
ally looking for when he hiked around our peninsula was the legendary—dare I say mythical—Fountain of Youth. Sure, he was searching for gold and, on his day off, he discovered Puerto Rico, but he really wanted to locate the magical spring he’d heard so many stories about. The locals told him it gushed water that could make old people turn young again. Alas, judging from my grandfather and certain other, shall we say, elderly individuals…”

  I took a pause so everybody could check out Mr. Frumpkes’s comb-over—six greasy strands of hair that couldn’t hide his chrome dome.

  “…the great conquistador never found his fountain. He did discover Cape Canaveral and the Dry Tortugas, but no fountain. Especially not on the Dry Tortugas, because they were dry and shaped like turtles, which can live to be some of the oldest, most non-youthful creatures on earth…”

  I went on like that for nearly twenty minutes.

  By the time I was done, I had recited every fact and figure there was to report on Señor Juan Ponce de León. Nobody else had to stand up and give an oral report.

  The bell rang and we were all free of Mr. Frumpkes for a whole week.

  I hurried home to the Wonderland feeling great—until I saw Mom behind the front desk, talking to a man in a dark suit.

  I knew he wasn’t there to pick up a SeaWorld brochure or play Pirate Pete’s Putt-Putt course.

  Nobody wears dark suits in Florida unless they’re going to a funeral or have something super serious to discuss.

  This guy seemed like he thought his shiny midnight-blue outfit made him look slick. He kept tugging his tie and flicking his bangs while checking out his reflection in our glossy (but fake) marble countertop.

  “P.T., mind the front desk,” said Mom, dialing down the volume knob on the walkie-talkie she wore clipped to her belt. “I need to talk to Mr. Pompano in my office.”

  “It’s Pom-PAN-o,” said the man in the suit.

  “Sorry,” said Mom.

  The guy just nodded like she should be.

  “P.T.?” said Mom.

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug.

  “This way, Mr., uh, Pom-PAN-o…”

  She held open the door to her tiny office and quickly whispered, “Keep Grandpa busy!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Mr. Pompano is from the bank.”

  Oh-kay. Now I understood.

  Grandpa isn’t very good at grown-up stuff like banking or staying awake while driving. He’s better at turning smiling peanut heads into exotic Hawaiian fruits. Or burping up gross salad gas after guzzling Cel-Ray soda. Or telling stories about how things used to be “back in the day.”

  While I guarded the lobby, a dad and a daughter came in. I didn’t recognize either one of them. They had to be that very rarest of rare tropical birds: paying customers.

  “Hi there,” said the dad. “I’m Manuel ‘Manny’ Ortega, new to the sports team at WTSP—Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota’s channel ten. We’ve got the news you need when you need it. Unless you need it right now, because I’m not on the air until five. Catch me right after Dr. Phil.”

  “You do sports, Dad,” said his daughter, rolling her eyes. She looked about the same age as me. “Not news.”

  “Sports is news. We always step up to the plate. And remember: there is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ ”

  I was just sort of nodding. Mr. Ortega, who sounded like a smooth radio deejay, talked very, very fast.

  “We just checked in,” said his daughter. “I’m Gloria. My dad lost our room key.”

  “Fumbled it behind my own goal line,” said her dad.

  “He dropped it in the swimming pool.”

  “Kudos on that underwater pool-cleaning robot,” said Mr. Ortega. “It gave one hundred and ten percent.”

  “That’s mathematically impossible, Dad.”

  “Be that as it may, the robot showed us everything it had out there today. Ate the key in ten seconds flat. A new outdoor pool record!”

  “Do we get CNBC on our cable?” asked Gloria.

  “I think so. Is that the one with the Today show?”

  “Whoa there, kiddo,” said her father with another blindingly bright smile. “In our family, we only watch the CBS morning news on WTSP—CBS channel ten.”

  “Right,” said Gloria. “This week that’s what we watch. Next week? Who knows what channel you’ll be on.” She turned to me. “CNBC is a business news channel. You know, stock markets, financial data, earnings reports.”

  “That’s the one with all the numbers and junk, right?”

  Now Gloria rolled her eyes at me instead of her dad.

  “Riiiight,” she said. “The numbers and junk.”

  “I think it’s, like, channel forty-six. I’ve skipped over it a few times on my way to HBO or ESPN.”

  “Oooh,” said Mr. Ortega. “ESPN. The top dogs. The big kahunas. Gotta keep my eyes on that prize. It’s fourth and long, and I’m going for six!”

  I pulled open the drawer where we keep the spare room keys. We don’t do those magnetic cards you swipe through a reader. Grandpa prefers the old-fashioned kind with a big plastic fob, a tag that says, “Drop in any mailbox. We guarantee postage!” It does not say, “Drop in the nearest swimming pool.”

  “So what room are you guys in?” I asked.

  “Second floor,” said Gloria. “Room 233.”

  I shot her one of my slyest winks. “You didn’t sneak a bucket of chicken up there, did you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Long story.”

  I might’ve told her about the alligator and the laundry cart and how I rode it chariot-style to a nearby golf course. I might’ve even added a few new details, like what happened at the water hazard when I discovered it was infested with sharks.

  But I didn’t have time.

  I could see Grandpa ambling across the parking lot.

  He was making a beeline for the front office.

  “Here you go,” I said, tossing Gloria Ortega a spare key to room 233.

  I hopped over the check-in counter and bopped the desk bell to alert Mom that I’d just spotted Grandpa.

  “Now, if you two don’t mind,” I said, ushering the Ortegas toward the door, “we need to lock up the lobby so our staff can restock the Coke machine.”

  “Seriously?” said Gloria.

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of coin counting involved. Have to roll the pennies in those little paper sleeves…”

  “The Coke machine takes pennies?”

  “It’s an old machine.”

  Gloria shook her head. Mr. Ortega gave me a jaunty salute.

  “Play like a champion today,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” I escorted them both out of the lobby and locked the door.

  While the Ortegas climbed the steps to the second floor, I headed across the parking lot to intercept Grandpa.

  “Hey, Grandpa, what’s up?”

  “Hmmm?”

  He had that far-off look in his eye, the one he always gets when he’s dreaming up a new “attraction.”

  “Wanda?” he said into his walkie-talkie. “Pick up. I have a huge idea! This is bigger than those mer-kids we did in the swimming pool with the windup baby dolls. Wanda? Where are you?”

  “Bigger than the mer-kids?” I said. “The mer-kids were huge. What is it, Grandpa?”

  He burped. Once again, the scent of celery filled the air.

  “P.T., I just figured out the ideal, perfect location for our new Happy-Stinky Fruit! We should put it in the lobby with the cat’s litter box hidden inside so when people check in, the Happy-Stinky Fruit would actually stink! It’d be incredible. Disney doesn’t have anything like it. None of their attractions stink. We’re finally going to show the world who’s the top Walt in Florida. Me!”

  “Neat idea, Grandpa. But I’ve got an even better one! I think the Happy-Stinky Fruit should go out back.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  I took Grandpa by
the hand and led him to the rear parking lot, where you can still see a stretch of the narrow railroad tracks for the old ride-on train sunk into the asphalt.

  It was about as far from the front office as we could go and still be on Wonderland property.

  And that’s exactly where Mom needed Grandpa.

  Far, far away.

  “You see that pavilion?” I said. “We’re not using it for anything except picnic tables. What if you put the sculpture inside and we called it the Hawaiian Picnic Island?”

  Grandpa was shaking his head.

  “Nope, nope, nope,” he said as we walked over to it. “Can’t do that, P.T. This is the Wonder World Express Depot.”

  “It is?” I said, pretending I didn’t know what the ramshackle shed used to be.

  “Back in the day, this is where we’d load up the railroad cars.”

  “Is this where you met the lady with the scarf?” I asked, knowing Grandpa would launch into his favorite story—the one about the beautiful blonde in the sunglasses and red polka-dot scarf. I’d listen. It would give Mom enough time to finish with the banker.

  Grandpa sat down at one of the picnic tables and patted the bench for me to join him.

  “This is the exact spot,” said Grandpa. He had a different kind of dreamy look in his eyes. “Of course, this was way back—before you were born. Before your mother was born. It was even before I met your grandmother, may she rest in peace. The year was 1973. Disney World was already open, so most of the glamorous movie stars and Hollywood types were skipping St. Pete and heading over to Orlando. But not my blonde.”

  “Was she a movie star?”

  “If she wasn’t, she should’ve been. Oh, she was beautiful, P.T. Beautiful.

  “She was here for a whole week. Sheila was her name. She must’ve taken a half dozen train rides around the property—one on every day of her stay. She’d say, ‘This place is perfect,’ and I’d say, ‘That’s why we call it Wonder World, ma’am. It is full of marvels to behold and stories to be told!’ My beautiful blond visitor wanted to know everything about every single display. The Mars rocket. Morty D. Mouse. Dino the Dinosaur. She was the first person I ever met who seemed to love Wonder World even more than I did.”