Two hours into their journey, she was completely immersed in her third novel of summer break—A Night Divided—when the truck lurched and began to make a disturbing thump thump thump thump sound. Based on the way the truck was bouncing along at an odd slant, Lucy had a pretty good feeling one of the tires on the “good as new” truck had gone flat.
“Whoa, Nelly,” Dad said, slowing the truck. He held the wheel steady, guiding their giant vehicle toward the side of the road. Lucy glanced out the window and saw that they were in the middle of nowhere. There was a billboard advertising a corn maze—COME BY FOR SOME GOOD, CORNY FUN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!—but other than that, there was nothing but fields for as far as the eye could see. Dad eased the truck onto the shoulder and came to a stop. Then he climbed out of the truck to investigate. “Back in a jiffy!” he called out to the kids with a quick tip of his hat.
Freddy and Herb both scrambled into the front seat, then hopped over Lucy to get to the truck’s passenger-side door. Both boys spilled out onto the shoulder, jumping and playing happily in the tall grass along the side of the highway. “Can I let my mice out to run for a little bit?” Herb called out to Lucy.
“Do you have a leash?” she asked in reply. She had no intention of actually letting her brother release the mice in the grass on the side of the road. That experiment certainly wouldn’t end well, and Herb would have a full-on meltdown if he lost them—or anything else he considered a prized possession. His collections were very important to him; ever since Mom had died, he’d refused to throw anything away. Lucy knew letting go was hard, so she tried to be patient with her little brother. “Or maybe one of those plastic hamster balls, to keep them contained?”
Herb looked confused for a second, but then he shrugged. “I forgot,” he said sadly. “Oh well, they can just stay in the truck with you.”
While her brothers stomped and danced in the long grass on the side of the highway, Lucy took a deep breath, considering her next move. On the one hand, she could be a good team player and get out of the truck to help her dad. She and her best friend, Maren, had taught themselves how to change a tire the previous summer. It was one of those things they believed a person should know how to do, so they’d taken it upon themselves to learn.
On the other hand, she was curious to see how her dad would handle the situation. Walter Peach was incredibly smart and had achieved great success in his career. But when it came to the puzzle of life’s basic challenges, he sometimes seemed to be missing a few key pieces. Lucy already took care of her siblings most of the time; she couldn’t babysit her dad, too.
Lucy rolled the window down the rest of the way and settled into her seat, resting her feet on the dash. She decided to see how things would play out without her getting involved, for once. Through the open window, she could hear her brothers chatting away while they lunged and karate-kicked each other in the grassy space along the side of the road. Herb’s tummy troubles seemed to have improved after Lucy had ordered him a turkey sandwich at Betty’s Pies.
While they battled, Freddy spouted off a collection of random facts about mice: “Did you know there are thirty-eight known species of mice? They’re usually nocturnal, so they prefer to play at night. Also, their teeth never stop growing. Never, Herb. So if your mice don’t get enough stuff to chew on, they could grow vampire teeth that stick out of their mouths and then they’ll eat us all in our sleep.” Lucy found it fascinating that Freddy was an endless fountain of useless facts about nearly everything. She listened as he rambled on. “Did you know mice can squeeze through a gap that’s only as wide as a pencil? In some parts of the world, mice are considered a special treat, and people eat them for protein.”
When she’d finally had enough of her brother’s mouse facts, Lucy called out, “What seems to be the trouble, Dad?”
“Well,” Dad replied, “I think I’m going to need to do a bit of preliminary research and see if we can identify the problem.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. Her dad approached nearly every problem using the scientific method:
1. Ask a question.
2. Do background research.
3. Construct a hypothesis.
4. Test with an experiment.
5. Is the procedure working? If not, repeat steps 1–4. If yes, carry on.
6. Analyze data and draw conclusions.
7. Do the results align with the hypothesis?
8. Analyze and communicate results.
This process was great for lab work. But she’d found that this approach didn’t always allow her father to bend and flex enough when faced with real-world challenges. Through the side window, Lucy could see her dad scanning every inch of the truck. “I don’t think it’s a belt,” he muttered. Lucy rolled her eyes. She was pretty certain her dad knew absolutely nothing about the inner workings of food trucks, or even cars—real or toy.
“It doesn’t look like we hit an animal,” he mused. “My guess is, our problem is a tire,” Dad said, stating his hypothesis.
“Bingo,” Lucy whispered. She paged through the truck’s manual, which she found in the glove box, and discovered that the spare tire ought to be tucked inside a special compartment in the floor at the back of the truck.
Dad paced back and forth, using a little silver pressure gauge to test each of the tires. Judging from the way the truck had bumped and thumped before they pulled over, Lucy knew one of the tires probably looked pretty flat and he likely didn’t even need to check the pressure to see where the problem was—but her dad wasn’t the type to make assumptions without gathering evidence. He would, it seemed, buy a food truck on a lark, but that was a whole other ball of wax.
“Aha!” Dad cried out finally. “I believe the problem is our front right tire.”
Lucy giggled. “A solid hypothesis,” she muttered.
Dad stood stock-still, staring at the front of the truck for a very long time. “How are we going to fix this?” he asked quietly.
“Maybe we should call someone?” Freddy suggested.
“That’s expensive and cuts into our summer earnings,” Dad said, stroking his chin. “Perhaps we could try patching it?” He hemmed and hawed, then said, “Worth a try.”
He began riffling through the truck, apparently trying to find something he could use to try to patch the tire. He came up empty-handed. Another ten minutes passed, during which he stared at the truck without testing any solutions at all. “Maybe I should just try driving on it, to see if it’s still causing problems?” he finally said.
“Can I pee out here in the grass?” Herb hollered, but got no answer.
Lucy realized they would very likely be stuck on the side of the road for the next six days if someone didn’t step in and do something. She realized she had a choice to make: she could help her mixed-up mess of a family, or let everything fall apart again.
Lucy set her book to the side and hopped out of the truck.
“Lucy! Do you have a hypothesis?” Dad asked. “I think it’s the tire. But I haven’t been able to gather quite enough data to draw a full conclusion and solve the problem.”
“Sometimes,” Lucy answered through gritted teeth, “a flat tire is just a flat tire.” Then she popped open the truck’s big back door, dragged the enormous spare out of its hiding spot, and got to work.
From the Sketchbook of Freddy Peach:
HOW TO SPEND A MILLION DOLLARS
When I’m a millionaire, I’m going to have a private pool for Herb (and me) that is bigger and better than the snooty country club pool. With waterslides! Fountains! A swim-up ice cream bar! Live music! Underwater TVs!
How Dad spent Mom’s million? On a busted food truck.
Dear Great Aunt Lucinda,
This food truck experiment—it’s crazy, right? Do I need to worry that Dad has gone totally nuts? I know you can’t actually answer any of my questions (since we d
on’t have an address you can write back to, and Dad won’t let us use his phone—it’s for “work and roadside emergencies only”), but I’ll keep writing you old-fashioned postcards from our trip, so you can maybe send help if it seems like we really need it. Has Dasher stolen and buried any of your wigs again lately? Haha!
Much love,
Lucy
8
HERB’S COLLECTION
They had been away from home less than a day, but Herb already missed his stuff. For the past few years—almost as far back as he could remember, really—Herb had been cultivating a special collection of treasures that he watched over and cherished. It was his garden of goodies. His mound of magic. His pile of precious.
Freddy too often told Herb his stuff was just junk.
Lucy had told him he’d created a fire hazard.
But Herb loved and carefully guarded every last item in his collection. There were nearly two dozen once-lost-but-now-found stuffed animals that he’d rescued from various places around town. Several had been forgotten by their kids at the playground. The purple bunny he’d found in a puddle in the grocery store parking lot. A fuzzy green frog had been left for dead on the sidewalk near the bus stop. The headless giraffe had appeared—like magic—on their front lawn when last winter’s snow melted. Each time Herb saw a stuffy in need, he picked it up and bathed it, nursed it back to good health, and added it to his box of friends in the back corner of his room. He knew it was his job to protect them.
Then there were the art projects: boxes and boxes of beautiful art projects that Herb had found—thrown carelessly away by kids at school. Whenever he found a lovely picture or diorama or clay creation tossed in the trash, Herb rescued it from the bin and brought it home to be treasured as part of the collection.
Herb had also started moving all the old clothes that no longer fit into his stash. He didn’t like to see things he cared about disappear for good. He’d never tell Lucy, but Herb had also taken a bunch of singleton mittens from the lost and found at school on the afternoon their school secretary was planning to throw them away.
There were also boxes and containers filled to bursting with:
• Cool pine cones and rusted matchbox cars he’d collected at the park
• Empty Thinking Putty tins
• Marbles
• Holey socks
• His mom’s nearly empty shampoo and hair cream bottles (He liked to smell those to help remember her.)
• Expired Box Tops
Herb was the keeper of all kinds of lost and forgotten treasures.
Though he missed his stuff at home, he was thrilled that he’d have a chance to start up a new collection on the road. His first major win was finding the mouse family. This was the most exciting—and challenging—treasure he’d ever had. He planned to take his responsibility for their well-being very seriously.
Other than the mice and his second-grade class hamster, there was only one other time in Herb’s life when he’d been entrusted with the care of a living thing. Herb had just started kindergarten when Mom got sick. His teacher that year had told him, nearly every day, that she was praying for their family. She’d also told him that if he prayed hard enough, and took good care of Mom and loved her and hugged her as much as he could, that he was doing his most important job. When she’d said that, Herb had thought that what she was telling him was: he had the power to make Mom better.
So he had done all the things Ms. Cheney had told him to do, and more, but Mom had died anyway. Herb had failed.
Since then, he’d vowed to take better care of everything that came into his possession. He wouldn’t let anyone or anything else go. Now, he had his chance to prove he could take care of something all on his own. It was Herb’s solemn duty to protect three little mice, and he couldn’t wait to show everyone that he was responsible enough to live up to the task.
That afternoon, when Herb’s dad pulled their big peach food truck into the campground where they would be staying that first night of their summer adventure, Herb set to work making his mice feel just as comfortable and cared for as the rest of the family. He had decorated their glass tank with a map, so the mice could see where they were traveling and feel like they were part of the family’s adventure, too.
But Herb knew that seeing and hearing about an adventure wasn’t the same as having an adventure. So while Freddy set up their two tents and Lucy got dinner ready, Herb transferred his mice from their glass enclosure into a lighter cardboard box, and brought them outside for some fresh air. He dropped snacks into the box and watched his tiny friends sniff and snuff the fresh, crisp air.
Once the tents were set up, Herb carried his mice into the yellow tent he would be sharing with Dad. He set up his own sleeping bag, and then got the mice settled in at the foot of his little bed. He tucked one of his T-shirts into a corner of the box so that they would have something soft to sleep in for the night.
Just as soon as they were snuggly, Dad’s voice echoed from somewhere outside the tent. “Kids! Time to bake!”
Herb scrambled to the tent’s front flap and unzipped it. Dad had promised to teach them all how to make pie today, so they would have their first round of treats ready to sell the very next day in downtown Minneapolis. Herb was excited to help.
“Naptime,” he told his mice. Then he blew them a kiss and zipped the tent up tight.
He scurried over to the food truck and hopped into the gleaming silver space. Dad was already busy measuring out flour and butter for the crusts. Lucy and Freddy tumbled into the truck behind Herb. “Wash up, then let’s get this show on the road,” he instructed. Herb did as he was told.
The four Peaches had decided as a group that their food truck’s signature item would be Great Aunt Lucinda’s famous peach pie. When Herb first saw Dad making this pie, he thought it looked pretty slimy: the peach slices Dad used were mushy and smushy, and the filling looked slimy and barfy when the peaches got all mixed up with sugar and cinnamon in the bowl. But after he saw and tasted the final product, he decided it was pretty cool how that mess of peaches could get turned into something so beautiful and perfect inside the food truck.
To figure out the rest of their pie offerings, Freddy had done some market research and told the family that selling some type of apple pie out of the truck was a must. A chocolate cream pie would also be a good addition, Lucy had pointed out, and Herb said that lemon meringue pie tasted like summer. To keep things exciting, Freddy thought they should test out some new recipes and add a special-feature pie or two into their rotation when things were going well.
“If we want to make real money,” Dad said, wiping his flour-covered hands on his bright yellow apron, “we need to sell a lot of slices of pie.”
“Duh,” Lucy muttered under her breath. Herb wrapped his arm around her, since it seemed like she could use a hug.
“To sell a lot of slices,” Dad went on, “we need to make a lot of pies. Which means everyone has to help with the baking each day.”
Dad taped Great Aunt Lucinda’s recipe card to the wall of the food truck and began his lesson. “Creating a perfect crust for your pie isn’t as easy as it looks,” he explained, as they each prepared a bowl full of crust ingredients. “It’s an art form, really.”
Herb gazed into his bowl as he mushed all the stuff together. He tried to think about his crust as art. It did remind him a little of the homemade play dough Lucy made for him sometimes. But this dough was crumbly and chunky and looked nothing like it was supposed to. He glanced over at his sister’s crust. Lucy had finished mixing and was now rolling her crust out on one of the shiny counters. It looked paper-thin in some spots, chewy-thick in others, and the round of dough ripped in half when she tried to lower it into her pie tin. Herb knew his brilliant, perfect sister wasn’t used to failing, but her crust experiment seemed to be a full-blown disaster.
Her
b’s big brother didn’t seem to be faring any better. Every time Freddy tried to roll his dough into a flat disk, the whole pile of ingredients crumbled into buttery bits. Freddy finally gave up and started pressing pieces of his dough into the bottom of his pan, clearly hoping it would hold together after it was baked. The pan looked like a patchwork quilt of pressed-together dough. Freddy continued to pound at his crust dough, slamming his fist into the bottom of the pan to flatten and even it all out.
“Maybe we’d be better off buying ready-made crusts,” Lucy suggested. “It would be a lot easier.”
After trying and failing many times, Herb gave up on rolling out his crust the regular way. Instead, he was forming it into little balls that he then rolled in a sugar and cinnamon mixture. “Herb’s Cinnaballs!” he cried, holding one up proudly. “Like donut holes, but yummier.”
“Buy ready-made crust?” Dad scoffed, ignoring Herb. “Nonsense. That would be like buying a Pepperidge Farm cake from the grocery store and then selling it by the slice. Or buying McDonald’s burgers and putting them in your own wrappers. This family specializes in Peach creations, not other people’s stuff.” He gestured at the lumpy crusts on the counter. “We have the power to turn this mess into something truly delicious and beautiful.”
“But Pepperidge Farm cake is delicious,” Freddy blurted. He looked around at his family’s baking efforts. “And our homemade crusts look like—”
Dad cut him off. “Our crusts look like a first effort,” he said. “Practice makes perfect. If Mom’s team had given up on the solar window cling invention after their first effort, they never would have succeeded. Then we wouldn’t have gotten the chance to set off on this family adventure.” He pressed his own nearly perfect crust into a pan. “It’s worth spending a little extra time on the things that matter.”
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