The Stepmom Shake-Up

by Niki Lenz

  The words of the pushy ladies from church last Sunday buzzed in my brain. It was time for Dad to meet a nice young lady. Maybe this Rachel was a nice young lady. And he wanted to talk to her. Exchange eggplant recipes? And then ask her out! And he wasn’t exactly asking my permission. He was asking about his hair. Which made me want to give him a noogie to mess it up.

  I let out a long breath.

  “Your hair looks…well, it looks messy, but I think it kinda works. I’ll be over by the Cocoa Puffs.”

  I ducked around the nearest aisle and pressed my back against the canned goods. This was really happening. What could I do?

  Suddenly my brain was flooded with the wise words of my history teacher: Fight back.

  I peeked around the shelf and saw my dad. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, smiling like he’d just seen his first episode of Jungle Survivor. He was trying to help the woman select a ripe melon. Like he knew how to select a ripe melon. Come on.

  Dad was laying it on thick, using all his charm. If this woman was super into dorky history-buff pastors, we were in real trouble.

  He said something and the woman threw back her head in a too-loud laugh.

  Uh-oh. He was pulling it off. She was picking up what Dad was putting down, and I felt my stomach clench as I watched them together. As soon as a potential love interest wandered into the area, I was completely off Dad’s radar.

  I looked around wildly, searching for anything that might help me stop this madness. I could run screaming to my dad and say someone had tried to kidnap me. I could make sure the store manager saw me stuff candy in my jacket pocket. I could pretend to get stuck in a freezer in the frozen-foods section.

  My eyes rested on a pyramid of creamed corn at the end of the aisle.

  Perfect.

  I skipped to the next aisle, found a cart, and threw in my basket of fruits and veggies. I started walking quickly toward the pyramid, the metal wheels jangling. The last few steps I jogged, just so I wouldn’t chicken out. I had a feeling it was going to hurt, but adrenaline carried me through.

  Crash! The noise echoed louder than I’d expected, and people from all over the store came to see what had happened. My dad and his lady friend were some of the first to arrive. It was like he remembered all of a sudden that he had a daughter. Eye roll.

  “Grace! Oh my gosh, what happened?” Dad ran up to me, his eyebrows scrunched together, his T-shirt coming half untucked.

  I smiled weakly at him. “Oops.”

  He reached out and touched my forehead, and I winced. “You’re bleeding!” he said.

  “I wasn’t watching where I was going, I guess.”

  He stared at me, eyes narrowed, and then turned to the stock boy attempting to rebuild the pyramid and asked him to get me a Band-Aid.

  Rachel patted Dad on the arm, said something too quietly for me to hear, and walked away with her melon. Dad didn’t care, because he was so focused on me.

  Mission accomplished. Soon enough the stock boy returned, offering a Dora Band-Aid, which Dad applied to my wound.

  My head started to pound a little, so I was relieved when Dad grabbed the cart and pushed it, and me, toward the checkout line. All worth it to keep him from asking that woman out.

  We paid for the stuff we’d selected. Dad promised to come back when I was at school the next day to finish the shopping, or else we’d have to become vegan.

  We were quiet in the car on the way home. I tried to look innocent and slightly concussed so Dad wouldn’t get mad at me. After all, as far as he knew, it was all an accident. A hailstorm of creamed corn could’ve happened to anyone, right?

  He didn’t ask me to carry a bag into the house, but I did anyway and even put the items in the correct drawers in the refrigerator.

  “Hey, maybe we can play a game of Risk tonight?” I asked. I wanted to get back to us just being us and remind him he didn’t need anyone else to hang out with but me.

  “You can’t play Risk with brain damage,” he said, tapping my Band-Aid and smirking at me.

  “I’m feeling fine now, much better, really.”

  Dad’s phone sat on the table, with a red dot that indicated a new voice mail.

  “Oh, hey, someone called you.” I played the message on speaker before Dad could protest.

  “Hi, Davy. This is Rachel, from the produce section. I mean, I don’t live in the produce section, but that’s where we were talking.”

  Dad scrambled to grab the phone, but I was quicker, ducking out of his reach. Rachel sounded almost as nervous as Dad had looked in the store. This was not a good sign.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I looked up your number in the directory because I felt like we were having a good conversation and then you had to leave so suddenly.”

  I glared at Dad. Um, hello? She didn’t even ask if his daughter was okay after her run-in with a tower of cans.

  “I hope we can talk again, maybe over dinner on Saturday? My number is 555-1253. Hope to hear from you soon.”

  Dad yanked the phone out of my hand and jammed the button to shut off the message, but he had a big, dopey smile on his face. And it seemed, after all my hard work and vandalism, he had still gotten himself a date. Rats. My corn-canned forehead wound throbbed.

  I’d taken a hit for Team Gravy, but I would really have to step up my sabotage game, or the next thing I knew Dad was gonna be taking this nice young lady to the movies.

  I had a strategy session with Bea the very first chance I got, which happened to be at my house on Thursday night. Operation: Stepmom Shake-Up.

  “Okay, here’s the plan.” I reached down to get a slobbery ball from Potus’s mouth. “Dad is totally letting these church ladies bully him into doing something that is not only bad for him but bad for me. I have to make sure he doesn’t go on any dates.”

  Bea scrunched up her nose. “How are you gonna do that? It’s not like you can lock him in the basement.”

  I tossed the ball across the room, and Potus chased it. “I’m not ruling that out.”

  Bea pulled a package of Skittles out of her backpack and waggled her eyebrows at me. “Wanna taste the rainbow?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Only half of it.”

  Bea dumped the candy out on the table and divided it up like we always do. Reds and greens for me. Purples and yellows for her. Neither of us really likes the orange ones, so those usually stay in the pile.

  Potus jogged lazily back to me and dropped the ball at my feet, and I rewarded him with ear scratches. Bea gave me a look as I let him lick my hand and then shoved some Skittles into my mouth.

  “Ew. That’s disgusting.” She shook her head at my germy hands, but there was a crooked smile on her face.

  Bea has always been the type of person who has to do everything exactly right. I’m guessing that when her mom did her diapers, Bea undid them and rediapered herself to her own high standards. She doesn’t give herself a lot of grace (ha, pun intended) when she’s trying something new.

  On our first day of kindergarten, the teacher demonstrated how to draw the letter A. All of us wiggly five-year-olds tried to copy the letter with our sharp new crayons. Bea sat at the yellow circle table with me, her lips moving quietly as she recited the directions the teacher had given us (up line, down line, cross it in the middle).

  Bea was so tense, so worried she’d make a mistake, that her red crayon’s tip snapped with the pressure. She burst into tears and told our teacher she didn’t feel good and went to sit in the quiet corner.

  I slapped my As down in record time, using every crayon in my box and not caring in the slightest whether I stayed inside the faint lines of the paper. And then I skipped over to where Bea was sitting. She didn’t look up at me; she was staring at her hands. I wiped my snotty nose on the back of my sleeve as I handed her my red crayon. “You can use my
red. The end is still pointy.”

  Bea burst out laughing. “Don’t wipe your snot on your arm! Use a tissue!”

  I giggled and made a silly face at her. “I don’t care. You wanna come back to yellow circle table? We can hold hands.”

  Bea smiled weakly and stood up. I extended my snot hand to her, but she grabbed the other one instead and we skipped back over to our table, best friends. Bea still likes to follow the rules, and I still like to break them, but somehow we’re good for each other and make each other better.

  I threw the ball for Potus again, but he’d lost interest. He just stared at me with a look that said, I already got that for you once!

  “Hey, who are you gonna do your second-semester project on?” I asked. Miss O’Connor had assigned us an extensive research project on a famous American of our choice.

  Bea’s eyes lit up. “I’m doing mine on Jackie Robinson.”

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  Bea laughed. “Not a she. Jackie Robinson was only the greatest baseball player who ever lived. Why are we friends again?”

  I shrugged and we both laughed.

  Bea put a purple Skittle in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Let me guess. You’re gonna pick one of your dusty old presidents.”

  “Duh. I’m going with Teddy Roosevelt, my favorite dusty president of the bunch.”

  “Don’t you already know absolutely everything about him?” Bea smirked.

  “There’s always more to learn,” I said. “And having a wide knowledge base will only make my report writing easier.”

  Bea shrugged. “You sound like your dad.”

  I scowled. My dad. Who was about to ditch me for a bunch of dates.

  “What’s wrong?” Bea asked.

  “Dad and me. We spend all our time together. We have our projects and our history road trips and our documentaries. And if he’s dating, he’s not going to have time for all that. He’s not going to have time for me.”

  Bea put her arm around me and squeezed tight. “Nothing could mess up Team Gravy,” she said quietly.

  “But what if it does?” My voice sounded high and squeaky. “I’m really worried. The other day, at the grocery store…he talked to a woman. Just walked right up and talked to her.”

  Bea tilted her head, her face sympathetic. “He’s a pastor. He talks to a lot of women.”

  I huffed. “No. It was different. He liked her. And then she called him. And now they’re going out to dinner.”

  I trailed off, my thoughts spinning wildly out of control. There had to be some way to fight back. I had to come up with a plan.

  Bea recognized the look on my face. “What are you thinking?” she asked, a hint of apprehension in her voice.

  “What if we make sure the dates he goes on…lack romance.”

  Bea scrunched her nose. “Translation?”

  “Dad sets up the dates and we knock them down.”

  Bea pressed her lips into a thin line. I could tell she was thinking about all the rules we would have to break to commit sabotage. She let out a long sigh. “I don’t know.”

  I pulled a notebook and pencil out of the junk drawer. “Just hear me out. I have a few ideas to run past you.”

  I wrote a dramatic number one at the top of the paper. “Let the air out of his truck tires.”

  Bea shook her head. “That’s mean. Plus, what if you need a ride somewhere?”

  “Okay, what about follow them to the restaurant and put dog chow in their food.”

  “Gross and also impossible. No restaurant is going to let you tamper with the food.”

  “I can set up a fake social media account for him where he is totally rude.”

  “That would probably get him fired.”

  “Indoor fireworks?”

  “There is no such thing. And also dangerous.”

  I sighed. “You are such a downer.”

  “I am the voice of reason.”

  I wrote the number five and then tapped the eraser on the paper. “Hey,” I said. “Remember that time when I made a big deal about seeing that ghosts-in-the-attic movie?”

  Bea raised one eyebrow. “Yeah. You begged for weeks. Your dad didn’t want you to see it.”

  “Yeah. He thought it would be too scary for me, but I strongly disagreed.” I scooted the gross orange Skittles around on the table. “The thing was, my dad was kind of right. Once we got to the theater and the movie started, it was way too scary for me. I only made it through the first fifteen minutes and I had to get out of there.”

  “What? You never told me that! You said that movie was awesome!”

  “I was embarrassed! It turns out that my nerves are not as sturdy as I thought they were. The point is, I had to fake a stomachache to get out of there.”

  Bea started to nod. “Okay, I see where you’re going. This could possibly work. You pretend to be sick so that your dad has to stay home. But if you get caught, I had nothing to do with this. My parents do not tolerate nonsense.” She did a spot-on imitation of her mom, and we both laughed.

  A little bit of the grocery store’s stress left my body as I shoved the rest of my Skittles into my mouth. “Nonsense is my middle name,” I said, rubbing my palms together.

  On Friday night I couldn’t sleep, so I spent some time reading my great-great-great-great-granny’s diary and staring at the picture of her in the white lacy dress. It was a beautiful dress. My fingers itched to sew something like it. I Googled the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and tried to imagine my dad and me walking through the amazing spectacle. Maybe I could get my picture taken right in the same place that Granny did. I drifted to sleep with pictures of carousels and parasols dancing in front of my eyelids.

  Dad and I spent Saturday morning nosing through Springdale’s only used-book store. They were having a sale, and the store was crowded, not with shoppers, but with additional tables loaded down with books. Outside the wind blew cold and blustery, and the windows of the store were frosted. We picked through dusty poetry books and outdated atlases, searching for anything related to American history. I was also looking for anything about clothes from 1904 because I could not stop thinking about Great-Granny’s dress.

  “Ah, the Father of Our Country!” Dad said, holding up a book with a chubby-cheeked, white-wigged George Washington staring down his nose at me from the cover. He looked ready for war, his eyes questioning me about my battle strategy. Dad’s date with Rachel was tonight, and I had to put my plan into action.

  I waited until Dad was on the other side of the store and then plugged my nose and held my breath. I could hold my breath an unreasonable amount of time until I got dark circles under my eyes. While I was not-breathing, I pulled a round container of blush out of my pocket and used my fingers to dab at my cheeks. Perfectly flushed.

  Getting my dad to believe I was sick would be easy-peasy. He never really properly examines me. We don’t even own a thermometer. If today was anything like my past attempts, he would give me medicine (the good-tasting kind), let me lounge on the couch, and baby me more than usual. Sorry, Rachel!

  He wandered over to me, the George Washington book tucked under his arm.

  “Hey! Find anything good?”

  I let my eyes go glossy and unfocused and didn’t answer him.

  “Grace?”

  “Oh, sorry, Dad. I guess I’m not feeling well.” I would just stumble a bit on our way back to the truck, and BOOM, his date would be as good as canceled.

  A look of concern passed over Dad’s face, and I could see the wheels turning in his head. “You don’t feel well?”

  I nodded sadly and then pressed my fingers to my forehead to indicate that the motion caused waves of pain.

  “She probably needs Tylenol and a nap.” Miss O’Connor appeared out of nowhere, a stack of books in her arms and a s
mile on her face. She wore a polka-dot shirt and bib overalls. I didn’t even know they made those for adults. Her glasses slipped halfway down her nose, and her hair created a halo of fuzz all around her head.

  “Hi, Miss O’Connor,” I said.

  “Hey, there’s where all the American history books went,” Dad joked, touching the spines in her stack.

  “You can borrow any you want,” she said, readjusting the books in her arms. “I also got some vintage mechanics books. The fifty-seven Chevy I’m restoring is giving me fits.”

  I was losing my audience.

  “Well, I’d better get home so you can give me some medicine and maybe make me some soup. From a can. No need to make a fuss.” I tried to do my best impression of a flu victim, swaying a little bit and thinking nauseous thoughts.

  “Oh. Yeah…” Dad took out his phone and started to scroll through. “I mean, I guess I can cancel my thing.”

  Miss O’Connor studied my face but turned to Dad. “What thing?”

  “Oh, I had a…dinner…is all.”

  As bad luck would have it, Miss Marge, the Mrs. Claus look-alike from church, spied Dad and made a beeline. She put her hand on his arm and said, “Pastor Davy, I heard a rumor about you.”

  Dad raised his arms like he was surrendering. “It’s all lies!”

  Miss Marge giggled. “I heard you have a date with Rachel Watson. And I heard your daughter destroyed Gambly’s Grocery Store.” She gave me a narrow-eyed look, and I scowled.

  Dad held the George Washington book like a shield, and his eyes flicked to Miss O’Connor. “Um, yes, Grace actually did destroy Gambly’s. But it was an accident. And I guess the date part is true too.”

  “Hey!” I said, throwing my hands on my hips, but then remembered I was supposed to be sick, so I took them back off and coughed weakly. The church lady shuffled away, satisfied that she’d verified some juicy gossip.

  Miss O’Connor cleared her throat. “I can take care of Grace for you while you go to your thing.” She peered at me over her stack of books and winked. “I can give her cod liver oil and tuck her into bed early and rub menthol on her feet and everything.” I had the sudden feeling that Miss O’Connor was onto me. It was like her years of teaching middle school had turned her into a human lie detector.