Penelope Crumb

by Shawn K. Stout

  “Mom said Grandpa Felix used to live in Simmons,” I say. “That’s got to be him!” I print out the telephone numbers and addresses and fold the paper in half. “We used to go to Simmons a lot when Nanny and Pop-Pop lived there. Before they got their camper and went exploring.” I stuff the paper under my shirt in case there is an alien inspection before I can get back to my toolbox.

  “What are you going to do with those?” she asks.

  “Littie Maple, we’re going on a treasure hunt. Only this treasure is the not-buried kind.”

  8.

  I take the phone to my bedroom, and Littie follows, poking the back of my head with the hook. We make it to my room without any alien encounters, thank lucky stars. And as soon as we get there, I pull out the paper from under my shirt and unfold it.

  “Want me to call out the numbers while you dial?” asks Littie, pulling on the corner of the paper.

  “No,” I say, grabbing the paper with both hands. “I don’t.”

  Littie lets go then and sticks out her bottom lip like I’ve stomped on her feelings. I try to explain that the names on the paper are like a secret code or a map or a key or something that will lead me to my grandpa, and that I want to do it myself. Which makes her bottom lip stick out even more.

  “You can still help me,” I tell her, “but just not for this first part.”

  Littie crosses her arms and lets out a “fine” with a huff blowing out of her mouth behind it. But I don’t care so much because I’m about to talk to my grandpa. “Which one are you going to call first?” she says, looking at the ceiling. “If I’m allowed to ask a question.”

  I give her a look that says, Don’t Be a Dork, and then I say, “The one in Simmons.” My fingers start to shake a little as I dial the only F. Crumb in Simmons. I hold my breath, not sure what I’m going to say when Grandpa Felix answers. Littie pulls my arm toward her so we can both listen to the phone.

  “First ring,” she says. Her eyes get big, and I match their size with mine. Littie reaches out her hook hand to me, and I squeeze it.

  “Second ring,” she says.

  My heart moves into my ears, making them feel sweaty.

  The rings keep coming, and Littie counts every one up to seven. At number eight, before Littie has a chance to get out a sound, I say, “Enough with the counting already, for Pete’s sake.”

  Littie’s face gets red and she pulls her hook out of my hand, but at least she’s quiet and there’s no reminder that there’s no grandpa answering on the other end. Other than the fact that there’s no grandpa answering on the other end.

  “Maybe he’s just away,” Littie says.

  “Of course he’s away,” I tell her. “That’s usually what it means when somebody doesn’t answer the phone.”

  “You don’t have to be nasty about it,” she says. “I just mean that he may be out on one of his adventures or something.”

  “Maybe.” I hang up the phone. “But I thought he would at least have an answering machine. With a message that says, ‘I wish I could talk to you, my darling, but I’m not here to answer the phone because I am on an important expedition to find the very rare painted lady butterfly. A challenging and most important task, indeed.’”

  “That’s what you think his answering machine would say?” Littie scratches her face with the hook.

  “What’s so wrong with that?” I say.

  “For one thing, butterflies?”

  I sift through the Heap, looking for matching socks. “I’ve been thinking about Grandpa Felix. And I’ve decided that he probably likes to go on nature walks, knows how to catch butterflies without tearing their wings, and is real good at fixing things.”

  “Fixing what kind of things?” asks Littie.

  “Broken things. Things that aren’t working like they should.”

  “You mean like your mom’s dryer?”

  “And other things, too.” Bigger things.

  “Oh,” she says. And then after a while she blurts out, “Nature walks?”

  I give her a look that says, What’s Wrong with Nature Walks?

  “Fine,” Littie says. “Nature walks and butterflies. But I still don’t think his answering machine message would say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because everybody knows it’s not a good idea to say you’re not home on your answering machine when you’re not home because robbers would know you’re not home and could steal all your stuff. Including your television.”

  “Okay, Littie.”

  “But even if that is your grandpa’s number, and even if he is on some painted lady butterfly hunt, how are you going to find him? I mean, he could be gone for a year. Or more even. I’m just saying.”

  Well then. The thing about Littie is that she thinks the worst a lot. And most of the time, the worst is not what I want to be thinking about. Especially when it comes to my grandpa. “There could be other reasons why he doesn’t answer, you know.”

  “Like what?” Littie says. But before I can even get a word in, she says, “Like he could be tied up by robbers and can’t reach the phone. Or he could have slipped and hit his head on the tub and now can’t remember how to answer a phone. Or even remember what a phone is for!”

  I give Littie a look that says, You Sound Just Like Your Momma. But Littie’s not as good as me about telling what different faces mean, so she says, “What?”

  I just shake my head and say “nothing,” because if she doesn’t know how much she’s like her momma then I am not going to be the one to tell her. I fold up the paper with the addresses and phone numbers of the F. Crumbs on it, and I drop it into my toolbox.

  “What about the F. Crumbs in Montville?” Littie asks.

  “On second thought, I don’t think the first words I say to my long-lost grandpa should be done on the phone. I think I’ll go and see for myself in person.”

  “Face-to-face?” says Littie.

  I nod. “Nose to nose.”

  9.

  What are you up to?” asks Terrible the next morning in a way that makes me think he knows what I’m up to.

  “Nothing.” I let the granola bars, bologna sandwiches, and water bottles fall from my arms into my toolbox. I push aside the stack of dirty cereal bowls on the kitchen counter and grab two apples from the fruit basket. Terrible watches me as I drop the apples into my toolbox and latch it shut.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

  I shrug and then finger the picture of Grandpa Felix in my pocket.

  “I’m serious, dork,” he says. “Mom is at school all day today, so I’m in charge. And you’ve got a list of Saturday chores to do.”

  Suddenly I’m Orphan Annie left with mean ole Miss Hannigan to scrub the floor until it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building. It’s a hard-knock life having an alien for a brother. “I’ve already cleaned my room, and it’s your turn to do the dishes,” I say. The last part is true at least. “Littie and me are going to work on a school project.”

  Terrible gives me the Stink Eye, but I put on my best Don’t Look at Me, I Didn’t Kill the Canary face. His alien mind reading must be on the blink today, though, because after a staring contest that practically makes me go cross-eyed he leaves me alone.

  The plan is to meet Littie downstairs, in front of our building. When I get there, she’s hiding behind the trunk of the pear tree in my mini-marshmallowed Captain Hook hat.

  “What do you have that on for?” I ask.

  “Detectives wear hats. I needed a hat. Did you bring the magnifying glass?”

  I pat my toolbox. “Got it. Do you have the tickets?”

  She pulls two plastic metro cards from her shirt pocket and smiles. “One is mine from the last time we went to the aquarium. And I borrowed the other one,” she says, biting her thumb. I raise my eyebrows. “What Mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her. I’m just saying. Did you get the provisions?”

  “Huh?”

  Littie slips the cards back into her pocket. “Food a
nd stuff. You know, in case of emergency.”

  I nod and recite the long list of food I crammed in my toolbox. Which now weighs a ton. Littie grabs part of the metal handle to share the load. “I figure we should try the F. Crumb in Simmons first,” I tell her. “Since he used to live there. And if that F. Crumb isn’t the right F. Crumb, we’ll try the ones in Montville.”

  “Good plan,” says Littie. “Let’s move.” She tiptoes away from the tree.

  I start tiptoeing, too. After a while I say, “Are we going to do this the whole way to the metro station? It’s hard on the legs.”

  Littie stops and plants her heels. “I guess we could be the kind of detectives that don’t tiptoe around.” I tell her that my legs think that’s a fine idea.

  We make it to the metro station after stopping twice—once for snacks and water that we gobbled up while resting on somebody’s porch stoop, and once when I get a pebble in my shoe that turns out to be an acorn. Littie talks nonstop the whole entire way there. About what, I’m not sure because my brains are thinking about what it will be like seeing Grandpa Felix.

  Inside the metro station, it’s dark and damp and smells like a wet towel that’s been left in the Heap for too long. “Why do you suppose your grandpa hasn’t talked to you all these years?” says Littie.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he is one of these F. Crumbs, that means he’s probably lived near you all this time. And unless it’s like you say, that he’s been on some big butterfly expedition or is fixing some top secret satellite for NASA or got lost on one of his nature walks, why wouldn’t he come to see you? I mean, you’re his family. It doesn’t make sense.”

  That makes my chest burn. I don’t have an answer, not a good one, anyway. So I say what my mom always says when I ask her Why questions. “The world sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Littie shrugs. “I guess.”

  We’re about to get on the escalator to go down into the tunnel when a thought sinks me. I stop walking and lose my grip on the toolbox handle.

  “Hey,” says Littie, grabbing the toolbox with both hands. “What’s the matter? You don’t look so good.”

  People push by us, almost run over us. Littie steers me off to the side. “Do you think,” I say slowly, “that the reason Grandpa Felix stopped coming around after my dad died, the reason he hasn’t seen us all these years, is because of his nose?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Terrible said that noses never stop growing, Littie. What if his nose is bigger than his face and he doesn’t want anybody to see and wanted us to think he was dead. Do you think that’s why?” I start to panic, because if that’s what happened to Grandpa Felix, then that’s what I’m in for. “What if people throw rocks at him and call him Nose Man or Rhinoceros or something terrible like that and he can’t get a job or go to a restaurant except on Thanksgiving because hardly anybody goes to a restaurant on Thanksgiving. Do you think that’s why, Littie? Do you?”

  “If his nose is bigger than his face,” says Littie, looking me square in the eye, “then he’d probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records. He’d be a celebrity and sign autographs at the mall. And probably people at NASA would want to examine him and pay him a million dollars if he donated his nose to science. Does that sound like a reason not to leave your house?”

  I shake my head.

  “Exactly,” she says, pulling on my arm. And we step onto the escalator.

  The metro is crowded, but we find two seats together in the second car from the end. The smell hits me as soon as we sit down. It’s like the inside of Terrible’s shoes. I look around. Me and Littie seem to be the only ones making a Hold Your Nose, It Stinks to High Heaven in Here face. Doesn’t anybody else smell it?

  For a second I worry that maybe Terrible has followed us. I look around and I hold my breath, because 1) I’m expecting to see Terrible’s face at any second, and 2) it smells so bad I think I might upchuck. But there’s no sign of Terrible anywhere, thank lucky stars.

  Littie holds her nose with one hand and opens the map with the other. I switch to breathing from my mouth. “Five stops before we get to Simmons,” she says.

  I hug my toolbox to my chest and wish that I’d brought my drawing pad. So many people to draw. So many different shapes and sizes of noses. I try to find all of the big ones to compare to mine. I point to a lady sitting across the way from us. “Is my nose bigger than hers?”

  Littie looks at us both and whispers, “Yep. And be more quiet about it, would you? I think she heard.”

  I give the lady a friendly Sorry about What I Said wave. Then I point to a man in a bow tie. “What about him? Is my nose bigger than his?” I ask softly.

  Littie says, “Definitely. Now stop it with all the questions, would you, I need to look at the map.”

  While Littie studies the map and rambles on about shortcuts and street names, I turn around to get a load of all the noses behind me. A man in the seat right behind me is leaning his head on the window. He has wrinkled skin that drapes over his bones like a tablecloth. His eyes are shut and his mouth is open so far that I can count twelve teeth on the bottom and eight up top.

  He is very still. And after a while I think maybe too still.

  I turn back around and shove my toolbox onto Littie’s lap. “What are you doing?” she snaps, folding up the map.

  I shush her and then face backward again, sliding up on my knees. I stare at the man for a long time until I’m sure he must be mostly dead. Maybe even all dead. His eyes stay closed during each stop, even when the name of the next station blares from the loudspeaker and the doors fly open and shut like elevators in a mood. The man doesn’t move, not even a twitch. I reach out my finger.

  “Penelope, no…,” says Littie.

  My finger gets closer and closer to his face. The whir of the train is loud in my ears. The windows go black. And I pretend that we are speeding through time so fast, so far, that we’re chasing the night and leaving the day in the dust. There’s no telling where we will end up. There’s no telling what can happen.

  I hold tight to the back of the seat with my free hand as the train rocks and jolts. I can feel Littie’s eyes on me. My eyes, though, are fixed on the space between the dead man and my finger. And the smaller that space gets, the more goose pimples I get on my arms.

  The train jolts again, and before I’m ready the space is gone. The tip of my finger hits the tip of the dead man’s nose. Right away, his eyes fly open. Which practically scares the life out of me. But somehow, with him alive and me now almost dead, my finger stays put on his nose.

  We both stare at my finger. We’re quiet, watching. Me, scared to take my finger away in case he might go dead again. Him, looking at my finger all cross-eyed like it is a butterfly on a blade of grass that might fly away at any second. As the train screeches to a stop, my finger slips to the side of his nose, but I manage to slide it back up again. His eyes are fixed on it.

  “Come on, Penelope,” says Littie, yanking at my arm and causing my finger to break away. “We need to get off.”

  I grab the handle of my toolbox as she pulls me off the metro. Over my shoulder, I look back at the man. He looks at me for a second, not even a second really, and as the doors close, so do his eyes. And then he is gone.

  10.

  When we get to Highland Street, the street where the only F. Crumb in Simmons lives, my heart is pounding. I pull at the neck of my T-shirt and have a look down at my chest. I imagine the insides heart that my mom drew pumping away inside me. And thinking about all the blood and veins and creepy stuff like that makes it pound even harder.

  “Shush,” I tell it, first in a firm voice like how you would tell a dog to stay, and then again much softer like when you find out that dog would rather not be told what to do.

  “There it is!” says Littie, pointing. Which just about stops my heart altogether.

  We stop in front of a yellow row house with pink shutters an
d a small garden in the front.

  “Well, if your grandpa likes nature walks, he might just live in a place like this,” says Littie. She pulls a leaf off a tall plant that’s sticking up through the fence and brings it to her nose. “Peppermint.”

  She hands the leaf to me, and after I smell it, I slide the leaf carefully into my pocket. Then I open the white iron gate and pull Littie along the stone walkway and up the three steps to the front door.

  My heart is beating so fast, I think it might jump right out and flop onto the ground next to my feet. Which wouldn’t be the best way to meet your grandpa for the first time.

  I practice what I’m going to say in my head. Mr. Crumb, my dead dad is your son. Which makes you my grandpa. Can I call you Grandpa? Pappy? Pop? My, Grandpa, what a big nose you have.

  “Are we going to stand out here all day?” asks Littie. “Aren’t you going to knock? Want me to do it? I’m just saying.”

  Good gravy. I raise my hand, hold my breath, and tap on the door. Littie takes a tiny step back and gives me a look that says, I Can’t Believe We’re Doing This. My heart is beating faster and I feel sick and woozy. Which makes me afraid because what if I go dead for real. Right now in front of Grandpa Felix. And then he’ll have a dead son and a dead granddaughter. “I can’t,” I say to no one in particular. This was a bad idea. I turn to run.

  But before my feet can figure out what they are supposed to do, I hear the door open.

  I turn my head just to get a quick look at him, but there’s no grandpa standing in the doorway. A woman in a bathrobe leans down toward us. That’s when I see the cat curled up in her arms.

  “Making repairs?” the woman asks.

  “Huh?” I say, staring at the cat’s belly to see if it’s breathing.

  “Looks like you’ve got your tools,” she says, nodding at my toolbox.

  “Oh, right,” Littie says. “Tools.” Then she gives me a look that says, I Hope She Isn’t Counting on Us to Fix Anything.

  Unless bologna sandwiches and half-eaten granola bars can fix what she’s got broke, we aren’t going to be much help. “Do you live here all by yourself?” I say.