Waiting for Normal

by Leslie Connor

  I’ve got few regrets as I float out of here, but I sure am kicking myself for never asking you to play your flute for me. I always thought there’d be time for Addie Schmeeter’s minimart debut. Then suddenly your flute was gone. I’m guessing there’s a good reason for that.

  This isn’t enough cashola for an expensive new instrument. But maybe there’s a secondhander out there, or even something else that’ll help you get your dreams back in order. You decide.

  Last thing, Cookie: If I made mistakes when it came to you and your well being, I’m sorry. This heroism business doesn’t come with instructions. We can only follow our instincts. I’m glad to have been one of your heroes, and glad that you were here on the corner being one for me.

  Keep crossing bridges and poking your nose behind gates, Little Cookie. It’s a big, big world.

  Love, Soula

  “Wow,” I whispered. “She writes a great going away note.”

  “Yes, she does,” Elliot said. Then he laughed. “Listen to us! She’s got us talking about her in the present tense.”

  For a moment, I did feel like Soula was still there.

  Elliot promised to take me around to the music stores. “I think there’s three hundred dollars there”—he gestured toward the envelope in my hand—“and nobody drives a harder bargain than yours truly. There’s a flute in your future, kiddo. If that’s what you want.”

  I lifted Piccolo out of her cage and let her tunnel up the sleeve of my sweatshirt. She turned around at my elbow and came back into my hand. It felt good to hold her tiny vibrating body, good to feel her take up some space. She looked up at me and blinked. I remembered Soula winking with her amazing lined eyes.

  chapter 47

  defining normal

  Grandio didn’t have much time for a sad story. He dished me up a double bowl of ice cream when we got home, but he didn’t give me any pep talks about loss and death and dying. I didn’t really blame him. Some things are too hard to talk about.

  He was nice about Piccolo moving in; he let me take her upstairs. I kept very close track of Pic. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing anything else.

  Grandio took feeding me very seriously. He said that was part of his job as my agency appointed guardian. But he always made long and heavy sighing sounds as he worked in the kitchen. I offered to cook but he wouldn’t allow that. If I did anything more than set the table he stopped me, saying, “No, no, you sit down, girl. I’ll get the supper out. I’ll get it.” His food was good, but every once in a while I craved one of my own toast dinners.

  Grandio made me a paper bag lunch every day, and every day he slathered the bread with mustard and slapped two pieces of bologna inside. I didn’t like mustard. I tried to tell him, but I guess Grandio thought that mustard went with bologna and that was that. Still, it was nice to find the lunch on the bench by the door every day as I headed out for the school bus. Something to count on. After a while I got used to mustard.

  But I did not get used to the things Grandio had to say about Mommers. He would suddenly bring up bits about the old “abandonment charges.” Then he let it drop that the new charges were called “child endangerment.”

  “How in heck does somebody forget to come home and take care of her own babies?” he’d say. Then he’d add something like “I got a yard full of idiot birds—chickens—that know better than that!” He’d shake his head. “Call it ‘endangerment’ or anything else ya want. That woman’s a criminal!”

  Criminal.

  I swallowed hard.

  I don’t know what I expected as far as Mommers was concerned, but I am sure that I didn’t expect to see the blue car come rumbling up to Grandio’s farm. But one day in April, it did. I was standing on the picnic table filling the bird feeder that hung from the apple tree out in front of Grandio’s house. Mommers got out of her car, but she left the door open like she wouldn’t be staying long. She looked at me as if it’d been two years instead of five weeks since she’d seen me.

  “Addie, baby,” she said hoarsely. “Addie, can you believe all this?” She pushed her hand into her stringy hair and held it in a clawlike grip. Her sweater fell open and I could just make out the lump of the baby at her belly. “We were so close this time. If I’d just had a little more time to make the business work—” She stopped and shook her head.

  I had no idea what to say to Mommers. Finally, I offered that I was sorry about the fire. The bird feeder squeaked as it swayed on the tree branch over my head, and I remembered how the train used to rock the trailer.

  “No, don’t be sorry about that old piece of junk,” she said. She began to cry. “I’m sorry I was gone so—”

  “Out!” Grandio boomed. He stood on the front step, one arm raised straight as a stick, pointing down the driveway. He held the phone in his other hand. “You’re violating the order, Denise. One call. That’s all I gotta make.”

  “Jack, don’t! How can you—” She stopped and took a step toward him. She took a hard swallow and said, “I just want five minutes with my little girl.”

  Little girl?

  Grandio shook his head. “Not while I’m standing here.”

  “Please, Jack! Don’t …don’t do this! Five minutes! Five.” She held up her hand, fingers spread wide.

  “Grandio,” I said, “couldn’t she just stay a minute? I know it’s against all the decisions, but isn’t anybody gonna ask me what I want?”

  He finally nodded and stepped back into the doorway.

  Mommers kept making little noises in her throat. She fussed with her hair and wiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

  “So, how’s Pete?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Pete is …well …he’s pretty flippin’ surprised.”

  “Then he knows? About the baby?” I glanced at her belly.

  “Yeah, he does now. He’s going to try to help me, believe it or not!”

  “I believe it,” I said. “It’s his kid.”

  Mommers nodded. “Pete and I have a lot to get past and we’re just getting started. God, it’s such a mess! They’re gonna make me take parenting lessons. They think I won’t know how to take care of the baby when he gets here.”

  “It’s a boy?”

  She nodded and pulled a ratty tissue from her pocket.

  “Well, Pete can help, right?”

  “I think so.” Mommers nodded again and blotted her eyes. I spent a second imagining—hoping—that Pete, whoever he was, would be a really good dad—like Dwight. “What about you, Addie? How are you?”

  I shrugged. “Grandio takes good care of me. I look fine, don’t I?”

  Mommers laughed and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Yeah! You do look fine. Have you seen my Brynna and my Katie?”

  “Yes. They come often. Everyone was here for Easter,” I said. “Brynna went home with purple sleeves from the egg dye. Katie wouldn’t bite the ears off her chocolate bunny ’cause she said he wouldn’t be able to hear without them.”

  “Oh, I miss them so much!” Mommers started to cry again.

  “I know. Me too,” I said. I wished I’d had fresh tissues for Mommers. She still had lots of crying to do and I knew how that felt.

  “Did you hear about Soula?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. And I was so sorry,” Mommers said. “Must have been awful.”

  “I miss her,” I whispered. “She was really good to me.”

  “Yes, she was.” Mommers nodded. She cleared her throat. “Addie, you said nobody asks what you want. Do you know what you want?”

  “I just want …normal,” I said.

  “What’s normal?” Mommers squinted at me. “Things are always changing. I mean, how does anyone know if they’ve got normal?”

  I thought for a second. “I’ve felt close to it before,” I said. “Normal …is when you know what’s gonna happen next. Not exactly what, because probably nobody gets that. But normal is being able to count on certain things. Good things. And it’s having everyone together—jus
t because they belong that way.” I realized I was making a circle with my hands as if I were holding on to a tiny world. “I keep waiting for it to happen to us,” I said, looking up at Mommers. “But we—we never seem to get all the way to normal.”

  Mommers looked back at me blankly.

  “Time’s up!” Grandio shouted from the doorway.

  Mommers got into her car quickly. Before she shut the door she said, “We’ll get it someday, Addie. We’ll get normal.”

  I know she meant that with all her heart, but as I watched the blue car bump away down Grandio’s long driveway I didn’t hold much hope. All or nothing never added up to normal.

  Grandio launched a big long rant about Mommers that rose and fell all that afternoon and through our meat loaf dinner. “I could have made that call, I tell ya!” He filled one cheek with potatoes. “One hot second and I would have reported her. Taught her to respect the laws that—”

  “Stop!” My own shout rang back at me. “I can’t stand it if you keep going on about her! I can’t!” I burned with tears and silence for the next few seconds. I expected him to shout back at me, but he didn’t.

  He finally ducked his head and mumbled, “You’re right, girl. That’s it. I’m done with it now.”

  Somehow, I knew he meant it.

  chapter 48

  full of surprises

  All through the month of May, I got visits. Dwight and Hannah brought the Littles down to see me as much as three times a week. “You are here a lot,” I said one day. “What about the work on the inn? And what about your wedding?” They just said they were budgeting time differently these days and that the wedding was on hold until some other things got worked out. At first, I was afraid they’d changed their minds about marrying. But they always walked in holding hands. I knew to watch Brynna, and I did. If anything were wrong, she’d be twisting her napkin. She seemed happier than ever.

  I longed to go up to Lake George, but Youth and Family Services had me sort of captive, within a certain radius of Grandio’s house. I could go places, but not far. I didn’t ask questions.

  Elliot and Rick took me to the mall one night and spoiled me rotten with french fries, root beer, bubble gum and a new CD player. While we were there, we put my name on a list at the music store. They’d call about any secondhand flutes that came in, but it might be a while. I ended up spending some of the Soula Flute Fund money anyway. I took half an hour to decide, but then I bought an Irish tin whistle. “I want something to play in the meantime,” I told Elliot and Rick. “Someday, I’ll be good enough to try a piccolo. This tin whistle will be pretty easy.” I figured out part of my solo from “I Wonder as I Wander” before we even left the store.

  “Wow! That’s beautiful. How did you do that?” Rick asked.

  “She’s brilliant,” Elliot told him.

  I giggled into the whistle and made it squeak something awful. Heads turned. We left the mall in a fit of laughs.

  Mrs. Casey made regular visits to the farm. We talked about everyone in my family, including the people I thought of as my family even if there wasn’t a blood relationship.

  “I want to live with my sisters and my …Dwight,” I told her. I didn’t care that it wasn’t likely to happen, or that I was just a pebble in a big sea that would decide what to do with me. “We belong together,” I insisted. I even tried to explain my idea of normal to her.

  For all my rattling on and on, I felt like Mrs. Casey was wasting everyone’s time. I’d end up with Mommers again somewhere down the line.

  But there was one thing about Mommers that I’d forgotten to figure in: she was full of surprises.

  In early June, when everything was quiet and nobody, including me, seemed to be clawing for anything at all, I looked up from where I was watering Grandio’s new marigolds. I saw Dwight coming across the yard.

  “Addie!” he called. “Addie! You won’t believe this!” He fell right down on his knees about twenty feet in front of me. He reached into his back pocket and held a fat envelope up high.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Adoption papers!” His voice rang out. “You’re mine! I’m yours!”

  “We’re what?” I dropped the hose. I took a step toward him.

  Don’t be a dream, don’t be a dream.

  “For real?” I asked.

  “For real!” he said.

  I ran to him—full speed ahead, arms open wide—and hit him hard. We both fell over in the grass.

  Grandio found us a few minutes later. We were lying on our bellies, elbows linked. We had the papers spread out in front of us, and I kept sniffling and running my fingertips over the circular seals that’d been embossed into every page. It was official.

  “What’s with you two? You’ll get bugs up your shirts,” Grandio said.

  “Three girls, Jack! I got three girls!” Dwight stood up and handed the papers to Grandio.

  “Did you both know about this?” I asked.

  “We’ve been working on it with your Mrs. Casey.” Grandio grinned. “And so have you, girl, though you didn’t know it! We didn’t want to say anything until it really came through.” He put his glasses on his nose and scanned the papers. “So Denise did a good thing, by gosh! Signed, and with no stipulations!”

  “That’s Mommers,” I said, wiping my face with my hands. “All or nothing.” I fell back on the grass and watched the sky spin.

  chapter 49

  all to home

  With just two weeks left until the start of summer vacation, we all decided together that it would make the most sense for me to finish out the year at Borden School. It was hard to wait, but it was also the first time I’d ever had the chance to get used to the idea of moving somewhere new.

  I sat beside Dwight on the front seat of the pickup the day he drove me home to Lake George. I held Piccolo’s cage on my lap and settled my palm into the spot where Soula’s weight had bent the wires the morning of the fire. Dwight reached over and covered my hand with his. He gave me a grin and I matched it.

  I knew I’d see Mommers again. Maybe someday she’d be allowed to bring her new baby to see her old babies. She did love us. I knew that, and I 289289 decided to look for a time to tell Brynna and Katie so. I wiped away a spill of tears, closed my eyes and remembered some of the times that Mommers had made me laugh.

  Once off the highway, the truck wound along the old mountain road. I braced myself and held Pic’s cage a little tighter as we took the last sharp turn that met the straightaway up to the inn. It made me laugh when I thought about it; I had come twisting and turning home.

  Sunlight glowed across the new lawn and broke into a patchwork of shadows on the porch. Brynna and Katie came running out the open door, giggling and carrying a long banner that circled and blew back against their legs. I watched the roll of paper straighten out before me. In big painted letters with little handprints everywhere it read: ALL TO HOME ADDIE!

  “All,” I whispered to myself.

  Then I hustled up to the porch to be with my sisters.

  acknowledgments

  With all my heart, I thank my family and

  my friends for keeping the net pulled taut

  beneath me. (You all know who you are.)

  My special thanks to:

  Jennie, for your unmatched energy.

  Katherine, for your belief and your wisdom.

  Emily, for braiding every end.

  About the Author

  LESLIE CONNOR grew up outside of Schenectady, New York, and frequently crossed Freeman´s Bridge on her way into the city. WAITING FOR NORMAL was inspired by a not at-all-glamorous lot on a corner. Leslie thinks of this story as a love letter back to the city of Schenectady. She is the author of the award-winning picture book MISS BRIDIE CHOSE A SHOVEL and DEAD ON TOWN LINE, a young adult novel in verse. She lives with her family in Connecticut.

  For exclusive information on your favorite authors and artists, visit www.authortracker.com.

  Copyright
/>   Waiting for Normal

  Copyright © 2008 by Leslie Connor

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © February 2009 ISBN: 9780061881640

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Connor, Leslie.

  Waiting for normal / Leslie Connor. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother’s erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.

  [1. Family problems—Fiction. 2. Mothers—Fiction.

  3. Stepfathers—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Self-reliance—Fiction. 6. Schenectady (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C7644Wai 2008

  2007006881

  [Fic]—dc22

  CIP

  AC

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  FIRST EDITION

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