Grandpa sat up ramrod straight and gave a snappy salute. Then he took both of my hands in both of his. “Ditto,” he said. His mouth worked around a little. “What I mean to say, is, Josie, is… love is… my heart is…” Still holding both my hands, he leaned and kissed my head. “I mean I love you too.”
Unexpected House on Desirable Street
The rest of summer passed the way it always had—twenty-four hours in every day, seven days in each week, the hours and the days and the weeks dragging and also, somehow, zipping by.
We had a pretty good routine, me and Mrs. Blyth-Barrow, while I waited for what would happen to me next. Child Protective Services allowed me to stay put “in the interim.” Saturdays we’d have popcorn and watch our shows, Sundays we’d go to church at Greater House of Harmony, and it wasn’t that bad. The temporary location was Moody’s special events room, which made it convenient to stay for breakfast after. And we’d go and see Grandpa every day.
Someone began working on Unexpected House, the last two weeks of August. Winky and I tried to find out what was going on in there, but the yard, including the backyard where the secret fort is, was taped off with yellow crime scene tape and sawhorses. KEEP OUT, said the signs posted here and there. It was wicked maddening to have our space invaded like that. I’ve learned that I like to get answers to my questions, even if I don’t end up liking the answer.
* * *
One afternoon, we were kicking the soccer ball around town. We kicked the ball all over the place, by the diner, and the post office, and Books ’n Things and the Pay ’n Takit. We walked by the construction site of what would be the Greater House of Harmony Church. We waved to Joe Viola. He was working with the Ladies’ Auxiliary. The Ladies were all wielding hammers and slinging tool belts and showing Joe how to do everything.
When we went by Unexpected House, we were wicked surprised to see the crime scene tape was gone, and a man was stealing the FOR SALE sign from the front yard.
“I’m not stealing it,” he said. “Why would I steal a FOR SALE sign? Somebody bought the place, I figure. Or the seller took it off the market. Or someone had a reversal of fortune.” He looked up at the clouds and sighed a loud sigh. “I’m just the guy who puts up the signs and takes them down.” He heaved the sign into the bed of his pickup truck.
We watched the sign guy drive off with the sign. We were signless.
“Now what?” said Winky.
“Nothing stopping us from going to the secret fort,” I said. So we did that. I was worried that whoever had been messing around inside the house had messed around our fort. We hadn’t been able to get back there for two whole weeks.
I parted the willow branches and we went into the fort.
Now there were two chairs, plus a lavender bath rug, with fringe. Winky made a Pope-like gesture to offer me the new chair, and he sat on the old chair. Then he opened up the fridge. By now we had grown used to seeing the Coleman cooler full of good stuff, and we’d even sort of started to take it for granted the snacks would magically appear and that none of it was poisoned. But this time, there was more. There was cake.
Winky took the cake out and inspected it with his magnifier. “Moody’s coconut layer cake,” he said. There were also two forks, real ones, not plastic, and so we dug right in. It felt like a party.
The silverware made me think of my plans to make money, the plans Winky’d said were one prong short of a typical fork. I didn’t need to make money anymore, I guessed. But still. The final prong was going to be my dad. Child Protective Services reported there were no leads on finding a biological father. End of story. The coming so close to having one made the not having one seem more sad. It made me miss my mom.
Suddenly the cake didn’t taste that great. Well, that’s not true. It still tasted good, but I just couldn’t eat any more.
“You okay?” said Winky.
“Yes,” I said. “No. Yes and no.” Either way, I’d lost my appetite.
“Knock-knock,” came a voice.
Winky and I both jumped up. Carefully we drew aside the willow curtain, Winky on one side and me on the other.
“What are you doing here?” Winky asked Mrs. Blyth-Barrow, because it was her pretend-knocking at the sort-of door. “Not to be rude,” he added.
“Josie. Winky,” she said, looking at one of us and then the other, without a single flicker of surprise. “I own this house. Indeed I own several properties, and I recently realized I had reason to take this one off the market.”
I thought about that. Mainly because it seemed like a tongue-twister.
“What reason did you recently realize?” Winky managed to ask after a second.
Mrs. Blyth-Barrow gave me a hard look. Not the hard look of Joe Viola staring down a batter. Not the hard look of Asa Pike ordering a rowdy Hot Dogs fan to simmer down. It was a look with lots of different pieces moving around in there like a kaleidoscope. I tried to make the pieces shift into a pattern.
“Was it you who kept stocking our fridge?” I asked.
Mrs. B-B’s helmet hair didn’t move an inch, but it was possible her eyes twinkled.
“Are you twinkling?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I am twinkling a bit. I feel as though I might be.”
“Are you taking this house off the market because you’re going to live here? Is that why?” said Winky.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Blyth-Barrow.
She smiled, and when she did, I saw she had one big gold tooth back in there. It was a nice tooth, an important tooth, like treasure stashed away for a rainy day.
“Josephine,” she said, “I’m twinkling because I’ve been approved by Child Protective Services.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Oh,” is all I came up with. What did it mean?
“Will you think about it?” said Mrs. B-B. “Would you like for this to be your home, too? With me?”
Oh! was all I could think. Then I thought about popcorn and TV night, the big stuffed chair, and the cats. I thought about the night the house burned down, how it was Mrs. B-B who hummed, and held me tight, and took me in.
“Well, you do play a pretty good game of soccer,” I said.
“Of course I do,” said Mrs. B-B. “In college, I captained… oh never mind about that,” she said. “A story for another time.”
“Okay,” I said. My heart was fluttering and flapping like that feathered thing in Emily Dickinson’s poem. That’s right; I felt a surge of hope.
“Okay, what? Okay you want to live here,” said Winky, “or okay, a story for another time?”
“Both,” I said. Now I was happily floating on air, just like a lolling lily. (I don’t know if that’s accurate, because I never bothered to learn what a lolling lily is.) “I want to live here,” I said, “and I want a story for another time. Both!”
There was some hugging, then, and a lot of smiling, and I found I could eat some more coconut layer cake after all.
Unexpected? You bet. It was wicked unexpected, right up till the very moment it happened.
* * *
“Well, that is… help me, now, what’s the word I’m looking for…” Tina crossed her arms. “Ugly, is what.” She shook her head. It was later that same day. We were already moving our things out of Kenerson’s Five and Ten.
“It’s unexpected!” I said.
“You got that right,” Tina said. “You’d expect a house to have four walls and a roof. Where’s the roof?”
“Actually, a geodesic dome makes a very solid structure,” Joe said. He was totally on my team, about the house, and he’d picked up some engineering know-how from the Greater House of Harmony Ladies. “There isn’t a right angle in the place, but it’s solid, all right.”
“You must see inside,” I said. I knew all the selling points from two years of reading the for-sale flyers.
“It’s larger than it looks,” Winky said.
“It’s a special opportunity,” I reminded Tina.
“Well,” Tina said
. “A little paint. A little lovin’.” She tilted her head to look from a different angle. “I suppose it could be charming.”
The movers (Mr. Grigg, Debbie Moody-Cote, Officer Pike, Joe Viola, and Mr. Mee) went to put Mrs. B-B’s stone angel in the yard. “No, no, that goes inside, yes, inside!”
* * *
We had a housewarming party that very night, and the whole town came. We had (more) cake, and BBQ, and three different kinds of salad. When it got dark, Mr. Mee dragged over some rocks to make a fire ring, and then he built a campfire. “I wasn’t a Boy Scout for nothing,” he said. And who knew Rex Grigg could play the accordion? Who knew Beverly Moody could sing? She tried to teach us all an old French song. According to Debbie Moody-Cote, it was a song mainly about cabbages. It was pretty, just the same.
Winky was standing a little outside the fire ring, outside the circle of people. On his magnifier, firelight winked. I thought about Winky losing his eyesight and with it the game he loved so much. I thought about losing my mom, and Grandpa, too. I think what I was most afraid of, all that time I was scrambling to pay the mortgage and keep the lights on, wasn’t so much being without a house or light to see by, but being without a family. I was afraid I’d be alone: the great emergency of life. But I wasn’t alone.
I looked at all the people singing about cabbages and roses, their faces glowing from the campfire and from all that togetherness. I wasn’t alone at all.
* * *
What I remember most about that party is the stars in the sky, so clear and so many, beyond the dark curve of Unexpected House. Sometimes it happens that you look up from all that’s been happening, and everything’s changed. And you notice it’s okay. You look up at the roof over your head, say, and maybe there isn’t a right angle in the whole place, but it’s a fine home, just the same. A wicked fine home, if you ask me.
Home
About One Year Later
Last Saturday, we all drove down to Boston for the annual Beep Ball Bash. Me and Tina went in the yellow Mustang with Grandpa and Mrs. B-B riding in the back seat. Mr. Mee drove down with the new teacher, Mr. DiAngelo, the one who replaced Mrs. B-B, in Mr. DiAngelo’s Ford Pinto. Winky’s parents took the bus. Winky, of course, was already there with his team: the Boston Bats.
“Peter Pan ain’t so bad!” Mr. Wheaton said.
“No indeed, Bob,” Mrs. Wheaton agreed. She’d been back and forth several times, ever since Brenda’s Book Cozies had been picked up by a fancy shop in Boston called Noun: A Person’s Place for Things. Mrs. Wheaton’s good fortune was all thanks to orange lady, the one who had been so nice to us at the Beep Baseball Bash and explained to us the rules of the game. (Orange lady had a name, of course, and it was Michelle.) If you wonder how many people read books with covers they don’t want anybody to see, the answer is: a lot.
“Sour ball?” Mr. Wheaton offered around a bag.
Mr. Mee sat beside me in a camp chair, with a book in his lap. There is a lot of waiting in baseball and in beep ball, and he said he likes to read during the lulls. Mr. DiAngelo sat on the other side of Mr. Mee and he drew in a sketchbook during the lulls. Lulls happen when Coach Viola stops the play to give a pep talk to the batter, for example.
Yes, that was my brilliant idea! Joe Viola needed a job, and the Beep Baseball League needed a coach! Coaching is a volunteer position, but Development Director is not. That’s the person who brings in the money. Donations to the not-for-profit BBL are up, way up. Winky was right about his sports hero being a money-making machine.
It was the bottom of the ninth, and pitcher–coach–Development Director Joe was on the pitcher’s mound doing such a wild wind-up for the crowd, his wide-striped shirt was coming untucked.
“Love ya, Joey!” Tina shouted. She can really belt it. “Tuck your shirt in!”
I leaned over to Mr. Mee. “Isn’t this wicked?” I said.
Mr. Mee glanced up from his book.
“I mean, you know… everything?” I said.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Mee. He poked the nose of his glasses. He seemed like he was waiting for me to say something else.
“Here we all are,” I said, “when a year ago… basically a year ago today… my house burned down, and I thought it was the end of the world.” I looked around at everybody from town who’d come to see the game. Mrs. Moody even brought beignets. “Wicked.”
Mr. Mee took off his glasses and breathed on each lens. “Unlikely coincidences and stunning reversals are quite common in literature,” he said. He wiped the glasses on the tail of his shirt. “If you had read more novels, you’d be better prepared for the seeming whimsy of this world and all of human existence.”
I thought about that.
“Or,” I said, “I could read Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Long Stories Edition.”
Mr. Mee put his glasses back on and went back to his book, but I saw a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Try a little Shakespeare,” he said.
Winky stepped up to the plate.
We all went quiet as a golf match.
Joe lined it up—“Ready!”—and—“ball!”—let it fly.
Beep beep beep (the ball and) Thock! (the bat and) “Two!” (the spotter and) Bzzzzzztzzzzzz (the base and)—
Winky threw down the bat and started to run.
“Put one on the board, baby!” yelled Mrs. B-B.
Grandpa leaped to his feet like a man half his age. “Bananas! Baked beans!”
Mr. Mee and Mr. DiAngelo dropped their stuff on the ground and started going nuts!
Winky had thirty seconds to reach that base. I was clapping so hard my hands were stinging.
The ball went right by the first fielder.
“Run, Winky!”
It bounced toward the second fielder.
“Winky, go!”
That guy went to scoop up the ball, but it took a bad hop and bobbled out of his glove.
“Run, Winky!”
Another fielder crouched low to get the ball while the spotters kept yelling directions.
“Dépêchez-vous!” cried Mrs. Moody. Nobody knew what it meant, but we got the idea!
“Run it in, Elwyn, sweetie, you can do it!” yelled Mrs. Wheaton, flapping her arms like a big flowery bird.
I don’t know if the pitcher was supposed to be screaming, but there was Joe Viola hollering, “Go go go go go!”
We were all of us on our feet, yelling and screaming and jumping up and down and I must have been yelling loudest of all: “Go Winkeeeeee!”
And guess what—do you believe it?
I bet you do.
Winky ran it home.
About the Author
Susan Hill Long is the author of The Magic Mirror: Concerning a Lonely Princess, a Foundling Girl, a Scheming King, and a Pickpocket Squirrel and Whistle in the Dark, about which Publishers Weekly praised in a starred review, “The novel sings with graceful recurring motifs, true emotions, and devastating observations about the beauty that can be found in the darkest hours.” It was named a Best Book of the Year by Bank Street and Publishers Weekly. Susan lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Learn more at susanhilllong.com.
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A Paula Wiseman Book
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Susan Hill Long
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Long, Susan Hill, 1965– author.
Title: Josie Bloom and the emergency of life / Susan Long.
Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, [2020] | “A Paula Wiseman Book.” | Summary: In 1977, middle-schooler Josie secretly takes on her aging grandfather’s financial problems while also helping her friend Winky bail his Major League Baseball idol out of the town jail.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019016015| ISBN 9781534444270 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534444294 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Finance, Personal—Fiction. | Grandfathers—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Baseball—Fiction. | Family life—Maine—Fiction. | Maine—History—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.H55742 Jos 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016015
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 15