“Uh,” Dad said, “no caffeine for the kids, Roxie.”
“Right,” she said. “I forgot.” She put the Cokes back and got out some juice.
Just then, someone knocked on the door. “Oh dear,” Mom said. “The pizza. I can’t answer looking like this.” She backed away from the door, down the hall, out of sight.
“I’ll get it,” Dad said. He opened the door to the smell of pizza.
“He’s going to need money,” Mom called from the hallway.
Dad reached for his wallet. “I’ll treat.” He gave the pizza man some bills and closed the door.
“Oh, Bill,” Mom said, coming back to the table. “You didn’t have to treat. But thank you.” She opened the lid of the box and peeked inside. “Yummy!”
I looked inside the box, too.
Mom had forgotten! I hate mushrooms!
Chapter 24
Good-bye Again
HORRIBLE MUSHROOMS COVERED EVERY bit of the pizza. “Mom!” I said as tears rushed into my eyes.
Dad shook his head at me and reached for a piece. I pressed my lips together and watched him pick off mushrooms. He slid my piece over to me.
“Oh, Katie,” Mom said. “Guess I forgot.”
“It’s okay.” I blinked the tears away and tried to smile.
“You’ve grown since Christmas, Katie,” she said, pulling me closer to her.
I rubbed my cheek against her soft robe, trying to forget about the mushrooms. “This bus is cute,” I said. “I like these little cabinets and shelves.”
“Look up there.” She pointed behind me, and I twisted around to look.
“Our pictures!”
“I keep the Scotch tape handy. Everything you send me goes up on the wall.” Mom nodded at me. “Makes this rig feel like a home.”
“We’ll send more,” I said. “I do birds now.” I looked down at my pizza. Dad had missed a lot of mushrooms. They were still everywhere.
Mom got up for another bottle of water. “It’s summer vacation, huh? What have you been doing?”
“We’ve hardly had a chance to play,” I told her. “Dad’s been making us sort stuff.”
“We’re giving away extra things,” Dad said, “in case I take a job in Portland.”
“You would love it here in Portland,” Mom said. “There’s so much going on.” Outside the rig, a siren whistled, coming closer and then finally turning away from us.
I started to say, no, we wouldn’t, but Tyler interrupted.
“We went on a picnic,” he said, sitting up and opening his eyes. “With the Plummers and Ms. Morgan.”
“Silver Creek Falls,” Dad said. He wiped tomato sauce off Tyler’s mouth.
“We went there,” Mom said. “Oh my gosh. Was Tyler even born yet?”
“Katie was a baby.” He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “Want to see some photos?”
Mom wiped pizza off her fingers and took the first photo. “Is that little Claire Plummer?” she asked. “I can’t believe it.”
“Little Claire Plummer is quite the little lady now.” Dad grinned at me.
“She’s mostly a pain,” I said.
“Isn’t she the one who helped you take care of pets over spring vacation?” Mom asked.
I nodded. “Sometimes she’s okay. She told me she was sad we might move.”
“Who is this pretty woman?” Mom put her finger on Ms. Morgan.
“My teacher,” I told her. “She’s wonderful.”
“Katie’s teacher,” Tyler said with a yawn, “is very wonderful.” He propped his head up with one hand, and his eyes drooped again. Mom hugged Tyler closer to her. “She must be seriously dating Claire’s dad. Look at the three of them.”
I took the photo from Mom and stared at Ms. Morgan and Claire and Mr. Plummer sitting side by side on the picnic bench. “We just found out she has a boyfriend,” I said, but Mom had turned to the next picture, one of Tyler and Dad and me ducking under a waterfall.
When Tyler put his head in Mom’s lap and fell asleep, Dad looked at his watch.
“Don’t go yet,” Mom said. “I need to make sure you all understand about . . . about why I can’t come home.”
“Seeing you perform tonight made it really clear,” Dad said. “You’re a professional.”
I nodded as I remembered the cheers, the clapping, the excitement.
She looked down at Tyler and brushed his red hair back from his forehead. “I miss you all very much,” she said in a soft voice.
“But,” I asked, already knowing the answer, “you don’t want to do mom things anymore?”
“I’ll always be your mom. But I don’t have time to be the kind of mom who lives at home with you.” She shook her head slowly back and forth. “I’m sorry, Katie.”
I looked away from her. “You would probably have trouble,” I said, “getting up early for Tyler. And cooking for us.”
“Cooking is not my strong point,” Mom said.
I folded my mushroomy pizza into my paper napkin and pushed it away from me along with dreams of Mom bringing pancakes to the table or baking cookies. This is one of those bitter times, I thought, but a moment later, I remembered the sweet parts. “Singing makes you really happy, Mom. We’ll be okay.”
Dad nodded. “Katie and I talked about it tonight. We really are okay.”
Mom blotted her eyes with a paper napkin. She turned then and looked at the big calendar that hung on the side of the refrigerator. “August is coming. We’ll have our time together.”
“The last two weeks of August,” Dad said.
I nodded. “At Grandma’s house.”
“Your grandma is coming to my Spokane concert tomorrow,” Mom said, starting to smile again. “She’s bringing her whole bridge group to the concert.” She hummed and sang, “You’ve got to know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em.” She laughed. “I’ll sing them a cardplaying song.”
“Mom,” I said, “I know how to play Crazy Eights now. Can we play when we visit you?”
“Definitely. We’ll play Crazy Eights every day.”
Tyler sat up and rubbed his eyes. “We might bring a dog,” he said.
“A dog?”
“Lucy,” I said, “is the most wonderful dog.” I hugged my arms around myself and remembered Lucy’s warm, soft fur and her dark eyes.
“She smiles.” Tyler was suddenly wide awake. “Like this.” He pulled his lips into a big grin.
“She wags her tail all over the place. It’s this long, her tail.” I lifted my arms to show Mom.
“We’re not sure yet about the dog.” Dad got up and walked toward the door. “Right now, we need to get on the road.”
Mom hugged Dad. Then she pulled open a cabinet door. “I have some T-shirts for Katie and Tyler. And some new CDs.”
She hugged Tyler and then me. “I really do miss you all,” she said. She bit her lip and looked at Dad. I could see tears in her eyes.
“We miss you, too, Mom,” I said. Her strong arms kept on holding me close while her perfume floated around me.
“We’ll have a great time in August,” she said in a husky voice. As we went down the steps and started across the park, she stood in the door of the RV and waved good-bye.
A few minutes later, we got into our car. Pretty soon, we were back on the freeway, headed for home. After a while, I saw Dad looking into the mirror at me in the back seat. “You guys okay back there?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking he wanted to be sure my seat belt was fastened all the way. Then, I thought, maybe he was talking about the bittersweet. “I’m fine, Dad,” I told him, but as I curled up on the seat to sleep, I could feel a big empty place inside me.
Chapter 25
Now What?
MOM WAS IN MY dreams all night. First she sang. Then she held me close, and I saw tears come into her eyes. In my last dream, she held out a piece of pizza. “No mushrooms,” she said.
When I woke up, I looked at her poster. She was probably on her way to Sp
okane right now. Maybe she was looking out the RV window and thinking about August and how we would be together.
She was probably thinking about the next concert. She was probably practicing the cardplaying song.
In the kitchen, I poured myself some Cheerios and sat down at the table with Dad. “There’s one good thing today. Ms. Morgan’s barbecue.”
“Right,” Dad said.
I sat up straight, remembering. “Did you hear about her boyfriend? That’s why she’s having the barbecue.”
“I heard that,” he said, cranking his head around to loosen his neck.
“Claire’s really sad that Ms. Morgan can’t be her new mother.”
He was quiet. “Today is the day,” he finally said, “when SolaCom said they would call me back about a possible job.”
Solacom. It didn’t even sound nice.
He sipped his coffee and set the mug down. “If they want me, I’ll tell them I’ll think about it. I have to talk with Mr. Flagstaff first.”
I sighed and pushed my spoon through my cereal.
“He’ll be back on Tuesday,” Dad said.
“Tuesday is years from now.” I took a big mouthful of cereal and chewed it. Swallowed. “Maybe we can get Lucy today.”
“That man said he’d call. They have to make sure she’s healthy.”
I stared into my bowl of cereal, and all the little circles blurred together. “She’s worried. She’s wondering why we haven’t come to get her. She doesn’t have any family right now.”
Tyler dragged into the family room with his blanket around him. He curled into a chair at the table. Dad brought him a bowl of cereal.
Tyler picked up his spoon and right away dropped it on the floor. “My spoon,” he wailed. His eyes filled with tears.
“Uh-oh,” Dad said, getting him another spoon. “This is going to be a long day. For more than one reason.”
I thunked my own spoon on the table. “Nothing is ever settled,” I said. “I want Sierra to come back so we can do stuff before we move away. This summer vacation is the dumbest one I’ve ever had.”
Dad nodded at me. “It’s hard on all of us.”
“We could settle one thing,” I said. “We could decide about getting Lucy right now.”
Dad got up and went to the kitchen to pour more coffee. He didn’t answer.
I watched Tyler loading his new spoon with Cheerios. He put one more on the top of the heap and opened his mouth. I looked away.
When the phone rang, Dad handed it to me.
“I cried all night,” Claire said, “because Ms. Morgan has a boyfriend. She’ll never be my mother.”
Or mine, I thought. But then, as usual, I thought of Mom. But today I knew for sure that Mom was never coming back. “Things are awful here, too,” I told her. “Everything was simpler when we were in fourth grade.”
I could tell she was nodding at the other end of the phone. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m writing songs for your mom to sing.”
“For Mom?”
“I’ll need you to send them to her, okay? She’s going to love them. She’ll probably pay me.”
I slid down to the floor and rested my head on my hand.
“I’ll sing you one right now,” Claire said. She began to sing and right away stopped. “I’ve lost the note,” she said. “I have to go find it on the piano.” She hung up.
In the utility room, Dad was flattening cardboard boxes.
“We can use some of these for moving,” he said.
“Wait!” I yelled as he reached for the next box. “Stop! I need that one!”
“I’m making space in here,” he said. “This box is too big for anything anyway.”
“I want it,” I said. Tears flew into my eyes. “Please, Dad?”
He looked at me. “Why?” he asked, pushing it toward me.
I stepped into it and curled myself into a ball. “It’s perfect.” I stuck my head up to look out at him. “When Lucy comes. . .”
He shook his head at me.
“If. If Lucy comes, this will be her bed. If we move, she won’t be a bit worried because her bed will go everywhere we go.”
He heaved a big sigh.
“Please, Dad?”
He shook his head again. “You can play with the box. I won’t flatten it yet.”
“Now,” I told him, “all she needs is a really nice blanket. Some toys. A pretty dish for water...”
Chapter 26
Ms. Morgan’s Barbeque
“YOU FOUND THE RIGHT place,” someone called, and there was Ms. Morgan, coming down from her front porch to meet us. “Welcome,” she said, and her green eyes sparkled at us. She scooped Tyler up for a hug. “You were so brave on that big stage!”
“Mommy says I’m in her band now,” he said, “but I don’t think so.”
“How is everyone doing?” she asked Dad.
“Okay, I think,” he said. “Tyler took a good nap this afternoon.”
He didn’t mention that Tyler napped on his blanket in Lucy’s cardboard box. We were going to have a big problem, Tyler and I, deciding which room Lucy would sleep in. If we got her. Ms. Morgan let Tyler slide down and held his hand as we walked up the steps. “Did you get your phone call?”
Dad shook his head. “They’ll probably call on Monday.”
“I’m interested,” she said. “Let me know what happens.”
I had forgotten all about Dad expecting the solar company to call. He didn’t look upset. He was sure better at waiting than me.
“The backyard is a mess,” Ms. Morgan said, leading us into her house. “My backpacking tent came. I’m trying to set it up. I didn’t know it would have so many pieces.”
Ms. Morgan’s house smelled like apple pie. We walked through her living room that had books piled everywhere.
The backyard had red flowers along the fence. Yummy chicken smells came from the barbecue. At the other end of the yard, I saw tent poles and bags and a little orange tent with a sagging top.
I looked around for her boyfriend. No one else was here.
“Good idea to set up a new tent before you go,” Dad said. “Sometimes, they leave out an important part.”
“Can I go in?” Tyler peeked inside the tent. “Take off your shoes.” Ms. Morgan unzipped the door for him.
Tyler crawled inside and rolled onto his back. He smiled up at us. “I like it,” he said.
“No rain in the forecast,” Dad said
Ms. Morgan gasped. “I forgot about rain. Should I take a rain parka, too?” She waved her hand at the picnic table. “See this stuff? All of it is supposed to go into my backpack.”
I looked at the clothes and cooking pots and a sleeping bag and a pad. “It’s never going to fit.”
She made a face. “I’ve got to take less.” She grabbed a long fork off the table. “I’m not taking this in my backpack. It’s for turning the chicken.” We followed her to the grill.
“May I do it?” Dad asked, holding his hand out for the fork. “Where are you going to backpack?” he asked as he turned the chicken pieces.
“Mt. Jefferson Park,” Ms. Morgan said.
“A beautiful trail,” Dad said. A minute later, they had put the cover back on the grill and were bent over forest maps, discussing the trails.
In the tent, Tyler was singing a song about spruced-up trees. Ms. Morgan and Dad weren’t paying any attention to me, but it didn’t matter. I leaned back against the table and listened. This party felt cozy. If only Sierra were here, it would be perfect.
Nobody else heard the knocking on the front door.
Chapter 27
Unexpected Guests
WHEN I WENT INSIDE Ms. Morgan’s house, Claire and Mr. Plummer stood on the front porch. “Please come in,” I said, pretending I was Ms. Morgan.
Mr. Plummer moved some books on the coffee table so he could set down a vase of roses. “The Peace rose is in full bloom right now,” he said. “I can bring some to your family, too, Katie.”
&n
bsp; “Thanks.” I breathed in the heavenly rose smell.
When I straightened up, I saw Ms. Morgan’s mantel. There, in the exact center, was the bluebird plate I had made. That bird looked right at home.
Claire pulled me away from the mantel. “Did you see him?” she asked.
“Him?”
“Her boyfriend.” She frowned at me. “I already hate him.”
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
They followed me through the house and out the back door. Soon we were all trying to make the tent stand up better.
Sometime later, I heard another knock on the door. Ms. Morgan was turning the chicken again, and the fathers were discussing tent stakes, so I went to the front door. This time it would be the boyfriend.
But no!
It was Mrs. Ramirez, the one who owned the bride shop, and Alex was with her. I stared at Mrs. Ramirez. She was surely here to help Ms. Morgan plan her wedding to the boyfriend. They would be choosing dresses and stuff. They were going to ruin the barbecue.
“We live next door,” Mrs. Ramirez said. “I think you and Alejandro know each other.”
I stared at her a moment before I realized what she had said. They had also been invited to the barbecue. They were neighbors. That explained why Ms. Morgan and Alex biked to the library together.
Mrs. Ramirez had wound her long black hair into a fancy knot at the back of her head, and a soft blue scarf floated across her shoulders. “We brought tamales,” she said. “I’ll leave them here on the kitchen counter.”
Alex had on his favorite shirt. “Hi, Katie.” He shoved his hands into his pants pockets. He had to lift up the shirt flaps to do it.
“They’re in the backyard,” I said. “Ms. Morgan has a new tent.”
“Cool.” Alex followed his mother and me out the back door. Claire was sitting at the picnic table. When she saw Alex, she rolled her eyes. Then, she saw Alex’s mother’s blue scarf and her eyes lit up.
“I’m Claire Plummer,” she said, and held out her hand to Mrs. Ramirez.
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