“Ben always gets to see them,” whined Lenora.
“Not always.” Mrs. T. smiled at me. “In fact, this is the very first time.”
Hopefully it won’t be the last.
Mr. T. hums as he drives. The trees along the road are now sporting colored leaves. October is the one month when Greenfield might become Goldfield, say, or Redfield. And the sweetgum tree in the Torgles’ yard is now fancy as a party. Its five-pointed leaves have turned all different shades: yellow, dark purple, and red. Today that pitiful thing looks like a bouquet of stars.
The trees we’re passing get me thinking about the family tree, that stupid school assignment that’s due on Monday. My tree, all bare but for three named twigs. Well, at least I won’t have to stay up all night trying to finish it.
October. The twins are starting to talk Halloween. Or maybe I should say yell Halloween. Kate wants them to dress as princesses; Lenora refuses. They argue about how to spend the last few dimes of their father’s money. Blabbing and boo-hooing, they constantly barge into my room.
It is chaos with a capital C.
Mrs. T. is fast-forwarding to Christmas, when Saint Jake Jock will visit. I wonder how he’ll feel about a stranger in his room. One day I had returned from school to find the twelve trophy guys gone. When I asked, Mrs. T. replied, “It was time I put them away. This is your room now.”
I have started to put a few things—my things—on the shelves. To keep my flashlight company. Mrs. T. keeps asking if I would like a new bedspread, but I am used to that brown plaid. A new spread might give me the feeling I’ve moved again. And I plan to stay at Number Eight for a while, thank you very much.
As the Torglemobile rattles down the highway, I try to keep my thoughts from jumping ahead to this afternoon. I let them bounce: D. M. Z. Q.
“We’ll go to your hardware store first,” I say. “Then the library and Safeway.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Mr. T. salutes.
I settle back, glad the hardware store has managed to hang on this long. I want it to be part of today. This day I have planned so carefully: A, B, C.
We’ll finish at Uddleston’s. Vanilla shakes and red straws for the three of us. Mr. T., Grover, and me.
See, about two weeks after that first phone call, Kate came giggling into the living room. “Phone for Ben. It’s a girl.”
When I picked up, I heard a familiar voice. “Don’t get any ideas.”
I gripped the phone. Tracey Graham.
“All day I’ve heard nothing but ‘po, po, po.’ I tried the toy phone. No luck. Jenny tried books. Grover threw them. Nothing, I mean nothing, will distract him.”
Sure enough, “Po! Po! Po!” came from the background.
“We’ve run out of people to call,” she said. “You want to talk to Grover?”
And then I heard “Beh! Beh! Beh!”
In the weeks since that call there have been others. These days Grover is so phone obsessed I talk to him a few times a week. Perhaps talk is not quite the right word, since Grover babbles in a language I’m still translating: po, Beh, Ma-ma, La, Tee, Ah-den (Aunt Jenny), and about a hundred others, from neigh (horse) to oos (shoes).
And once Grover finishes, do you think that poor phone gets a rest? Not a chance. Tracey has to talk to Mrs. T., or Mrs. T. to her, the twins jabber for their turn, Mr. T. aahs around the kitchen, Charmaine follows like the man’s tail-thumping shadow.
It is chaos with all capital letters: C-H-A-O-S.
For example, the other day Jenny asked my advice about pancakes and then Tracey took the phone and grilled me about toys—trikes versus wagons. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she said, “You know, Grover named that outlet thing you gave him.”
“The night-light?”
“He calls it Boo Beh,” said Tracey.
Blue Ben. How about that.
I still worry sometimes about Grover. Yeah, I know his sheets and faucets are okay, but what if, say, his mother died? And his aunt? What would happen to him?
Those questions—well, they keep me awake some nights. If I can think them through, lay out the answers like a trail of stones, then hopefully Grover can’t get lost. The thinking is hard, though. No sooner do I have one question figured out than another comes along.
I remember Gram’s will and the friend she left me to. Maybe Tracey’s will should name a bunch of folks that can watch over Grover. I would like to be one of them. If something happened to Tracey and Jenny, I would promise to stay around. After all, only the Watson half of me is footloose; the other is stick-it-out stubborn as Gram. And since I’m only eleven—not eighty-two—there’s a good chance I won’t be dying till I’ve seen him safely grown.
Gram. The strong branch on my family tree. Maybe I can be a sort of twig on Grover’s.
I remember the question Mrs. T. asked when I first came. Did I think of Grover more than I thought of myself?
Now I can answer that question: Yes.
Me, myself, I. The life of Ben Watson. I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about all the homes it took to find this one. All the spoiled Chihuahuas and time-out closets, all the light-fingered boys and Safeway samples I had to pass through to get here.
Ms. Burkell wants me to talk all this out. Those are her words—“talk it all out”—like my mind is a sponge to be squeezed clean and dry. Like all that happened can be washed down the sink. She has set up an appointment with a fancy counselor. I tell Ms. Burkell she is shrink enough for me. She laughs but says all this talking will be healing for me.
Healing, huh. She makes me sound like Grover with a boo-boo on his knee. Right now, I don’t want to talk. It is enough to walk beside the twins to the school bus. To help Mrs. T. fix a meal. To set my own place at the table. It is enough to sit on the brown-plaid spread each night and gaze at the sky and watch the small lights breaking through. In the fall in Greenfield, the stars are very clear and close.
Ms. Burkell’s beads don’t get on my nerves half as bad these days, even though she keeps yammering about this new law. There’s a big push, she says, to promote adoption, to keep foster stays short, to place kids in permanent homes.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Though Ms. Burkell hasn’t brought up Sarah Jewel again, sometimes I wonder about my mother. Maybe she had been knocked around, too, like Tracey. In my mind Sarah Jewel is always a dark-haired teenager staring out a bus window. But really, now, she would be grown up. A woman fixing meals, driving a car, working. Maybe she would have other children. And my father? What about him? Someday I may try to find out.
Not now. My parents are twigs, broken off, blown away. I want to let them rest for a while.
Two days ago Tracey asked Mr. T. if he’d like to take Grover into town on Saturday afternoon. And she asked me if I’d like to go, too.
Tracey was letting me spend a day with Grover. How about that. We both did something we won’t do again, she had said in August on the phone. Let’s leave it at that. I guess that’s what she was doing.
I haven’t seen the kid since the day I bought him that little horse. I bet he’s taller now. And he’s probably running fast as a colt.
I think Tracey has decided that Grover needs some guys in his life. Guys to read him stories, to play horse and car, to shuffle beside him while he names every bug, stick, and leaf in his path.
An old guy like Mr. T.
A young guy like me.
Good thing I never sold that Dr. Spock book back to the library. It’s bound to come in handy.
I wonder if Dr. Spock has anything to say about family trees.
I think about the tree I inked up in class. Maybe what I need is not one tree but a little forest. A bunch of trees together on the same piece of paper. There would be a tree for Lenora and Kate and their broken twig of a dad. And one for the Torgles. And one for Grover and Tracey and Jenny. And my tree, too. Mine and Gram’s.
And maybe some of these trees would be mighty oaks and pretty maples. But a fair
number, I bet, would be sweetgums. Yes. Because, as Mrs. Crawdich used to say, a sweetgum can surprise you.
But who wants to think about homework? My mind is filled with plans for this afternoon. And this is how I’d like things to start.
Today when Tracey opens the door to apartment 402, I will hand her a bag of Grover’s favorite fish crackers. I will hand her a big jar of Jif for Jenny, who’s studying for an exam. Then I want to give something to Tracey. I want to look straight at her. I want to look past the quick frown and gooped-up lashes and see her eyes, the same blue as Grover’s. And I want to say “Thank you.”
I think she will understand.
Of course, the afternoon may not start like this at all. It will probably be chaos with all capital letters: C-H-A-O-S. Underlined. And I will have to work the thank-you in when I can.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Quattlebaum is the author of several books for young readers, including Jackson Jones and the Puddle of Thorns, which won the Marguerite de Angeli Prize and a Parenting Reading Magic Award; The Magic Squad and the Dog of Great Potential, winner of the Sugarman Award; and most recently, the picture book Aunt CeeCee, Aunt Belle, and Mama’s Surprise, which Publishers Weekly praised as a tale “readers will be happy to hear … over and over.”
Mary Quattlebaum grew up in rural Virginia, the oldest of seven children. Like Ben Watson, she often took care of rambunctious younger brothers and sisters. She earned a B.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from Georgetown University. She now writes frequently for The Washington Post and various magazines for children and adults and teaches creative writing in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and daughter.
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Text copyright © 2001 by Mary Quattlebaum
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eISBN: 978-0-307-52912-1
April 2003
v3.0
Grover G. Graham and Me Page 13