by Jack Gantos
“Take your time,” I said. “See you later—after I see Mom.”
I left a big bowl of breakfast for Pablo and Pablita and ran out of the house. I passed my little gnome friends. They were part of a Thanksgiving yard scene with Indian corn, and gourds, and a plastic turkey who was being chased by IGOR I HATE YOU because he had the little hatchet. “Take it easy, Igor,” I said, and bent down and turned him in another direction, then skipped down the street, having done another good deed.
After Mrs. Lapp said her “W.W.J.D.?” I told her Jesus would probably have a special theme park section of heaven set up for Thanksgiving turkeys who lost their heads. After that she got busy on the telephone calling businesses for donations to the community pantry. I read all day, and Olivia listened to books on tape, which I suspected wasn’t a book at all but something else because she was tapping her fingers and humming a tune every now and then. We got along fine except when she lifted off her headphones and wanted to know exactly how I was going to sneak her out of the house. I had exactly no ideas. “Still workin’ on it,” I said.
“Better put in some overtime,” she replied. “Because Godspell is only playing through the weekend, and if you don’t get me there, I’ll march down to your grandma and tell her that you are no longer my friend. And that will probably kill her.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m thinking.” But I wasn’t. I knew getting her to Godspell was going to be one of those things I figured out at the last minute, like I always did with Mrs. Lapp when she asked, “W.W.J.D.?”
After school I went over to the Beauty and the Beast salon. As soon as Mom saw me she ran over and picked me up and swung me around. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said, then stood me up and began fussing with me in a way I just love, as if I’m the only man in the whole world. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” She kissed me.
“You’ll never forget me,” I said, and kissed her back.
“Now sit in my chair,” she said, rubbing her chin as she looked me over. “I’ll trim you up. I want all my men to look good on Thanksgiving.”
“Is Booth coming?” I said.
“Of course he is,” she replied. “Joey, I know you are a little possessive, but he is a nice guy. He’s very good to me and has been especially patient with your dad haunting the town.”
“I’m a nice guy too,” I said. “How many do you need?”
“I need one nice guy and one Froot Loop.”
“He can be the Loop,” I said.
“Okay, Mr. Nice Guy, now close your eyes.” She picked up her water bottle and scissors.
I closed them.
“So tell me,” she asked while spraying down my hair and combing it out. “What’s your week been like?”
I didn’t tell her much. I didn’t tell her I was picked up by the police and fingerprinted. I didn’t tell her that because it would make us both sad, and we were trying to be happy. I didn’t tell her that it was Dad who had stolen Pablo and I had got him back plus Pablita. I didn’t tell her that because she hadn’t given me permission to keep another dog. I didn’t tell her about scaring a blind girl. I didn’t tell her that Olivia had become a friend and now I had to sneak her out to see Godspell. I didn’t tell her that Grandma talked about dying every time she opened her mouth. I didn’t tell her I had passed my old school and wanted to return.
So I just told her about the one big thought that filled the space between all the others. “I miss you all the time,” I said. “When are you coming home?”
“Believe me,” she replied, snipping away at me, “I’d love to. But your dad has still been buzzing around, and I don’t want him coming over to the house and bugging us there. We have the restraining order, and the police claim it won’t be long until they chase him out of town, and then we’ll get things back to normal.”
“You promise?” I asked. “I’d love some normal around our house.”
“I promise,” she said. “Now don’t worry.” Then she swiveled my head this way and that and snipped and snipped until she fluffed it up with some gel and made me look like a little chick that had just pecked its way out of an eggshell.
“I look like Tweety Bird!” I said, staring bug-eyed into the mirror.
“Do you still have that watch Booth gave you?” she asked.
I didn’t tell her about that either. And I was lucky that she had an appointment to go over hairstyles with a bride-to-be, so I got a bunch of kisses and squirmed away. I took one last look in the mirror. “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” I chirped and ran for the door.
On Wednesday morning I woke up and held my breath all the way from my bed into the living room and didn’t breathe again until I saw a cloud of smoke rising from behind the curtain.
“Cup of tea?” I hollered.
“Extra honey,” she called back. “Soothes my throat.”
“You want biscuits with that?”
“How ’bout some sliced apple?”
“Coming right up,” I hollered back like I worked in a diner. As I cut up the apple, I called out, “Grandma, I need some advice about my friend.”
“What’s that?” she yelled back.
“I promised Olivia I would sneak her out of her house and take her to see Godspell at the opera house because her mother won’t let her go, but I don’t think I can do it. What would you do?”
“I’d take the bull by the horns,” she said. “Just look the mother in the eye and ask nicely if she can go. What else can you do? If you try and sneak her out, you only end up looking like Carter sneaking around town. You can’t do that. And if the mother says no, then it’s Olivia’s problem, not yours.”
“But I promised I would sneak her out.”
“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” she said. “It will catch up with you every time.”
“But I already made the promise,” I said. “Will you come with us? Maybe Mrs. Lapp will let Olivia come if you came along too.”
“I can’t go to the opera,” she said. “Look at me. I’m just barely good enough to sit on the couch all day and lick envelopes. No, you take her. Just ask Mrs. Lapp.”
“Okay,” I said in a small voice because I wasn’t convinced Grandma’s advice would work.
After I fixed her breakfast, I went to the Lapps’. Olivia must have lightened up on her mom because Mrs. Lapp was actually being silly with me in a way that she never was. When I knocked on her door, she called out her favorite four letters, and I said, “He’d always tell the truth.”
She looked disappointed. “That was too easy,” she said. “Think of something else.”
“He’d always respect his elders.”
“Keep trying,” she said.
“He’d be nice to the needy.”
“Come on, Joey, put some zip into it.”
“He’d take the day off?”
“You can do better than this,” she said. “You just don’t seem like yourself today. What’s wrong?”
I wanted to say Jesus would tell someone’s mom that he planned to sneak her daughter out to a show she was forbidden to see, but I didn’t. Instead, I squeezed my eyes together and kept thinking.
“Come on,” she coaxed. “One more time. Make it a doozie.”
Then the best answer in the universe just popped into my head. “He’d say, Can I get back to you on that!”
“Hmm,” she hummed, and wrote it down.
10
KNOCK-KNOCK
On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up with a blinding flash going off inside my eyes as if they were filled with exploding stars. I sat up and opened them. Booth was leaning over me with a huge camera and flash attachment mounted on a silver tripod next to my pillow.
He set off the flash again.
“Ouch!” I hollered. And for a few seconds after I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything except for rippling sheets of darkness. I wondered if this was how Olivia felt all the time.
He fired off another flash. “Stop that!” I hollered, and covered my
face with my hands as if he were slapping me around. “That hurts.”
“I just got a side job with the police taking crimescene photographs, and I’m practicing on you,” he explained. “Your mom and I have been here for an hour already, and you’ve been asleep like the dead.”
That reminded me. I threw my covers aside and ran out of my room and across the living room. I ripped open Grandma’s curtain. She was sitting in her underwear plucking at her skin and stretching it out into little teepees as if it were made of Silly Putty.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Seeing if you are okay,” I replied breathlessly.
“Take a good look,” she said, spreading out her arms. “I’m alive and damn surprised. I smoked my last cigarette last night, licked my last envelope, and said the ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ prayer. I fully expected to ‘die before I wake.’ That’s a fact.”
“Well, you are alive, and it’s Thanksgiving so you should be thankful,” I said.
She pointed to her bedside table. There was a green apple with a tooth stuck in it. “That was one of my last real teeth,” she said. “I was so sure to be dead, I even tried to eat an apple for my last supper.”
“I’ll make sure we have applesauce,” I said, and held her bony hand. “Promise.”
She grinned at me. Her gums were caved in like the mouth of a rotten jack-o’-lantern, but I kissed her anyway. I was happy she was alive, even if she wasn’t.
“Now run up to that grocery store and get me some smokes,” she squawked. “Now that I’m still alive, I need to keep killing myself.” She reached into her pillowcase and pulled out a scratch card. “Here,” she said, “this one is a ten-dollar winner. Buy yourself a treat while you’re at it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yeah.” And I was so glad she was her grumpy old self, I nearly flew out of the house except I saw Mom in the kitchen surrounded by bags of food.
“Mom!” I shouted.
“Joey!” she hollered back. She dropped down onto one knee, and I ran right at her and hit her like a cannonball. She fell back and would have hit the floor except she hit the cabinets so hard I heard a few things fall over inside.
“Oh, my,” she winced, and rolled her shoulders around. “Have you gotten stronger since I last squeezed you?”
“Yes!” I shouted, and made a muscle.
She felt it. “Well, Mr. Helpful,” she said, reading the label I had stuck to my forehead before bed, “I’m going to need some muscle today. We have a turkey as big as the Macy’s parade balloon, and not only am I going to need some help with it, but you are going to have to eat a ton.”
“I can do that,” I said, and chattered my teeth together like those wind-up jaws. “I can do whatever you want. You name it, and I’ll do it.” I put my arms around her and licked her face.
“Stop that,” she said. “You’re worse than Pablo.”
“I’ve missed you,” I whimpered. “So much that I had to get another dog.”
“I noticed,” she said. “And I think we need to talk about that.”
“Okay,” I said, “I love to talk.” But before we could get started, she suddenly jumped up and marched toward the front door. She opened it and cocked her ear to one side and listened.
“What are you listening for?” I asked.
“Hush,” she said, and raised her hand for silence.
I stopped in my tracks and listened alongside her. In the air was the roar of a motorcycle. It didn’t sound like it was moving anywhere but was just pent up with the engine revving like a rodeo bull held back by a gate and waiting, waiting, waiting to spring forward. I knew Dad was out there somewhere. He was getting ready to cut loose, and she knew it too.
But when she turned away and lowered her hand, she was beaming down at me as if there was nothing to worry about, so I said, “I have to go to the store. Do you need anything?”
“Why don’t you stay home with me?” she said in her parent voice that made a question sound like a direct order. “I need you to sharpen all the knives and help me cook. Booth can go get Grandma’s smokes.”
“Okay,” I said, and leaned my face into her. I sniffed her clothes. I sniffed her arms. I jumped up and down and sniffed her hair until she grabbed the top of my head with one hand and pressed me down like she was loading one of those springy joke snakes into a can. Then in one quick move she ripped the MR. HELPFUL label off my forehead. “Ow w w!” I hollered. “You got some skin with that.”
“Is that all?” she asked, turning the label over and examining the sticky side. “I thought I pulled out some of your nuttiness.”
I hugged her. I was so happy to have her back home. I didn’t think of anything bad, and all I could think was that Thanksgiving was the holiday with the best name, and I wondered if I put a TURKEY label on my forehead Mom would just stuff me full of love and hugs and kisses and everything good in the world to be thankful for.
“Booth,” she called over my head. He came sprinting out of my room as if Mom were on fire. She really had him trained.
“Yes, Fran?” he asked, all breathless, his eyes darting around looking for danger. It seemed like he expected to find something wrong, like when Dad had peeked in the window and Mom threw a glass at him. I knew they had been living in a motel and hiding from Dad, and I thought there might be some things they weren’t telling me. It made me feel all nervous inside because I figured if she was hiding something from me, something awful, then I wouldn’t be able to help her solve it.
“Go get Grandma some smokes,” she said to Booth.
I handed him the scratch card and gave him Grandma’s instructions. “And with the extra money, please get me some turkey jerky for the dogs.”
“Will do,” he said, being his jolly self, then headed out the door.
And take your time, I thought, but didn’t say it.
Mom opened a kitchen drawer and clawed around inside it until she pulled out three long knives. One had a big V missing right in the middle of the blade and a bunch of little nicks around it from where I had used the knife to hack open a lock on what I thought was a pirate’s chest down in the basement but when I finally got the lock off there was only a stack of dresses that Grandma later told me were hers from when she was a farm girl and used to sew up a storm. Some of the dresses had blue ribbons pinned to them from winning prizes for dressmaking at the county fair. Grandma had washed a few of them out and ironed them, and they were hanging in the hall closet. I wanted her to try one on, but she insisted they were only for special old lady occasions, or a yard sale.
“Can you sharpen these?” Mom asked, and gave me a round sharpener that you put the blade of the knife into and roll back and forth on the counter.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s easy.”
And the rest of the morning was just as easy as rolling that sharpening wheel back and forth across the counter. Mom got the turkey cleaned up and stuffed with those little bags of crunchy stuffing and popped it into the oven. Then we peeled a sack of apples and cored them and made farm-style applesauce with cinnamon and lots of brown sugar poured in. Later she had me open all the cans for the side dishes—cranberry sauce, creamed corn, tiny peas, and sauerkraut because it was Grandma’s favorite. I knew where every can came from in the grocery store. I could tell you the aisle and section and whether it was on the top, middle, or bottom shelf. I could give you the price per item. And as I opened the cans, I thought this was exactly my idea of Thanksgiving. I was so thankful everything was in order. No surprises. No secrets. Nothing sneaking up on me and making me nervous. Just everything right there on the counter where I could see it.
She also had a tube of crescent rolls from the cold case of the grocery store, and a box of potatoes you just add hot water to, in case the real potatoes she bought were no good because they had so many eyes in them. Booth had brought several bottles of bubbly wine called Cold Duck, and she drank some out of a tall iced-tea glass, and Grandma had a mug of it while she
sat on the couch and watched the Green Bay Packers beat up on the Detroit Lions. I just couldn’t stay away from Mom, and I did everything she asked me to do, and it wasn’t until she began to boil a big pot of water and cut the eyes out of the potatoes that I remembered about the Lapps bringing dessert.
“Wonderful,” Mom said. “I spoke to Mrs. Lapp yesterday. I called to see how you were doing, and she said you and Olivia were working well together.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But she’s become a lot nicer since she came to the house to meet Grandma.”
Over the roar of the TV crowd Grandma shouted, “I taught her some manners.”
“Well,” Mom said to me, “you should be very proud of yourself.”
“I am,” I said, smiling brightly. “I think Mrs. Lapp should give me an A for Helpfulness. Olivia wasn’t easy, but I wore her down.”
“That’s one of your best qualities,” Mom remarked. “You could wear a mountain down into a molehill.”
“That boy’s an unrelenting force!” Grandma shouted. “I bet they name a hurricane after him someday, and he blows us all to kingdom come.”
I looked up at Mom and rolled my eyes. “She’s always talking about dying,” I whispered.
“That’s a subject she should get an A in,” Mom whispered back.
“What’s your best subject?” I asked.
“Putting up with you,” she said, and gave me a smack on the bottom. “Now get busy setting the table, and I’ll finish off these potatoes.”
“Should I use the good tablecloth?”
“Yes,” she said. “No plastic today.”
I got the old lace tablecloth out of the linen closet. I spread it out on the table and put the pink stain where a glass of red wine had spilled down on Booth’s end. I had made some Thanksgiving crafts at the Lapps’ and decorated the center with drawings of Pilgrims and Indians and a Styrofoam turkey I painted brown and red with real turkey feathers fanned out and stuck in the tail with little turkey-feet we made out of twigs. Once I had the plates and flatware and glasses and napkins set out, I ran to my room and got my label gun. I made a place name for each of us. I put POCAHONTAS on Mom’s plate, SITTING BULL on Booth’s, SQUANTO on Grandma’s even though Squanto was a man, and mine was the best—GERONIMO!—because it was one of my favorite names in the world. Then I set two plates in a corner of the kitchen floor and labeled one LITTLE BEAR and the other LITTLE TREE for our little dogs.