Clementine and the Family Meeting

by Sara Pennypacker

  “Can I try it on? Please?”

  My father poured himself a mug of hot chocolate and shook his head sadly, as though he was thinking of the most tragic tragedy in the world. “Sorry, Sport. This tool belt was handed down through fourteen generations of the men in my family. It’s a priceless heirloom.”

  Mostly I think my dad’s jokes are funny. Sometimes, though, they are N-O-T, not.

  “Dad. We got it yesterday at Hardware Depot.”

  “Oh, right,” my dad said. He drank some cocoa and then complained about how much work he had to do. “My beeper’s been going crazy all afternoon. Winter! The boiler’s thumping, the pump’s off on the seventh floor, and Mrs. Jacobi’s windows are iced shut. I’ll be lucky if I’m back for dinner.”

  “Don’t forget the meeting tonight,” my mom said.

  I slumped back down to my chair. “Just tell me what I did wrong,” I sighed. “Say what the meeting’s about, and I’ll promise to do better.”

  My mother sat down next to me. “Oh, honey, you didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing at all. Is that what you’ve been thinking? No, the meeting’s for…something else.”

  I lifted my head and Really?-eyed her.

  “Really.” She smiled.

  My dad was smiling, too.

  “I’m not in trouble?” I asked them. “And the meeting’s not about a problem?”

  “Nope,” my dad said. “The meeting’s about a good thing, in fact. A good surprise. Something we’ve been waiting for, for a long time.”

  I felt so relieved, I decided to try again. “Then, could I try your tool belt on when you get back?”

  “Not a chance. When I get back, I’m going to have to lock it in the safe,” my dad said. “You see, this tool belt is a priceless treasure from the Ming dynasty. It’s irreplaceable. If anything happened to it—”

  “Dad,” I said. “It came from Hardware Depot. You could just buy another.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. But then he went off to see about Mrs. Jacobi’s frozen windows, muttering about winter.

  One way that I am like my fruit name is that I have lots of sections. Right now, a couple of Clementine sections were worrying about Eighteen. A few Clementine sections were thinking about that tool belt, about how great it would be to try it on. A few of them were mad at my dad for thinking it was funny not to share it. But most of my sections were so happy to find out that I wasn’t in trouble!

  My mother went into the living room to work on some drawings. My brother watched a video about bulldozers. And all afternoon, I tried to guess what the good surprise was.

  Finally, finally, it was after dinner. We cleaned the table—which took a while because when we weren’t looking, Spinach had hidden his little toy trucks in the ziti—and sat back down in our family-meeting places. Our family-meeting places are the same as our regular places, except that my brother has figured out that whatever the meeting is about, he and I are on the same team, so he sits on my lap. This gives me hope for him.

  Moisturizer jumped onto my lap too, and then my dad called the meeting to order.

  “We are a very lucky family,” he said. “Very lucky.”

  “What’s on the agenda?” I asked.

  “I’m getting to that,” my dad said. “Now, families change. They grow. It’s hard to believe, but you’re eight and a half now, and your brother’s almost four.”

  I clapped my hands over my brother’s ears. “Should we have a surprise party for him? You know what would make a great present? A gorilla!”

  “His birthday’s not for a few months,” my mom said. “I vote we table that discussion for another time.”

  “Well, so what’s the good thing we have to talk about tonight?” I asked.

  My dad looked at my mom and raised his eyebrows. My mom looked back at him and smiled. She waved her palm at him like a game-show host, as if to say, “Show us these great prizes, Bill!”

  My dad looked at my mom again, and this time he looked like he was going to cry! Not in a sad way, but in an “I can’t believe how lucky I am that you’re here” way. Which was nuts, because my mom is always here.

  “Families grow,” he said again. “And tonight…” He stopped and smiled at my mom again. “Tonight, your mother and I want to talk to you about…an addition to our family. Our family is about to grow again.”

  And then finally I figured out what he was saying! I slid Pea Pod off my lap and jumped up to give my dad and mom a hug.

  “Yes! Thank you! Yes! You won’t be sorry, I promise I’ll take good care of it, you’ll barely even notice it’s here… Thank you!”

  Cauliflower was sitting on the floor, looking between me and our parents, completely clueless. I leaned over and squeezed him hard. “We’re getting a gorilla, after all!”

  My mom fell back against her chair, laughing. “Oh, Clementine,” she said. “It’s definitely not a gorilla!”

  I was a little tiny bit relieved. The truth is, since I got my kitten, I’m not sure I really want a gorilla anymore. That would be a really big litter box.

  I studied my parents. “What is it, then? A pony? We’re getting a pony?”

  My dad pulled me over to him and held my hands. “We’re talking about a new baby. A brother or a sister for you two. What do you think about that?”

  What I thought about that was N-O, no thanks!

  I yelled it.

  “No thanks!” Parsnip echoed. Then he looked up at me. “No thanks what?”

  “No thanks to more people! Our family is four. There are four sides to a puzzle so we can all work on it at once. Hot dogs come in packages of eight, so we can each have two. At the playground, four is an even number for the seesaws. Four can all be together in the car. Four can be two and two sometimes, and nobody is lonely. Two kids and two grown-ups. Two boys and two girls. There are four sides to the kitchen table, so we each get one. Four is a perfect number for a family!”

  While I’d been explaining all this, my brother had snuck over to his favorite cupboard and thrown all the pots and pans out, like a personal-size tornado. He was sitting inside now, crashing lids together.

  I pointed to the mess in the kitchen. “Look at us! Lima Bean puts toy trucks in the ziti and we used a drill gun to stir the muffins this morning because we couldn’t find the mixer and my rat is missing, which isn’t my fault, and so is my hat, and maybe that is my fault, but how is a baby going to help with anything, that’s what I want to know! It’s all moving too fast and we’re not ready.”

  “Oh, honey,” my mom said. “Life is always moving too fast and we’re never ready. That’s how life is. But somehow that’s just perfect.” She dragged Zucchini out of the cupboard and hauled him off to get his pajamas on.

  “Your mother,” my dad said, “is exactly right. Things are always changing—that’s life. And this?” He spread his hands to the tornadoed kitchen. “Us? Toy-truck ziti, missing hats, drill-gun mixers? Well, this is how we roll, Clementine. This is how we roll.”

  He started picking up the pots and pans, and after a while, I went over and helped him.

  I didn’t say, “What if we didn’t roll for a little while? What if we just stood still?” even though my mouth was nearly bursting with the words. But I guess my dad could see me thinking it anyway. When the kitchen was picked up, he hoisted himself onto the counter and pushed back the cutting board so I could climb up beside him. “Do you remember how you felt when Gram and Pop moved to Florida?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You thought you’d never see them again, and you were upset because you liked having them live just a couple of blocks away. And how did that work out?”

  “Part good and part bad,” I answered. “I can’t see them when I want to, and I miss them. But now I have someone to write letters to, and I like that. And they come here in the summer and stay for a whole week, and I get to sleep on the couch. And then in the winter we go there for a week, and I get to call out ‘Lucky legs eleven!’ at bingo and drive t
he golf cart for Pop, and a lemon fell out of a tree right onto my head, and in two years—Disney World. So, part good and part bad.”

  “That’s what most change is—part good and part bad,” my dad said. “Right?” he asked my mom, who had just come back with my brother.

  My mom ignored him. “Did I hear something about driving a golf cart? And what’s this about bingo?”

  My father laughed. “Our daughter has a secret life in Florida, apparently. Part good and part bad for us, too. Anyway, I think it’s up to us which part to concentrate on. That’s what makes the difference.”

  I jumped down from the counter. “I want to write Gram and Pop a letter right now,” I said. “Do they know yet?”

  “No,” my mom said. “We wanted to tell you two first. But we were planning on calling them tonight. In fact, let’s get your brother to bed, and then we can call.”

  My mom asked my brother who should read his bedtime story to him, and for the first time ever, he picked…me!

  “Really? Not Mom or Dad?”

  Bean Sprout said yes again, and then he dragged me into his room. He lined all his trucks on the bed to get ready and he pulled a book from under his pillow.

  Let me tell you, it was not much of a story—a bunch of trucks live together and crash into each other. That’s all, and I’m not even kidding. But my brother loved it. As I read, he crashed his trucks together two by two and then tucked them under the covers to go to sleep.

  When I was finished, he thanked me!

  “You’re welcome,” I said, surprised. And then I looked at him—really looked at him. Usually he looks like a puppy to me—little and round and always wiggling. But tonight, stretched out long in his big-boy bed with one of Mitchell’s old baseball caps on, he looked like…a boy.

  Which meant our family didn’t have a baby in it anymore.

  My dad held the phone up when I came into the living room. “Would you like to tell them, Clementine?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You do it.”

  I flopped onto the couch and listened. My mom sat down beside me and wrapped my curls around her fingers.

  “It’s wonderful… Yes, yes…July…wonder-ful,” my dad was saying. “She feels fine…yes, it’s wonderful…” And then he said “it’s wonderful” a hundred more times.

  Finally my dad handed the phone to me.

  “Hi,” I said. And then nothing else came out. Especially not “It’s wonderful.”

  “So you’re going to be a big sister again,” my grandmother’s voice said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Well, I’d say this new baby is very lucky,” Gram said. “You are an excellent big sister. Luckily, you don’t take after your father at all in that respect.”

  I sat up. “What do you mean?”

  “Well!” my grandmother said, and I could tell I was in for a long, juicy story. I suddenly wished Florida wasn’t two thousand miles away, so I could sit beside her while she told it. “Well,” she said again, “your father was four years old when Frank was born.”

  “Just like me,” I interrupted. “I was four when Spinach was born.”

  “Well, that’s right. But your father was a very different kind of four-year-old than you were. He was a hellion, that boy. He was practically feral. Your father, Clementine, was a four-year-old maniac. You, on the other hand, have always shown immensely good sense.”

  That was the first time in my entire life I’d ever heard anyone say I showed good sense. “Would you say that again, Gram?” I asked. “Really loud. I’m going to put you on speakerphone now.”

  “I’d be happy to, dear,” my grandmother said. “You always showed such good sense around your little brother. Right from the beginning, you were very careful with him, very protective of him.”

  “I was? I don’t remember that.”

  “Oh, yes,” my grandmother said. “You were a wonderful big sister. Not like your father at all.”

  “Why? What did he do?” I looked over at my father. He made an innocent face and threw his hands up.

  “Gracious, what didn’t he do?” My grand-mother’s laughter filled our apartment. “We didn’t think your Uncle Frank would live to see his first birthday. Your father was absolutely intent on getting rid of him, from the day we brought him home from the hospital. I couldn’t turn my back for a second. One time he filled up the baby carriage with pinecones.”

  “So you couldn’t put Uncle Frank in it?”

  “Oh, no, honey. Uncle Frank was already in the baby carriage,” my grandmother said. “We had to dig him out.”

  “Now wait a minute,” my dad began.

  But my grandmother was just getting warmed up. “Another time, I found him trying to put the baby in the dryer. He said his diaper was wet. Thank goodness I got there before he figured out how to turn it on.”

  My father shook his head with a sad face. She’s a little crazy, he mouthed. It’s all that Florida sun.

  My mother bent over the counter, scribbling something.

  “And then there was the time with the garden hose,” my grandmother said. “Now, that was really—”

  My dad sprang over and grabbed the phone and stabbed off the speaker button. “Well, now, I’m sure we don’t need to go filling her head with any more stories,” he said to my grandmother. “How’s the weather down there these days?”

  My mother tugged on my father’s sleeve and held up her pad of paper. LUCKY LEGS ELEVEN!!! DRIVING THE GOLF CART!!! she’d scribbled in big capital letters, with about three hundred exclamation marks all around the page.

  My father signaled Later to my mother, then said into the phone, “Well, we’ve had a big day here, lots of excitement. I think we’d better say good night now. Love to you and Pop.” And he hung up before anybody could get into any more trouble.

  I headed into my room and took out a notebook.

  I told Margaret about the new baby on the bus ride Tuesday morning. She smoothed away some imaginary skirt wrinkles and then said, “That’s going to ruin everything. I don’t know why you’re allowing it.”

  “What do you mean allowing it? What can I do?”

  “Well, I’d move out,” Margaret said, without even thinking about it for a second.

  I tried to imagine Margaret not living in her looks-like-a-magazine-picture apartment, but I couldn’t do it. “Where would you go? Hey, would you move in with me?”

  Margaret gave me her “Are you crazy?” look. “I want my own room. You’re out of rooms. I’d go live with my father.”

  “In California?”

  Margaret nodded hard. “I’d have my own room there. With my own orange tree.”

  “You’d have an orange tree?”

  “Yes. Right outside my bedroom window. So I could just reach out and pick oranges and eat them in bed.”

  Margaret was surprising me so much today, I was starting not to be surprised when she surprised me. Still. “Margaret…oranges, in bed? What about…?”

  “I’d keep a roll of paper towels beside the bed, of course,” she said, as if she’d already planned out this California bedroom of hers. “And rubber gloves. And a wastepaper basket.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, what about Mitchell?”

  Margaret gave me another “Are you crazy?” look—high power this time. “He’d stay here. He could watch the baby when my mother goes to work. He’d have to change all the diapers. Ha!” Margaret stopped to shudder from the horror she’d be escaping.

  Sometimes Margaret can get kind of carried away with an idea. “Your mother’s not having a baby,” I reminded her. “Mine is.”

  “I know,” Margaret said. “I’m just saying if.”

  At lunch, Waylon brought his tray over and sat down to give me some bad news. “If we don’t find Eighteen, we’ll have to do a different science project,” he said.

  Just hearing Waylon say we might not find him made my throat hurt. “I hadn’t thought about that. What would we do instead?”

>   Waylon piled his carrot sticks onto his slice of pizza. “Vikings. Boarding their ship,” he said.

  I forgot that before Waylon eats something, it has to be in a battle. I waited and tried to think of what would make a good project. Maybe we could build a solar system. Maybe we could re-create the stomach of a Tyrannosaurus rex, with mashed-up triceratops guts and stuff.

  Waylon scrambled his salad around the pizza. “Bad storm,” he explained. Then he plowed his milk carton through the salad and crashed it into the Viking pizza-ship. Some of the carrot sticks fell into the water, and Waylon said they were dead immediately. He scooped up a bunch of the not-dead ones and started to whack the milk carton with them.

  He glugged all the milk down. “Okay, Vikings win,” he said. Then he took a bite of the ship.

  “So what should we do?” I asked again. “If…”

  “I think it should be about my superpowers,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I think our project should be about my superpowers,” Waylon repeated. He eyed my chicken drumlets for possible battle opportunities.

  I pulled my tray closer. “It has to be something science-y, Waylon,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, my superpowers are science-y,” Waylon said. “I’m going to be a very science-y superhero.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like molecular transmogrification.”

  I started to get interested. Those were science-y words, all right. “What does that mean? Transmogrifi-whatever.”

  “It means I can walk through walls,” Waylon said. “Or I’m starting to. I’m starting to be able to transmogrify the molecules of me through the molecules of the wall.”

  I got really excited—this was going to be way better than rats in a maze. It was even better than dinosaur guts! “You can really do that?”

  “Sure. Watch.” Waylon got up and walked up next to the NUTRITION ROCKS! poster. He pressed himself against the cinder-block wall so hard, I thought his whole front would be one giant bruise.