“YOU DRIVE,” DAD SAID as we crossed the parking lot.
“Me?” So far, I had been the passenger only, the third wheel, the one stripped of any kind of responsibility of getting us safe and alive to the West Coast. “Really?”
He nodded and yawned at the same time. “Sure! I want you to drive us home,” he said, emphasizing the last word.
“Yes sir,” I said, unable to hide the excitement in my voice. I climbed in the truck and sat down behind the steering wheel and looked at Dad, holding my hand out for the keys. Dad leaned over and pulled down the visor.
“Ta da!” he said as the keys dumped into my lap.
“Check!” I grabbed the keys and turned the engine. Mom leaned over and grabbed my hand as we pulled out of the parking lot. I nodded as we exchanged a knowing smile: I was driving us home.
AND AFTER A FEW WRONG directions from Mom, five hundred gallons of coffee, eighteen bags of Gummy bears, seven cheeseburgers, and a gazillion bad Dad-jokes later (not to mention an entire country), there it was—home-sweet-instant-home.
Even though we had spent the last couple of weeks listening to Dad’s comprehensive use of amazing adjectives, describing our new out-in-the-woods house, I had not expected this at all. I guess, partly because I had stopped paying that much attention, but mostly because Dad has absolutely no sense of style. Also, he was on a mission to sell, which always makes me go all ear muffs. But the salesman with a bad sense of style was right. It was as he had advertised: a little piece of heaven on earth.
The house was situated on top of a small hill overlooking a tiny lake, surrounded by about seven or eight other houses. Ours was a red wooden, two-story Cape Cod, beautifully framed by a huge yard of pine trees, apple trees, and wildflowers. A big white porch wrapped around the front of the house, which reminded me of something taken right out of the Little House on the Prairie show and I felt like Laura Ingalls, watching the wildflowers blowing in the wind.
I stepped down and looked up at Mom. She was staring up at the house, at a loss for words, which doesn’t happen often. (Once Mom and Dad made a bet that if Mom could be as silent as a Chaplin movie for just one hour, Dad would do the dishes every night for two weeks. This was before Bill, Dad’s old friend from college, somehow got his hands on an old table dishwasher. “Thissss isssss for you, Abby,” he hissed. He had a problem with the letter “s”, and it made him sound like Sir Hiss from Disney’s Robin Hood, and it sure made him spit a lot. Dad would call him Spitting Bill behind his back, which wasn’t very nice, but at least Dad had a consistency with naming people; besides Spitting and Sitting Bill, there was actually a third, Quitting Bill—yet another of Dad’s goofy college friends. Quitting Bill got the name because he had a problem finishing anything. “Not even his own damn sentences,” Dad would always say. Dad claims he loves them both dearly and the quitting and spitting Bill is only said out of jest. Makes me wonder what they called Dad behind his back. Anyway, it only took Mom two minutes to lose the bet.)
Finally, Mom turned toward Dad and smiled.
“If this house is as promising on the inside as it is on the outside, well...” She leaned over and kissed him and then whispered, “You might get lucky later.”
“Ugh, Mom, I’m right here,” I reminded her, not taking my eyes off the house.
Dad popped his head out and took in the fresh morning air. “I guess they weren’t lying about this being the evergreen state. It’s June but it sure looks like the first day of spring.” He grabbed something from his pocket and turned toward Mom. Pride was thick in his voice when he handed each of us our own keys and said, “Here! Didn’t I say I would take care of things? Take care of my precious girls? I even put your names on them.” He held his arms out to Mom and smiled. “Now, shall we?”
“Really?” Mom looked up at the house, biting down on her lip, “But the stairs, and your back...” Mom stepped down from the truck and looked up at Dad. “You’ll kill your back, hon.” Dad moved over and stepped down.
“Nonsense,” he said, “I’m fit as a fiddle.”
Mom nodded and turned toward me, rolling her big green eyes. “Here we go again.”
Mom and Dad have had the same ritual since they met and lived together in Pennsylvania. Whatever house, apartment, rental (even the basement of Grandma and Grandpa’s house), Dad always insists on carrying Mom over the threshold for “good luck.” Mom complains about getting heavier every year (even though we know that’s not true). And she puts up a fight, claiming that this time it will be the end of Dad’s back. But the outcome is always the same: Dad carries a laughing and screaming Mom over the threshold of a new beginning, and I stand there and watch—a little less embarrassed the older I get (needless to say, not cool when you’ve just turned thirteen and all the new neighborhood kids are watching from across the street).
They finally made it up the stairs and even though Dad looked a little worn out, he and his back had survived yet another Jensen house ritual. Momma’s in da house.
NO DOUBT ABOUT IT; Dad was getting lucky later. The house was as charming and cozy on the inside as it was on the outside, with hardwood floors and beautiful white trim throughout the entire house. There were three bedrooms—a master and a smaller one upstairs, and a huge one downstairs with its own little brick fireplace. The kitchen—worthy of a picture or at least a footnote in Martha Stewart Living or something—was a big country-style kitchen with a huge old gas stove taking up half the space. And after a quick count of bathroom doors, I was glad to learn that I was finally getting my own. Seattle: one point!
Dad stood in the doorway. “Take your pick. Maybe this one?” He turned on the light and smiled. “Your own fireplace and everything,” he said, back in the salesman role.
I took a quick look around the room. Besides the fireplace, it had two huge bay windows overlooking the yard, a large window seat, a skylight window, and multi-colored, flowery wallpaper covering every square inch—not really what I would have picked for myself, but it kind of felt right for this room. I ran my fingers over the wallpaper and looked at Dad.
“This one,” I said and looked up into the evergreen state.
“Good for you.” He nodded and smiled and left me alone in my new room.
I sat down on the window seat and looked out. The view was spectacular—a beautiful forest of greenness made promises of life (and rain), and if you stretched your head far enough at just the right angle, you could almost see the sun making its way behind the big trees by the lake. “This one,” I said out loud to myself, smiling. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. At least it wasn’t raining. Yet.
Instead of crashing on the window seat (it was still way too early), I decided to go and explore the rest of the downstairs, and I immediately fell in love. It was old school, corny and so not my style, but there was love in every little detail—from the wallpaper in my room to the little daisy hooks in the bathroom. It was inviting, like a home. I could imagine myself sitting by the fire on a cold winter morning, watching the raindrops fall (Dad couldn’t fool me). And I could almost hear the sound of logs burning. I walked up the little staircase—leading up to the master bedroom upstairs—when suddenly I heard Mom screaming something, though I couldn’t make out exactly what. Instantly, I ran over to the bedroom windows, looking for Mom and Dad, but apparently the windows faced the wrong way, and there was no sight of them. So instead, I ran down the narrow staircase, headed for the front door, imagining all kinds of Wild West Wilderness catastrophes—all involving big brown bears attacking Mom and the little survival kit slash snack box she had meticulously packed back home. I imagined how the bears would first dig into the peanut butter, then the chocolate, then bread, and finally the fruit. Maybe the box with pot stickers in heavenly sesame oil would be spared? (I mean, bears and Asian food?). And Mom?
When I finally made it outside, Mom, thank God, was still alive and there wasn’t a single bear-like creature in sight, but the look on Mom’s face was scary enough. She slump
ed on the ground—leaning up against the U-Haul truck—staring straight ahead with her mouth wide open and her red curls jumbled. In a mechanical voice, she sputtered, “We... they... we... the car... the boxes... my box... the peanut butter... the... the... the...” Then her voice became high-pitched and hysterical. “My survival box isn’t here. It’s not here. It’s gone, it’s not, it’s not ... here.” She leaned up against the front of the truck, then stood up, then sat down halfway. She twisted her curls in and out, in and out, and if I hadn’t known her as Mom, I would have said that this was one crazy woman tripping. Dad made eyes at me and tried to put on one of his happy faces (like when you’re trying really hard to convince someone that it’s not the end of the world even though her dog has died, when in truth, it is). Then he cautiously sat down next to Mom and grabbed her hand—still working on his happy-smiling-nervous-clown face.
“It’s not the end of the world, you know. We’ll survive without ...um ... the survival box. We can just go and get some more—”
“—No, it’s not that,” Mom interrupted. “I mean, sure we can survive, but it’s not just the survival box. Something’s not right. At all! It doesn’t look like it did when we left.” She pointed toward the truck. We all looked at it. The doors were wide open. I guess she had already started to unload as Dad and I had been exploring the rest of the house.
Dad got up and climbed in. “Flashlight?” he yelled from inside the truck.
“It’s in the survival box,” Mom yelled back. “Go figure.” She sat back down and started twisting her curls again—this time looking a little less frantic, a little less crazy.
I sat down next to her on the lawn and grabbed her hand. We could hear Dad from inside the truck bumping into things and mumbling, probably swearing something. After a few more bumps and curses he appeared from behind the boxes in the back, looking sweaty and tired. He climbed on top of one of the plastic boxes in the back and knocked on it. He looked down at me and nodded. “I think your crazy mother’s right. This load sure doesn’t look like ours. I mean, for starters, there’s a piano in here. I mean a freaking-Mozart-bite-me piano.”
White men in white socks
Mom was on her third double-shot venti, and I swear to God it was making her eyes pop—not the vibrant green—the entire eyeball, as if ready to jump right out of its socket.
We had just gotten back from another trip to Starbucks—the second one before eight AM—and we were sitting on the kitchen floor. Dad and I were having bagels and juice while Mom enjoyed her coffee—and her fit—pacing the kitchen floor, twisting her curls in and out, in and out. Dad was rubbing his beard, chewing faster than the speed of light. He also looked a little wired, and all he could say was either, “I just don’t get it” or, “Bust my buffers!”
For someone who doesn’t know Dad that well, I guess this makes absolutely no sense at all, but “bust my buffers” is what he actually says (or cries, to be more accurate), when he mistakes his finger for a nail, when he drops his phone into the toilet (yes, it has happened a few times), when he hits the garage doors coming home, or if the Yankees lose big time. The explanation, Mom once told me, can be derived from the word “shit.”
“I tell you, every other word he said was shit this, shit that. Eventually he was known as “Frank Shit Jensen,” she had said. First I tried to make him say shoot every time he was about to say shit, but within a few weeks he was going around saying shoot all the time, and people knew he actually meant to say shit, so that wasn’t really working either. Then one day we were at a friend’s house, and he was watching Thomas the Tank Engine with the kids. Apparently one of the trains was chugging along saying, “bust my buffers” all the time. All the other men, and Dad, found that hilarious—they were probably a little tipsy—so I guess that’s how he picked it up. And now it’s like he can’t stop saying that either. “But I guess it’s better than shit,” Mom explained to me, not sounding too convinced herself.
“What now?” Mom’s voice was almost back to normal. Color had returned to her face and she had let go of her curls. “What now? And if you say, ‘bust my buffers’ one more time, I swear I’ll bust two of your buffers.” She winked at me and smiled. Mom was back to Earth.
“As the nice U-Haul woman said, there must be another family out there who just discovered that they are one piano short, and instead they’ll find a survival box with some delicious heart-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Lucky bastards. And two rolls of toilet paper. Lucky assholes,” Dad added and kissed Mom on her forehead.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I guess it’ll all be sorted by tomorrow morning.” She looked up and smiled at Dad. “And as for lunch and bare necessities ... I saw a Whole Foods not far from the other Starbucks, so emergency solved right there. Let’s go. I need some more coffee as well.”
“Oh no you don’t.” Dad stood up. “Look at you! If you have one more cup of coffee today, I swear I’ll be shouting “bust my buffers” from the top of my lungs all night.” (As it happened, he didn’t.)
DAD SPENT THE NEXT two days either on his cell, talking with the people at U-Haul, or mowing the big lawn. He had found this old lawn mower in the back of a wooden shed and developed a kind of love/hate relationship with it; one minute he would pat it gently like a dog—saying stuff like, “Good job, old Johnny Boy.” The next he would yell at it, “Come on, you big old fart.” I guess he was trying to find new ways of expressing himself.
Mom was convinced he was going crazy on us. “I mean, look at him,” she said, watching him through the window. Dad stood in the middle of the yard talking to Johnny Boy. He was unshaven, unkempt—wearing only his Homer cap, his Homer boxers, and a pair of three-centuries-too-old and three-sizes-too-big rain boots. He’d found them in the back of the shed, next to Johnny Boy.
“No, Mom,” I said, smiling at the sight of him. “I think he’s just bored.”
He was. He had arranged with his boss to not start work until the second week, which would “give us time to settle in and play around with the furniture arrangement.” But as it turned out, we had no furniture to arrange.
It had been only two days since the grand discovery of the missing load, and both Mom and her crazy curls were slowly starting to unwind. Maybe she was just putting on a happy face, but she didn’t really seem to be so stressed out by the fact that all our stuff—all her nicely organized and labeled boxes—had gone MIA somewhere between Connecticut and our new home.
“I still don’t get it,” Dad said for the gazillionth time as he sat down at our makeshift dinner table. Mom had arranged a few of the wrong boxes in the middle of the kitchen, close to the stove. As an improvised table cloth she found some big old white handkerchiefs in the back of some of the kitchen cabinets. “Clean as a whistle,” she had said, and laughed when she showed them to me.
I sneezed.
“Gesundheit!” Dad said, raising his eyebrows at me.
“I saw that, Frank,” Mom said, shaking her head. “But I swear they are clean as a—”
“—Whistle,” Dad and I said at the same time. She had told us about a thousand times.
“Well, it all looks great. I mean, I could almost live like this. I love a good baguette right out of the baker’s oven, or Mom’s oven.” Dad chuckled. “And I tell you, there’s nothing like a hard day’s work in the yard.” He smiled and took a huge bite of his bread.
Mom shook her head disapprovingly. “Frank, do you really need two inches?”
“What?” Dad asked, over a mouthful of bread. Mom pointed at the evidence on the plate: an abundantly stacked sandwich.
“Oops, I did it again.” Dad smiled and revealed a set of butter-and-jelly-covered teeth. “Sorry.”
I looked at Mom. She looked genuinely upset. I guess she was only saying it out of love, but I couldn’t quite figure out why she kept nagging Dad about his unhealthy eating habits. I mean, why bother, when the old man never changed?
“That stuff will kill you, you know,” M
om continued.
Dad nodded his head and looked at her with the face of a little schoolboy. “Monday. That’s it. I start my new healthy me on Monday. This Monday.”
“Yeah right, Dad.” We had heard that about a thousand Mondays ago.
Mom rolled her eyes at me. “Whatever. Well, come on, we’re dying here, Frank. What did they say?”
“Who?” Dad scratched his forehead with the butter knife.
“Yeah, who do you think, Dad? The fashion police?” I grabbed another slice of ham and smiled.
Mom scanned Dad from head to toe. “I guess we should have called them too,” she said, giggling. She turned toward me with her eyes crossed. “No, not the fashion police, Frank. U-Haul.” She turned and looked at Dad. “What’s the verdict?”
Dad shook his head as he leaned back and took yet another big bite of his monstrous sandwich. I could tell Mom was really restraining herself from commenting on the amount of butter going into the digestive system of Frank Jensen. She took a deep breath and directed a smile toward me instead.
“Well, you see, it’s rather complicated,” Dad said with his mouth full of butter. “The thing is: They, or she—Melanie, who, by the way, has been very helpful and quite concerned about the whole thing—looked it up on their computer, and as far as she can see, there was only one truck leaving Saturday at five AM in Connecticut going to Seattle.”
“Yes, but what about the rest of the country? There must have been hundreds of U-Hauls leaving that very same morning. Thousands!” Mom leaned back and crossed her arms.
Dad nodded and explained to us what he had been told earlier: Melanie—apparently his new U-Haul dispatcher BFF and also a self-proclaimed poet and a mother of three boys: Simon, Jason, and Mark—had sent a memo to all the local offices about a potential mix up, and so far, no one had reacted to it. Nothing seemed to have gone wrong, except when she looked us up, our name and address came up twice, suggesting that we had been double-booked, and we had also been charged twice. She said she would, of course, credit our account and she would make sure to contact us first thing if anybody called the office.
Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2) Page 4