Monette flashed Mo a grateful look, then turned to her mother.
“Oh, Ma,” she said, eyes shining. “Just think of it. Once you come, three generations of us will live together under one roof. What does it matter whose roof it is?”
Da curled her fingers around Mo’s. And then, at last, she began to eat.
Soon Three-C and Monette began hinting how it was a long five-hour trip, and why drive in the dark and . . . Next thing you knew, the dishes were done, the heat was turned down, and Mo and Mercedes were helping carry Da’s things out to the car.
“Thanks for what you said,” Three-C told Mo. “Life’s all about risk. Just between you and me”—he lowered his voice, pretending he didn’t want Mercedes to hear—“I was scared to death to become a stepfather. But give me strength!” He grinned. “When I think of what I might have missed.”
Mercedes threw her hands over her eyes. “Spare me!”
“There are many wonderful, exceptional things about Mercedes,” Three-C went on, “including the fact that she came ready-made. This new baby. on the other hand . . .” He gulped.
Monette was helping Da down the front steps. It was earlier than expected, and Mr. Wren was going to miss saying good-bye.
“We’ll give you a ride home,” said Three-C.
“My father’s coming,” Mo said.
“Here, better call him.” He handed Mo his phone.
But her father didn’t answer. Maybe he was in the middle of one of his important appointments, or maybe he was already on his way. Mo knew the Walcotts wanted to get going, and why give them one more thing to worry about?
“Any minute now?” she said into the phone. “Okay, I’ll be waiting right on Da’s porch.” Handing back the phone, she said, “He’s really sorry he won’t get to see you, but he sends all his best.”
At the bottom of her front steps, Da paused beside the big lilac bush. Who knew how old it was? It had always been there, busy with blossoms and honeybees each spring, shading the porch with its heart-shaped leaves all summer. Mo watched her break off a twig and slip it into her coat pocket. Would she keep it in the drawer of her new dresser?
Unhooking her arm from Monette’s, Da lifted her chin and walked the rest of the way to the car by herself. The one-armed hug she gave Mo was stiff and quick. Mo could tell she didn’t trust herself to linger a moment longer. When Three-C opened the car door, Mo got a glimpse of leather seats, cushy with pillows and blankets.
“We didn’t even get to talk!” said Mercedes. “I love your hair long.”
“You do?”
“It’s like you’re the same, but different.”
“I am?”
Mercedes’s stepfather started the car, and she made a face. “He’s in such a hurry, let him leave without me.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“I know.” Mercedes hugged Mo, and her nose did an accordion imitation. “Umm! You using some new kind of laundry soap? You smell so good.” Stepping back, she grinned. “Oh, Mo, I’m so happy! You are too, right? Remember you promised to come this summer! We’ll start a countdown, okay?”
She climbed into the car. A toot of the horn, a wave of hands. Mo watched the silver car roll up Fox Street and disappear.
The Plum Tree
Mo sat on Da’s porch, waiting for her father.
Mrs. Petrone drove by, her hair swept up high and wearing her good black coat, which meant she was on her way to her job at the funeral home. Down at Mr. Duong’s, the lawn mower he was fixing roared and sputtered and died. An upstairs window at the Baggotts’ rattled upward and a pillow flew out, flumping to the grass. Someone shouted, and the window slammed shut again.
It was chilly on the porch, out of the sun. Behind her, Da’s house sighed, settling its bones.
Across the street, you could hardly see the grass for all the bright plastic toys strewn around. The new front door had four square windows instead of a single round one. In the driveway, that rusty beater of a car basked in the sun like it was entitled to be there.
The side door opened. Out they came, Sarah and Tim in coats that had seen better days. But Min wore a fat new jacket that turned her into a marshmallow with a head. The door swung closed neatly, without a sound. Mo slid down in her chair. Sarah held Min in her arms, but the baby squirmed and pitched herself forward till her mother set her down. Arms out like a miniature plane, she propelled herself forward. The tassels on her hat spun and swayed. Min could walk! Sort of. Seconds later she was down, oof. Instead of crying, she picked something off the ground and popped it in her mouth.
Peering between the porch rails, Mo watched Tim fish it back out.
“Baa baa!” he said, then “Ouch! No biting!” Meanwhile, Sarah fetched the stroller, and before she knew it, Min was buckled up and speeding toward Paradise. Tim started singing that song about baby whales. His voice was strong and true.
Mo waited till they were out of sight, and then she waited a little longer, making sure the coast was clear. Looking both ways, she darted across Fox Street and up her old driveway.
The plum tree was like an ink drawing, all stark black lines, but Mo wasn’t fooled. She knew that tree. She could see how the tips of its branches had begun to swell. New life, all excited and eager, pulsed inside it. “Here we go,” that tree was saying. “Get ready for some blossoms!”
A tipped-over yellow plastic pail lay beneath it. Shriveled-up plums from last year spilled out onto the ground. Min must collect them, the way Dottie used to. Mo picked one up, thinking she’d tuck it into her pocket, but it squished in her hand, all used up.
“There’s a tree by my new house.” Mo hooked an arm around the tree’s trunk. “Nowhere near as good as you.” She leaned her cheek against the rough bark. “It’s really scrawny.” And then, just as if the plum tree had replied, Mo had a new thought. “Probably because it practically grows out of the sidewalk cement. How does it do that, anyway?”
Overhead, the top branches swayed and dipped, saying, “That’s how trees are, Mo Wren. We do our best, wherever we’re planted.”
A vine of tenderness climbed up inside Mo. In some rooty, steadfast way, the two trees were related. She sat down, fitting her backbone against the trunk, waiting to be comfortable. But the ground was cold, and her father would show up any minute, and who knew when Min and her family would come back? Long before she felt ready, Mo stood up. Crossing the grass, she gave one tire of their car a kick.
A familiar clatter made her whirl around. Out in the street, arms at his side, long hair lifting like curtains in the breeze, Pi coasted by on his skateboard.
The Red Sweatshirt
Mo’s hands flew to her own hair, smoothing it back. She ran down the driveway and waved. Pi gave a shout and swerved.
“Mo!” He pulled up.
Another skater sailed by. A girl, about Mo’s age.
“Whoa!” Pi flipped his board and caught it in both hands. He stared at Mo. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello to you too,” she said.
The girl, who wore a million layers of clothes and a striped knit cap pulled low, pivoted.
“That’s Clara,” said Pi as she rolled by again without stopping. “She lives over there.” He waved a hand in the direction of Paradise. “She still can’t do a one-eighty, but she’s getting close.”
“Wow,” said Mo. “Impressive. Did you teach her?”
“Huh?” Pi set his skateboard down. “Clara? She taught herself.” He pinched his bottom lip. Those lips were still the softest thing in his bony face. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I had to say good-bye to Da.”
“Oh yeah. We all said good-bye last night.”
Clara coasted by again. She wore knee pads over her washed-out jeans. Her high-tops were checkered. Mo had never seen her before, but something about her looked familiar.
“I sent you a letter,” Pi said.
At the thought of that letter, and how happy it had made her, Mo felt her f
oolish cheeks heat up. All this time she’d been imagining him missing her! Dragging his feet as he slumped past her house. While instead he’d been blissfully skateboarding with Clara. Here she came again, crouched down, concentrating.
“That day I found your shirt in the driveway, all soggy and dirty with tire tracks on it . . .” Pi shook his shaggy head.
It was Mo’s turn to stare at him. “What?”
“And then every time I walked past your house . . .”
Clara rolled to a stop beside them. “You coming, man?” she asked.
“This is Mo. She used to live on Fox Street.”
Clara had freckles and a big, toothy smile. She was the kind of girl Mo might like, under different circumstances. Including if she wasn’t wearing Mo’s sweatshirt.
“Hey!” said Mo. “What are you doing with my shirt?”
Startled, Clara looked down at herself.
“I almost forgot!” said Pi. “That’s Mo’s sweatshirt.”
Clara unzipped her down vest. Underneath, sure enough, there it was. Clara tugged it over her head. She still wore a thermal shirt and a T-shirt.
“How . . . what are you doing with it?” Mo asked.
“Like, one day we were skating and I tried this half-pipe and wiped out and got a big rip in my shirt and Pi said like, hang on, and he went inside his house and . . .” Clara held it out. “Thanks for the loan, man. It’s still pretty clean.”
Mo shoved her hands into her pockets. “Never mind,” she said. “You keep it.”
“But . . . I washed it and everything. I even got the tire tracks out.” Pi held it up so she could see. Confusion and disappointment whittled his face even sharper. “Clara was just borrowing it. I told her you wouldn’t mind.”
“I got a new one.” Mo pointed to her lost and found shirt. “I don’t need it anymore.” She tucked her hands in her armpits to keep from changing her mind and grabbing it. “She can . . . You can keep it, Clara.”
“Cool,” said Clara. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Man.”
Clara knotted the shirt around her waist, pulled her cap back down, and pushed off. “I’m going to the parking garage. You coming?”
“Yeah.” Pi turned to Mo. “You staying?”
“My dad’s picking me up any minute.”
Pi traced a gentle half circle around her.
“It’s good you’re good, Mo,” he said.
Her heart did that little sparkler imitation.
“Okay.” He set his foot down and pushed off. The sparkler had nearly fizzled out when he arced back around. “Are you going to visit again?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right then. Bye.”
“Bye.”
The clatter of his board faded in the distance. Mo looked around. For the first time in her life, she felt lonesome on Fox Street.
She started walking toward the corner.
Passengers
Up on Paradise Avenue, Mo watched one car after another go by. At the pay phone outside the Tip Top Club, she tried calling her father again. Something must have happened. Her father forgot a lot of things, but not her. He never, ever forgot Mo.
At the bus shelter on the next corner, a curly-haired woman held a big brown portfolio on her lap. A fuzzy bit of yellow poked out from inside her open jacket.
“Does the crosstown bus stop here?” Mo asked her.
“The number eighteen. And your timing is perfect—here it comes. You have exact change?”
“Oh, no.”
“Hang on.” She dug in the pocket of her jeans. “Here you go,” she said, spilling quarters into Mo’s palm. When Mo thanked her, she just smiled and asked, “What stop do you want?”
“Umm, by Eastside Park?”
“Me too!”
As they boarded the bus, Mo took a closer look at her yellow sweater. It was new, not baggy at all, and its buttons were black, not pearls.
Never in her life had Mo been alone on a public bus. She gazed out the smudged window. Riding a bus set you high above things, making it all a little unreal, like watching a movie. When the bus turned onto the bridge, she saw how the steely blue of the lake met the more fragile blue of the late-day sky, two blocks of color coming to rest against each other.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” the curly-haired woman asked from across the aisle.
“Yeah.”
“I love traveling, even on a grotty old city bus!”
The bus bumped along, stopping and starting. At last Mo saw the park.
When they got off, the woman in the yellow sweater waved and hurried away.
“I’m back,” Mo told the faithful bus shelter.
She almost wished she’d stayed on the bus. Being in motion, being a traveler, you weren’t here and you weren’t there. Life stayed at a distance.
But now she was back. And life came rushing at her.
What happened? Where is he?
She broke into a run.
The Curse, Part Three
The way Dottie was howling and carrying on—Mo had never seen her sister behave that way. Not even when their mother died. Then she’d been too little to really understand.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Handsome!” Dottie was in a heap on the dining-room floor. Now she crawled over and grabbed her big sister by the ankles. “He’s gone!”
“No!” How could it be? He’d looked just fine when Mo fed him his breakfast cricket before she left—today? Was that really just this morning?
“You mean he . . .” Mo couldn’t make herself say died.
“He’s nowhere!” Dottie rested her forehead on Mo’s shoe. “We’ve been looking and looking and we can’t find him.”
Oh! That kind of gone. Now Mo noticed what an uproar the room was in. Chairs were shoved aside, glasses pulled off the shelves. A metal plate had been unscrewed from the wall, and darkness gaped behind it. Handsome’s tank stood on the bar, lid off. She sat on the floor beside her sister.
“How’d he get out? What happened?”
“I was teaching him a new trick.”
Though she could barely fit, Dottie climbed into Mo’s lap. She made Mo remember trying to wedge into her mother’s lap when she was so pregnant with Dottie, there was hardly any room. Mo had been determined to fit, making her mother laugh. No sooner did her mother pull that moonbeam curtain around her than suddenly, out of nowhere, Mo had felt a kick right in the head. She’d yelped, and her mother had chuckled. “This is going to be a wild one,” she’d whispered, as if it was a secret between just her and Mo.
“I t-tried to hold on to him,” Dottie stuttered. “I tried to hold onnn . . .”
“Oh, no.” Mr. Wren, flashlight in hand, froze in the doorway. He flattened his hand against his brow. “Oh, no.”
“It’s okay,” said Mo. “I took the bus. I’m fine.”
“Why’d he run away?” asked Dottie. Her voice was jagged, strewn with bits of broken heart. “I thought he liked it here.”
“He did,” Mr. Wren said. “I mean, he does! Handsome loves you. But sometimes . . . sometimes creatures just can’t help themselves. They do stupid things.”
When Dottie started crawling around again, he told Mo in a low voice, “I’m really sorry. I’ve been on lizard patrol for hours. I searched every heating duct, all over the basement . . . the guy just vanished.” He shook his head. “He’s the Corky of reptiles.”
Mo looked at the empty tank with its crayoned decorations, its miniature palm tree and heat rock. The Wren House was so chilly, how could thin-skinned little Handsome survive? Not to mention if he’d somehow gotten outside, into the coldest winter on record. She tried not to think about how sad he looked when he missed a meal.
“Look!” Dottie picked up something from the floor. “His tail! He dropped his tail!”
It was a mess of bulging, fleshy stuff, like a tortilla oozy with raw meat. Mo was not the squeamish kind. But a very bad taste rose in the back of her mouth.
/> “Now he’ll get infected,” Dottie said. “Carmella’s book says you have to put medicine on them when this happens, or they get infected!”
“But it happens in the wild, right?” Mo struggled to sound convincing. “And they don’t get medicine then. So maybe . . .” She looked to Mr. Wren for help.
“Handsome’s a tough guy,” he said. “Hey, how about some supper, what do you say? Dottie’s Delight coming up, huh?”
But Dottie just rolled her meatballs around her plate without taking a bite. Mo sighed. It was the second time today she’d shared a table with a person who had lost her appetite.
“Some girl called here,” Mr. Wren told Mo. “She said you were supposed to go shopping with her today. I told her you don’t like shopping, but she insisted.”
“Megan! Oh, no! I forgot all about her!”
Mo found the slip of paper with Megan’s phone number and called. When Mo said how sorry she was, Megan made a sniffing sound. Maybe, Mo told her, maybe they could go shopping another day.
“Tomorrow I have a birthday party,” Megan said. “My mother works during the week, and my baby- sitter would never take us.”
“Maybe my father could drop us off,” Mo said.
“Drop us off!” Megan’s voice was as horrified as if Mo had suggested swimming among crocodiles. “My mother never permits me to get dropped off. The world is full of perverts.”
“Well,” said Mo, “maybe we can do it another time. I hope.”
“Maybe,” said Megan, and hung up.
Mo looked at her reflection in the mirror over the bar. Her face was too long, and her hair was scragglier than ever. She pushed a lock behind her ear, remembering how Mercedes said she liked it. Probably she was just trying to think of something nice to say. Mercedes with her pierced ears and fake-fur jacket. And bra. Turning sideways, Mo ran a hand down her own same old uneventful front. She pictured Clara in her little knit cap and cool, checkered high-tops. Like an itch she couldn’t reach, discontent took hold of Mo. Nothing was right anymore. Not even her own face in the mirror.
Dottie was asleep with her head on the table. When Mr. Wren picked her up, she came awake long enough to say, “It’s the curse.”
Mo Wren, Lost and Found Page 9