I lumbered beside Beecher, who stumbled beside Mom, who was finally more than a sticky note. It was early Sunday, so early, morning fog still snaked along the wet grass at our feet.
So early, my eyes were barely open. But I didn’t care. We had Mom here with us finally.
Bonus #1: She wasn’t hunched over the kitchen table, reading a fifty-pound textbook.
Bonus #2: We weren’t hauling a month’s worth of dirty clothes to the Laundromat.
We were almost like a normal family.
“I hungry.” Beecher’s voice drifted out from behind his pumpkin.
He’d fallen in love with a pumpkin the size of a minivan at the first stand we passed. And even though he could barely reach his arms around it, even though it was the most lopsided, ugly pumpkin ever grown, even though Halloween was more than a month away, no way was he leaving the Wheaton Farmers’ Market without it.
My job was to make sure it didn’t die a gooey death on the pavement.
I sneaked a glance at Mom. Her face glowed pink in the chill of the morning. The usual knot of worry between her eyebrows had smoothed out into regular skin. She sucked in a deep breath of crisp farmers’ market air, and the corners of her mouth curled up in an almost smile.
She never looked like that at the Laundromat.
“I hungry,”Beecher said again.
“Shhh.” I flicked him on the head. “Mom’s happy. Don’t ruin it.”
“I no ruin it.”
“Ruin what?” Mom smoothed her hand over his hair. “You couldn’t ruin anything, Beech-man.”
Huh. She had clearly not spent enough time with him lately.
She looped her hand around Beecher’s shoulders, and he sort of leaned into her and buried his face in her jacket. And that’s how we threaded our way through the crowd: Mom clutching her yellow sticky note, Beech and the pumpkin sort of stuck to her rib cage, me gimping along beside, one hand hovering under the pumpkin, ready to save its life.
A wave of warm, sweet doughnut aroma floated on the morning air. My stomach growled.
But Mom pushed on. Doughnuts were not on her sticky note.
First thing this morning Mom had tossed an empty cereal box in the garbage and caught sight of the other trash stuffed in there.
“Is this what we eat?” She picked through macaroni boxes, frozen waffle boxes, syrup bottles. I think it was the microwave corn dog wrappers that finally tipped her over the edge. “It’s all starchy and mushy and”—she frowned—“beige.”
Well, yeah. Meet Beecher MacBean, who only eats if his food is beige. With a face on it.
Mom decided on the spot that what our family needed—immediately—was vegetables.
Now we were winding our way through stands of veggies, fruit, organic honey, and handcrafted soap. Finally, at the end of the very last aisle, Mom stopped. She checked her sticky note, tucked it into the pocket of her jean jacket, and planted herself in front of a stand.
I guess it was a stand. Mostly it was rickety pickup truck, more rust than paint, backed up at the end of the row. Cardboard boxes, held together with duct tape and piled high with vegetables, filled the tailgate. An old man, rickety as his truck, leaned against the fender. White stuffing wisped out from the lining of his jacket. White hair wisped up from his skull. Duct tape held the toe of one work boot together, and white socks leaked out from the cracks.
Nothing about this outfit said healthy to me, but Mom had consulted an expert—Rosalie, our downstairs music student, who was really big into all-natural stuff—who said this stand sold the best vegetables in the market.
It did have a pretty good crowd clustered around it, picking through shiny red apples and fat potatoes and onions. The white-haired man watched over his veggies like a proud parent. I squinted. Somehow he looked familiar.
Mom stood with her hands on her hips, studying the duct-taped boxes. She furrowed her eyebrows. Probably it had been so long since she’d seen an actual vegetable, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
I helped Beech lower his lopsided pumpkin to the ground and propped it up with my foot.
Mom reached into a box and wrestled out something round, bulging, and suspiciously purple. “So.” She held it up. “What do you think?”
I stared at it. “Is that a . . . beet?”
“Hey, mister.” She aimed the purple thing at me. “Beets are highly nutritious. Packed with vitamins. And beta carotene. One thing we could definitely use more of is beta carotene.”
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but . . . “A beet?”
“And fiber. Amazing amounts of fiber. And it’s not beige. You really can’t go wrong with a colorful root vegetable. It’s the whole package.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Not doughnut,” Beech muttered.
Mom studied the beet, then, with a sigh, set it back. “You’re right.”
She studied the rickety truck. And decided to take the safe route: apples.
“At least it’s something we know how to eat,” she said.
As the man bagged our apples, he noticed Beecher crouched beside the pumpkin.
“You got a load there, don’t you, fella?” he said. “Maybe I can help. Hang on a minute.”
The man disappeared around the side of the truck. When he came back, he was pulling a little red wagon. At least, it used to be a little red wagon. Now it was a little rust wagon, the handle bent, the Radio Flyer emblem a ghost against the corroded metal. But the wheels moved right along, without a squeak.
The man wheeled it to a stop beside Beecher, lifted the pumpkin into the back, and set the bag of apples behind it to keep it from rolling over. He placed the handle in Beecher’s palm.
“Now you can drive that pumpkin of yours around in style.” He gave the lopsided pumpkin an admiring look. “It sure is a beauty.”
“Yep.” Beech ran a hand over the nubbly pumpkin. “Beauty.” He beamed up at the man.
Mom did, too. “We’ll haul the pumpkin to the car and bring the wagon right back.”
The man waved a work-browned hand at her. “No hurry.”
We rumbled off, Beech pulling the wagon with both hands, the pumpkin and bag of apples bumping along in the back, me making sure they didn’t bump out onto the pavement.
We made it to the parking lot, and while Mom unloaded the apples into our car, I braced the wagon so it wouldn’t roll away. My nostrils drifted in the direction of the doughnut stand—
—and I found myself, once again, staring straight into the eyes of Sam Zawicki.
She was marching across the parking lot toward us, feet pounding so hard I swear she left boot prints in the asphalt. She thumped to a stop, cut a look at my mother’s legs (half dangling from the back seat as she wrestled Beecher’s pumpkin into a seat belt), and held out a bony hand.
“Give it,” she snarled.
I took a step back. “What?”
Sam rolled her eyes toward the sky. “The wagon, Beanboy.”
The wagon?
“No.” I pulled the handle closer, suddenly feeling protective of our rickety, rusty pumpkin-mobile. I squared my shoulders. “We promised to take it back.”
Sam leaned in till we were practically nose to nose.
“I said, give it.” She ripped the handle from my hand.
Which just made me mad. What kind of person steals a wagon? From an old man? She couldn’t want the tumble-down thing. Or need it. She was taking it out of pure meanness.
But we were talking about Sam Zawicki here, the girl who once dumped Spencer Osterholtz’s lunch tray into his lap when he said his carrot sticks were squishy. Who gets that worked up over a carrot?
No. The big surprise wasn’t that Sam Zawicki was stealing a wagon. The big surprise was that she wasn’t any good at it. I mean, if you would’ve asked me who, of all the people at Earhart Middle, would make the best wagon thief, I would’ve said, “Sam Zawicki.”
But now here she was, right out in the open, swiping a wagon in a public parking lot. From me, the one person who could identify the culprit. A pretty pathetic start to her criminal career.
But she didn’t look pathetic. She looked like she always looked: crackling mad.
She speared me with a Zawicki Glare of Death, then turned to go, rusty wagon handle gripped in her white-knuckled hand.
This was my moment, I realized. The moment I could reach inside and find my superhero heart. The moment I could stand up for truth, justice, and rusty wagons everywhere.
I swallowed, opened my mouth, and—
“Well, hi there.”
My mother had finished buckling the pumpkin and was now looking at Sam. Wearing her how-lovely-to-meet-you smile.
I closed my eyes. I knew that smile. Things could only spiral downhill from here.
“I don’t think we’ve met before. Tucker, why don’t you introduce me to your friend?”
Friend?
Friend?
I sincerely think I lost consciousness for a moment, right there in the parking lot. It was almost as humiliating as the third grade bathroom incident.
Sam Zawicki gaped at my mother in pure horror. “No. I’m—I’m”—she edged backward—“just here for the wagon.”
“Well. Isn’t that sweet?” Mom unzipped her purse.
Sweet? I stared at my mother. She was clearly more vitamin-deficient than I had realized.
Because here’s what she did next. She reached into her purse and pulled out a dollar. A real live actual dollar bill that could have been put to good use in our pickle jar.
But did she put it to good use? No. You know what she did?
She held it out toward Sam. Sam Zawicki. And said, “Such a thoughtful deed deserves a reward.”
I froze.
No way.
No.
Way.
First of all, who uses the word “deed” besides my mother? And possibly the Cub Scouts?
And second of all, Sam Zawicki was stealing a wagon right out from under our very noses, and my mother was paying her to do it.
I love my mother, but I do not know what planet she’s from.
Then I heard Sam say, “No. Really. No.” She backed away from my mother’s dollar like it was radioactive. “I couldn’t.”
My mom shrugged. “Well, thank you anyway.” She tucked the dollar back into her purse. “You saved us a trip back to the stand.”
Oh, sure. And saved that farmer from having to pack the wagon up and take it home again where it belonged. Just liberated him from that whole responsibility.
Sam and the wagon rattled away. I stood there and watched. Me and my superhero heart.
Mom shut the car door, I pushed Beecher’s glasses up, and—
Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun.
Beech froze. I froze. Even Mom froze for a tiny second.
It was the Death March, blaring from Mom’s purse, and don’t tell her boss, but that’s the ringtone she programmed to go off only when he called.
Mom closed her eyes. The little knot of worry popped up between her eyebrows.
Don’t answer. I beamed brainwaves at her. Don’t answer, don’t answer, don’t answer.
She dug her phone from her purse, flipped it open, and turned her back so she could talk.
Beech looked up at me. “Bad news?”
I shrugged, like I didn’t know. But I knew.
Mom flipped her phone shut and turned to us, a pained smile plastered across her face.
“You have to go to work?” I said.
She nodded.
“No.” Beech’s fists clenched at his side. “Day off. You promise.”
“I know, Beech-man.” She pulled him to her side. Ran a hand through his hair. “But something came up, and they need me.”
“You work all the time,” I said. “Can’t they get somebody else?”
“I wish.”
Mom opened the car door again and strapped Beecher in the back.
He slumped against the pumpkin. “Bad news,” he told it. “Real big bad news.”