Chapter 7

I could hear Quinn and Ray even before I went in the house, yelling and laughing: “YAAAAHHH ha ha ha! YEEEhee hee!”

“I’m going to EAT YOU ALIVE!” Mom was chasing them with a dragon puppet.

“YAAAAHHH! YAAAAHHH!”

Lily sang quietly in the corner, dancing with a Barbie doll:

“And the tiger caught the mouse, And he brought her in his house ...”

Jack and Jenna were in the kitchen, feeding our new bunny, whose name is Captain.

“You have to hold the parsley up over his nose,” Jenna was saying.

Dad was fixing the kitchen table for about the eight hundredth time, pounding away with a hammer. “How was the party?” he asked between pounds. But just then, Quinn fell over a toy bulldozer and started screaming, which was good. I mean, not good for Quinn, but good for me because I could sneak upstairs and not answer about the party. I was afraid I’d start feeling lousy again if I did.

I told Mom later, at bedtime.

“Oh, honey, how awful, poor baby ...”

I cried a little then. Telling Mom about disasters always makes me cry even when I think I’m all back to feeling fine. She started singing:

“The pancakes came marching
six by six, hoorah, hoorah . . .”

I smiled a little.

“The pancakes came marching six by six, hoorah, hoorah!
The pancakes came marching
six by six,
The last one stopped to do diving
tricks . . .”

We laughed.

Mom hugged me tight.

When she left, I squeezed my eyes shut to squirt out the last, last tear.

Then I did this thing I do sometimes. I thought of what happened that day like it was a story, like a tiny book inside me. In my mind, I lined up the Mrs. Kenly book with the other ones I have in there. There’s a little book about when we got caught in a blizzard in Colorado. There’s another one about when that giant tortoise got lost in our house. (He was there for my Wild Kingdom birthday party.) There’s the story of how I got stitches in my head, and a lot more.

When I’m Mom’s age, I’ll have so many stories, my insides will look like a library.