The door of the shed where Gus keeps his welding tools actually lets out a gasp when we open it. Like it’s been holding its breath waiting for us to arrive.
I know exactly how that old shed feels. I can barely remember to breathe as Gus lowers one of his masks over my face and puts some fireproof gloves on my hands. I feel myself fidgeting anxiously as he pulls Burton’s toaster out of the box. “When you look at this,” Gus says, “what can you see?”
“A flower,” I say. “With big pointy petals, like a daisy. If a daisy could be silver, that is.”
Gus smiles. “You got it,” he says. He puts a cutting tip on his torch, flips his own welding mask down over his eyes, and motions for me to stand back. Once I take a few backward steps, he angles the torch, slices the toaster in half, removes the guts, and cuts the outline of a daisy head.
I watch for a little while, then turn back to the big cardboard box. I pull out an old curling iron. “Here, Gus,” I say. “We can use this as the stem.” I open the iron and point to the part that clamps hair down. “Can you bend this like a leaf?”
“You bet,” Gus says. He uses his torch to remove the metal barrel from the handle. He exchanges his cutting torch for a welder that uses a flame to melt the daisy head to the stem. And he heats up the clamp on the old curling iron enough that he can bend it the way I described.
As quickly as Mrs. Pike can pull her twins apart when they start to fight, Gus and I have a whole flower—a silver daisy.
When we’re done, we rush outside, where Gus holds the daisy up to the sun.
“Gus!” I shout. But I have so many thoughts swarming inside me, it’s hard to pull the words apart to make sense of it all.
I grab some loose-leaf paper from my backpack and some old crayons from my room. I sit down on our front step and start to draw the wild pictures that are exploding in my mind like popcorn kernels.
I draw a giant rose that hasn’t completely opened. The petals are all swirly and tight, like a family hugging each other at the bus station, crying because none of them want to let go. On the stem, I draw giant thorns so big, they look like nails. I draw a tulip, too, as bright as the ones that grew along our curb last spring. And I draw a forget-me-not with only one petal left—the one that says He loves me.
“Can we make all of these, Gus?” I ask, handing him the drawings. “And—and can we make an iris, like at the Widow Hollis’s place? And grass—like the kind in Mrs. Shoemacker’s yard? Grass as thick as the carpet in movie stars’ houses!”
Gus’s Cheshire cat grin comes back. “Sure, Little Sister,” he says. The sweat of work makes him glisten like a tub full of pennies.