So I was going to talk to Grandpa as soon as the sun rose in the morning. I hoped he would point to the elephant in the room and say, Yep, there he is and his name is Dave. And me and my elephant are here because we didn’t want to be alone while I have stomach problems that may or may not be cancer.
But I didn’t get the chance, because Grandpa answered the phone, took a message, folded it into a paper airplane, and aimed it at my head, and then I had to go eat with the Flee.
Epic fail.
Epic.
Epic.
Epic.
Grandpa said, “It might be a good idea. Considering.”
Considering what?
Some unspoken message passed between him and Mom that I couldn’t decipher. I suspected it had something to do with all the elephants living in our house.
Because if Grandpa thought it was a good idea to go out with the Flee, the world had gone crooked.
“I’ll go with you, Wayne,” Mom said.
“Jennifer, let the boy handle it on his own,” Grandpa said.
“I’m going with him,” Mom said with a determination I hadn’t heard in her voice since, well, since we lived in BEFORE.
I got inside Mom’s car, not knowing what to expect and not really caring. Sandy had told me that the most epic poet of all time, old Bill Shakespeare, had once written that “expectation is the root of all heartache.”
So I prepared to have zero expectations.
Like Mom told me.
Zero expectations = zero heartache.
Do you know where the Flee wanted us to meet him?
At a very international restaurant. The International House of Pancakes. Did you know that IHOP recently opened its first restaurant in the Middle East? It’s true. They opened one in Dubai. Maybe a lot of the world’s problems could be solved over pancakes and boysenberry syrup, which is my favorite. Boysenberry syrup is a cross between four different kinds of berries (European raspberry, blackberry, American dewberry, and loganberry). Do not ask me why I know so much about this syrup. I just do.
“Something wrong with you?” the Flee asked.
No.
“Still can’t talk yet, huh?” the Flee said, his mouth full of pancakes.
“His therapy is going great,” Mom told him.
I knew he enjoyed how I couldn’t talk. He probably liked me better this way.
I ordered a shake, and a sandwich I couldn’t eat, but what the heck. He owed me at least a sandwich. While he stuffed pancakes into his mouth, the Flee managed to spit out a few words.
“Sorry about the other night,” he said.
I studied the back of the ketchup bottle. One tablespoon has twenty calories.
“Sorry, Jennifer,” the Flee said. “It’s just your dad.”
“You might want to stop talking now,” she told him.
“Hey, here’s something I thought Wayne might be interested in,” he said, passing me a brochure. It was yellow, and on the front it read, JOIN THE AQUADUCKS THIS SUMMER.
“I thought, you know, you might want to check out the swim team at the rec center. If you aren’t going to run track and field, maybe this is the sport for you. What do you think? I’ll take you.”
No.
“Well, why not? Don’t you want to join something this summer? Meet some new people?”
I shrugged.
“Think about it. It might be fun.”
Sure.
I knew I wouldn’t spend a minute thinking about his stupid idea.
“Want to go shopping for your birthday next?”
I nodded.
“Great, I’m headed to the men’s and we’ll be on the way. Anything you want!”
“You don’t have to go,” Mom said when he left.
She didn’t have to say that. I wasn’t going to go anywhere with him. I had a gut feeling the Flee was going to ditch me.
When he left the table, I noticed a lot of happy families were eating at IHOP. When you want something in your own life, it looks like everybody at every table in a restaurant has it. I’m not just talking about eyebrows. All over IHOP, people were having a great time. So why couldn’t we?
When the Flee came back, his ear was to his phone. Across the table, half of my DNA stuffed pancake into his mouth as he talked.
“Yeah, yeah, calm down. I’m having lunch with my number one son.” He winked at me. “Fine, fine. Okay. Don’t have a cow.”
Yep, I’d seen it coming.
From what I gathered, Stephanie was having some kind of emergency that required his immediate attention. He paid with a coupon, made a big production out of telling the waitress it was my birthday and “customers eat free on their birthday,” and then I wrote a note to the waitress asking for a to-go box for my uneaten sandwich. He threw a twenty-dollar bill at me and told me he’d call me later and we’d do that shopping trip.
Loserberry.
Mom and I drove home in silence. I went inside the house and put my sandwich away. I rearranged Mom’s blue glass birds into a circle, like she liked them. Why couldn’t people leave things the way other people liked them?
Next to the sink, there was an amber pill bottle. One I hadn’t seen before. It was a prescription made out to Truman Dalton.
Right then I knew I’d chicken out on asking Grandpa anything. I didn’t know if I really wanted the answer.
I pushed the AquaDucks brochure in front of Mom’s face.
“Well, I get it,” she said. “He’s trying to encourage you to do something.”
Remember the last time he encouraged me to do a sport? We all remember how great that was.
“It’s true that your father didn’t handle that well,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think he’s right to want you to try new things.”
It all made me think of that time the Flee did what he did. So I stopped thinking.
Grandpa walked in. His timing was perfect.
“What the heck is an AquaDuck?” he asked.
Going out!
“Mashed potatoes for dinner!” Mom said, and I headed for the door.
I wandered down Cedar Drive by myself and into the smooth streets of the Estates, kicking the same acorn for two blocks. The sky changed into a mix-up of oranges and purples, and the clouds looked like controlled explosions.
Maybe I did know something about poetry after all.
Or maybe the sky was distracting me. It worked. It made me think about a new topic. Something I’d just read that I couldn’t wait to share with Denny Rosenblatt.
The Irish crown jewels have been missing since 1907. The jewels had been transferred to a safe in 1903. The new safe was to be placed in a newly built vault, but the safe didn’t fit through the doorway to the vault. So the safe was then stored in a heavily locked office. Four years later, the jewels were stolen from that office.
Office versus Vault. Talk about heartache.
Among my many questions that start with the plaguing word is this: Why didn’t builders measure the new safe before building the doorway to the new vault?
Returned e-mails from Liz Delaney: zero
Questions I still have for Liz Delaney: one million
Internet hours spent reading her articles and online biography: four
Data collected: Liz Delaney’s great-aunt perished more than sixty years ago in a plane crash just outside Marshall, Texas. The flight left Dallas and was bound for Shreveport, Louisiana. According to reports, on May 17, 1953, the airliner flew through a thunderstorm and plunged to the ground thirteen miles east of Marshall. There were twenty souls aboard the aircraft. There was only one survivor. Since then Liz Delaney has had a special interest in aircraft disasters.