My heart slammed against my ribs like a pinball bouncing off the flipper. I ran into the living room.
“Gram’s home!” I worked to dial down my volume. “We’ve got about ten seconds to get this stuff put away.”
Iz stuck her head out of the bathroom, gave me a panicked look, and then went back in, slamming the door behind her. Kenny started throwing blankets back into the cedar chest. I scrabbled around on the floor, stuffing newspapers and other junk back into the box. The lid wouldn’t fit, so I grabbed it and the box and ran toward my room just as I heard the back door opening. I whipped the box under my bed and then took two deep breaths, trying to put on my Mr. Cool mask before heading back out to face Gram.
“Kenny,” I heard Gram say from the living room, “what are you children doing in the house? Why on earth aren’t you outside on such a beautiful day?”
“Well, I got to confess, Mrs. Stoiska.” I froze on the other side of my bedroom door. Was that all it took? She hadn’t even gotten out the thumbscrews, and Kenny was already acting like a narc?
“We got real hungry, so we came in and ended up eating most of your pie from the freezer. I’m sorry if you were saving it for something special.” You gotta hand it to him—turned out he could lay it on as thick as a Minnesota accent when he needed to. I came out of the bedroom.
“Sorry, Gram,” I said, hoping the pie theft would account for the redness I could feel on my cheeks. “We were starving.”
Gram gave me this long look, making it pretty clear that she still had that mom skill. The one where she could sniff out a lie in two seconds flat. And between snooping through her house and turning her into a bank-robbery suspect, I guess it was no surprise I was sending out guilt waves.
Finally she turned and walked into the kitchen. I looked at Kenny and we followed her. She peered at the one little slice Kenny had left in the pie dish. “I didn’t even remember it was there,” she said. “You boys were welcome to it, as long as it hadn’t gone bad.”
“Best pie I’ve had in ages, Mrs. Stoiska,” Kenny said. “Better than Grandma Gudrun’s, even. Maybe if you don’t mind, I’ll just finish off this last little bit so that you can wash the pan.”
I glared at him while he scarfed up the rest of the pie without leaving me even one little bite, but Gram’s face relaxed at the compliment to her cooking. Then she looked around. “Isabella isn’t with you?”
“Uh, she’s in the bathroom,” I said, waving vaguely in that direction.
“You know girls—takes them forever,” said Kenny. “I pretty much never get a chance in there now that we’ve got even more of ’em living at my house.”
Iz walked into the kitchen. “Oh, like you don’t spend an hour in front of the mirror every morning searching for whiskers. Hello, Mrs. Stoiska.” A dust bunny big enough to be a dust elephant was hanging off the back of Iz’s shorts, but I figured it was probably better if I didn’t reach over to brush it off.
“Hello, dear,” said Gram. “Kenny’s mother asked me to send the two of you home to get ready for the church fundraiser. We’ll see you there later on. I forgot the hotdish, so I had to come home too.” She looked me up and down, and her eyes stayed stuck on my shirt. I looked down and realized it was covered with dust from the box. When I lifted my head again, that x-ray look was back.
“You might want to put on a clean shirt, Travis.” Gram’s voice sounded cold. She finally broke eye contact, picked up the pie dish, and headed for the sink. I’d been spying on her. Now she didn’t trust me. We were just one big happy family.
Iz gave me the thumbs-up sign and left.
“Later, dude,” said Kenny.
I was now on bad terms with Gram and most of the rest of the town, but at least I’d have two allies tonight.
I couldn’t help thinking about that box under my bed while I changed my shirt. But there was no time to look through it right then; Gram was already convinced I had been up to no good, and hiding out in my room would only make her more suspicious. Fortunately, when I came out, she seemed like back-to-normal Gram—not saying a whole lot, but not giving me that x-ray look, either.
I hated to rock the boat, but finding the box had made me want to start fishing even harder for information about my dad. So when Gram handed me the dish holding the food for the fundraiser and reached out for her car keys, I nodded toward that lumpy fish key rack.
“So, Gram? I know about the bank-robber thing and the rough edges, but there has to be some good stuff about my father too, right?”
Gram froze. Then she took the dish from me, set it onto the counter, and put her hands onto my shoulders, just for a second, before her hands dropped. “There was so much ‘good stuff,’ Travis. I know that everybody—even me, I’m realizing—has been focusing on the mistakes he made. But your father had some marvelous qualities too.”
She leaned against the counter. “He loved his people the same way he did everything else: full tilt. It was hard sometimes to be on the other side of that love, because he didn’t think through how concerned we would be when he took all his risks. But he was always genuinely repentant afterward. And he stuck by his loved ones no matter what.”
“But he and Ma ended up . . . not together. Even though she was pregnant.”
There was a long pause. “I do believe he cared about your mother, Travis, but their relationship was new, and as you just pointed out, it got complicated very quickly. And John was struggling at that point. It’s something you should probably talk about with your mother. There are some things that only the two participants can truly understand about a . . . romantic relationship.”
I suddenly felt a strong need to make sure there wasn’t a single wrinkle on my T-shirt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gram smoothing the corners of the aluminum foil covering the fundraiser food, making sure it was really tight. Really, really tight.
Finally Gram pushed off from the counter and straightened her shoulders. “I’m thinking about the loyalty he showed Carl. I told you that Carl stepped in as a father figure when your grandfather died. As John got older, Carl changed; he’d make plans with John and then not show up. But even in high school, John still made a point of stopping by Carl’s house every couple of weeks. He brought him groc-eries and cleaned up the place. Carl’s always been too proud to accept much help from most people, even as sick as he is now, but somehow he was willing to accept help from John. One of the things John was taking so hard that last summer was that Carl was finally losing his house, and John wasn’t sure how to help him.”
Gram glanced at the clock and grabbed up her keys. “Goodness, you’re turning me into a regular chatterbox, Travis. We’re late!”
Gram talked only once on the way into town, and that was to mutter, “They better have left us something other than that Jell-O concoction of Mimi Ingersoll’s to eat. Mayonnaise and Jell-O! I’d rather be tarred and feathered.”
Mayonnaise and Jell-O? I felt my gut tighten up. But I wasn’t sure if it was the thought of a food combination even Kenny would likely avoid or Gram’s mention of tarring and feathering. From what I remembered of middle-of-the-night Westerns on cable, that was what good old-fashioned townsfolk did when they wanted to hand out some vigilante justice.
And guess who was likely to be first in line the next time the local farmers cleaned the feathers out of their chicken coops?