CHAPTER 44
The Deadline Looms
BY THE END OF AUGUST, EVENINGS WERE ALREADY GETTING chilly enough for a fire. Terpsichore sat with a tablet and a pencil, doodling possible names for her cookbook. Tigger occasionally roused herself from half napping on Terpsichore’s lap to bat at the end of her pencil.
What to Do with a Two-Hundred-Pound Pumpkin?
Jellied Moose Nose and Rhubarb Pie?
Cabbage Patch Soup and Eskimo Ice Cream?
The Best Souvenir of the First Palmer Fair?
None of the titles sounded right.
She leaned back against the pillows she’d stacked against the wooden arm of the settee and stared out the window at Pioneer Peak for inspiration. Polly sat cross-legged on the braided rug in front of the woodstove, leaning over to stroke Willa behind the ears. Willa sighed and stretched in kitten bliss. Cally sat with Rogers on her lap. With one hand she petted Rogers just enough to keep him purring, but her attention was firmly on the Sears catalog, open to a page of horse equipment. Rogers meowed a complaint when she stood, dumping him to the floor.
“Smoky is going to need a blanket before winter, and I found the perfect one for him.” She walked over to the table to show the page to her father.
Pop sat at the kitchen table, making lists of all the supplies that would be needed to build the new church. He sketched, scribbled figures, and erased, figuring and refiguring. He looked up, grinning. “Yankee doodle dandy!” he said. “Guess how many peeled logs we’ll need to build the new church?”
“But Pop,” Cally said, “see this blanket? This is exactly what Smoky needs. Can we order it?”
Pop crossed the room to rub Mother’s neck. “Don’t you want to know how many logs we’re going to need for the new church?”
“But what about a blanket for Smoky?” Cally persisted.
Pop dropped his hands. “Doesn’t anyone want to know how many logs we’re going to need?”
Terpsichore closed her tablet. “Okeydokey, Pop. How many logs will it take to build the new church?”
Pop smiled at Terpsichore. “If all the logs are at least twenty feet long and at least eight inches in diameter, it will take a thousand . . . give or take a few,” he said.
“Wow, a thousand,” Cally and Polly said.
“That’s nice,” Mother said. “But I thought work on the walls and roof wouldn’t start until late this fall, and you know, we might be gone by then.”
“Clio, you said you’d wait until after the harvest fair to give your vote. Who knows what might happen between now and then?” Pop said.
“I’d almost forgotten that we might not stay,” Cally said sadly. She closed the catalog and put it back on the bookshelf.
“Me too,” Polly said. She snuggled Willa against her neck, and Willa licked Polly’s face in return.
“Well, I most emphatically have not forgotten,” Mother said. “And neither has your grandmother.”
She put down the old sweater she was unraveling into a ball of yarn to reuse, and took the latest letter from her mother from her apron pocket. She read one line from the letter:
“‘I’ll be up by the last week of August to bring you all home to Madison. I so look forward to having you here with me!’”
Mother laid the letter on the kitchen table. She was smiling, but nobody else was.
“If we move back to Grandmother’s house, we won’t get to take Smoky,” Cally said.
“And not even Tigger and Willa and Rogers,” Polly said.
Terpsichore slipped off the couch to confront her mother. “That’s not what you said before! You said you’d wait until after the fair to vote!”
“What difference does a few days make? Once she gets here, I know she won’t want to stay very long.”
Terpsichore wrung her hands. “But you said you’d wait until after the fair!”
“You did say you’d wait to vote until after the fair,” Pop said.
Terpsichore put her hands together in thanks to her father for sticking up for her. “Yes, Mom, you never know what might happen at the fair.”
• • •
Terpsichore led the twins upstairs so they could talk privately. Both twins sat on Cally’s cot in their bedroom. Terpsichore sat cross-legged on the floor beside the bed. “I don’t want to leave Alaska,” she said.
“We don’t either!” the twins chorused.
“I have a plan that I hope will work,” she said. “And maybe you both could help. One of the things Mom misses most is her piano. Miss Zelinsky is selling hers, and if I can earn seventy-five dollars by the end of the fair I can buy it for Mother.”
“How can you earn that much money?” Cally asked.
“I plan to win the twenty-five dollars for the biggest vegetable at the fair.”
“But that’s not enough,” Polly said.
“I know, but I also thought of something I can sell at the fair—a book of my Alaska recipes. If I can sell one hundred cookbooks at fifty cents apiece, I’ll have enough to buy the piano from Miss Zelinsky by the last day of the fair.”
“How can you make a cookbook?” they asked.
“Mendel has tidy printing, and he’s going to write out all the recipes. Gloria has drawn a picture for the cover. And we’ll make copies on the mimeograph machine at school. My giant pumpkin will help bring people to the booth, but once they get close, how else can we get attention for the cookbook?”
“You need a jingle too, like on the radio,” Polly said.
“Pumpkins . . .” Cally started. “Polly, do you remember the song we learned in class last year, the one about the pies with crazy stuff in them?”
“‘The Pumpkin Pies That Grandma Used to Bake’?” Polly said.
The two began to sing:
“My grandma was a wizard
At baking pumpkin pies;
The things you would find in them
Were surely a surprise!”
“Only we can change the ‘grandma’ to our sister,” Cally said.
“And the things that get baked into the pies to things that are more Alaskan . . .”
“Like ice skates or dogsleds . . .”
“Like salmon and snowflakes . . .”
Cally and Polly slid off the bed to hug Terpsichore from both sides. “If we could keep Smoky and the cats and have a piano again, it would be perfect!”
“It sure would!” said Terpsichore.
“Leave it to us,” the twins said.