“It’s a quote from Much Ado About Nothing,” Calhoun told us, after we’d coughed up all the money we had in our wallets.
“Well, duh,” snapped Jasmine. “We didn’t need to pay you almost twenty bucks for that.”
Calhoun smirked again. “Not my fault you don’t know your Shakespeare,” he said. “The main characters in the play are Beatrice and Benedick.” He pointed to the initials on the envelope and the letter. “There’s your B and B.”
I stared at him. “How’d you figure that out so fast?”
Calhoun shrugged. “My father is a Shakespeare scholar,” he told us. “He teaches classes on the Bard.”
“Who’s the Bard?” asked Jasmine.
“Well, duh,” said Calhoun softly, repeating Jasmine’s earlier words. “Shakespeare, of course. Everybody knows that.”
Jasmine flushed.
“This quote here,” Calhoun continued, tapping a finger against the letter, “ ‘I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books’? That means Benedick is on Beatrice’s blacklist—he’s not in her ‘good books.’ Get it? She’s mad at him.” Looking around at our stunned expressions, he grabbed the book away from Cha Cha. “Here, check it out, Act I, Scene 1: ‘There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her: they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.’ ”
“And that is supposed to mean what, exactly?” I asked.
Calhoun sighed, clearly disgusted by my ignorance. “The two of them spend most of the play bickering with each other. They argue all the time, but it turns out that they’re really in love.”
My mouth fell open. “Are you telling us that this is a love letter?”
“Duh,” Calhoun said again.
I gave him the stink eye.
Calhoun was smart. Why did he take such pains to hide it, I wondered? I looked over at Cha Cha. “Should we show him the other letter too?”
She shrugged. “Might as well.”
“Sorry, kids, I’d like to stay and play but I have to go,” Calhoun told us, before I could fish it out and hand it over. “My sister’s cheering for some wrestling meet tonight, and my father wants me to go along and watch.”
“Shoot,” I said, glancing at my cell phone. “My family’s going too. I was supposed to be home five minutes ago,”
“Me too,” said Cha Cha. Her cousin Noah is on Danny’s team.
“How about you all come over to my house tomorrow after school?” I suggested. “You’re invited too,” I told Calhoun.
I could tell he was curious. “We’ll see” was all he said, though, playing it cool.
I ran all the way home. Fortunately, my family was running late, so nobody noticed I’d blown my deadline. Dad had gone back to the bookstore, and my mother tried not to sound disappointed as we all piled into the car.
“Danny’s first meet of the season!” she said in an overly enthusiastic tone. “Won’t this be fun?”
I was surprised at how full the gym was at West Hartfield High. I guess there aren’t a whole heck of a lot of other things to do in the heart of maple syrup country on a weeknight in the dead of winter. I spotted Belinda Winchester up in the stands, and Ella Bellow was there too, talking to Bud Jefferson from the stamp store.
“Truly! Up here!” Cha Cha called. She and her mother and Baxter were saving seats for us.
Pippa and Baxter were so excited to see each other they nearly fell off the bleachers and had to be corralled into a coloring project. Lauren made a beeline for Belinda Winchester, who was sitting a couple of rows in front of us. Belinda reached into her pocket and handed Lauren something—a kitten, most likely. The two of them have bonded over their mutual love of animals. Mom was a little worried at first, since Belinda is, well, kind of odd. In fact, odd is putting it mildly if you ask me, which nobody ever does.
“She’s nuts, but not nuts nuts, you know?” Aunt True assured my mother, after Belinda invited Lauren over to view the latest litter. Lauren’s dying to have a kitten, but my mother says she has enough pets. “Unless you consider someone who doesn’t own a TV and doesn’t read the newspaper nuts, Belinda’s just your garden-variety cat lady. I’ve spent a lot of time with her over the past few weeks—she’s practically a fixture at the bookshop these days. Lauren will be perfectly safe.”
“Lauren!” my mother called a few minutes later, motioning her back. “Honey, you’ve got homework to do. You can visit after you’re done.”
Lauren slumped down on the bench beside me with a sigh of resignation. Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out her book report on Charlotte’s Web.
“Will you read what I’ve written so far?” she asked me.
“Sure.”
“Aunt True says that if the first edition hasn’t sold by the time I give my report, she’ll bring it to school so I can show everybody,” Lauren told me.
“Cool.” I started to read.
Elwyn Brooks White, known to his friends as Andy, was born on July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York.
I only got as far as the part where Mr. White and his wife bought a saltwater farm in Maine, when the lights in the gym dimmed and loud rock music blared. A moment later, Danny and his team came running out in their maroon-and-white warm-up suits. The West Hartfield fans clapped and cheered.
Of all of us, my brother Danny is the most like our father. Same strong jaw, same wiry build. When he’s in his wrestling singlet, he looks almost exactly the way Dad did in his yearbook pictures.
I waved to Hatcher, who was standing on the sidelines. Scooter Sanchez was there too, along with several other guys I recognized from school. In Pumpkin Falls, the middle school wrestlers attend all the high school meets and tournaments. They help set up and tear down the mats, warm up the team, and watch and learn.
Danny and Cha Cha’s cousin Noah both wrestle in the 152-pound weight class, so they wouldn’t be up for a while. As Cha Cha and I settled in for the long wait, I noticed that our mothers had somehow gotten onto the topic of how they met their husbands.
“Harry and I were rivals in a dance competition,” Mrs. Abramowitz said as the music faded and two guys even skinnier than Lucas Winthrop stepped onto the mat for the first match. Watching 106-pounders wrestle always makes me anxious. Their twiggy arms and legs look like rubber bands that might snap at any moment as they flail around trying to pin each other. “I lost the competition but gained a husband.”
My mother laughed. “J. T. and I sat next to each other in freshman English at the University of Texas,” she said. “When he told me he was from a place called Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire. I thought he was making it up!”
“Wasn’t he there on a wrestling scholarship?” asked Cha Cha’s mother. “I seem to remember Ella Bellow saying something about that.”
“I’ll bet she did,” my mother replied, and she and Mrs. Abramowitz exchanged wry smiles. It’s no secret that our postmistress loves to gossip.
“So wrestling runs in the family, then?” said Cha Cha’s mother.
Mom nodded. “My family too. J. T. was the first guy I dated who was willing to take on my brothers.” My mother loves telling this story, and we all love hearing it. It’s practically a legend in our family.
“I have six of them,” she continued, her Texas twang deepening as she warmed to her tale.
“You have six brothers?” said Mrs. Abramowitz. Her eyes, which were the same green as Cha Cha’s and Baxter’s, widened.
My mother smiled her sunflower smile. “A boy for every day of the week and a girl for Sunday, my grandmother used to say. Anyway, my brothers made J. T. arm wrestle each one of them before he was allowed to take me out on a date.”
“I’m serious!” said my mother, grinning. “He must have really wanted to ask me out, because he beat every single one of them.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment,” said Mrs. Abramowitz, glancing over my mother’s shoulder. I looked up and saw my father making his way through the crowded bleachers toward us. Aunt True was with him, bundled up in a sheepskin jacket and another hat from her seemingly bottomless collection of embarrassments—a rainbow knitted number this time, with a spray of tassels on top that looked kind of like Annie Freeman’s braids.
My mother gave my knee a squeeze, which I knew meant, Don’t make a big deal about your father coming along; just act normal.
“J. T., True, this is Rachel Abramowitz,” she said. “My boss at the Starlite.”
“And more importantly, Cha Cha and Baxter’s mother,” said Mrs. Abramowitz. She smiled up at my father. “I hear you’re quite the arm wrestler, J. T. Dinah was just telling me about your exploits back in college.”
He gave her a brief, polite nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
We all fell silent as he took his seat. I couldn’t help but notice as Cha Cha’s mother’s gaze wandered to the hook at the end of his shirtsleeve.
My father’s arm-wrestling days were over.