The sun was low by the time Grandpa’s truck rolled down the driveway after a couple hours on Saturday running errands. We sat there and remained silent, like the plaque tells us to, while the truck coughed and lurched and stopped. I checked out the truck window to count the number of squirrels compared to me. (Math!) At first it had been just a couple of squirrels. Grandpa liked putting some peanuts-in-the-shell on the mudroom steps, and watching the squirrels come and get them and hide them away. By then we were outnumbered like the last of the living in a zombie movie and going through a bag of nuts a day.
Grandpa went out to his workshop in the garage, and I went in and made the macaroni. When I called, “Dinner!” Grandpa came inside carrying a little wooden house. It had a pointy little flagpole on its little tiny porch, and a hole where a front door would be. “It’s a squirrel house,” he told me. “I’ll shove an ear of corn on this spike, and Mister Nutkin can sit right here and nibble away. And he can go inside for a snooze, if he likes.”
We ate dinner with the squirrel house in the middle of the table, right beside the ketchup. Grandpa kept moving it a little this way or that way, sliding it a half inch to the left, pushing one corner to get a better view.
“Do you want a salad? Is it salad you want?” I said. I was thinking about that full-color brochure and the salad bar at the old folks’ home.
“Sure, sure,” Grandpa said.
“We could make vegetables some nights.”
“Right you are,” he said.
We ate our macaroni in silence for bit.
“Rutabaga!” said Grandpa.
“It’s nice, Grandpa,” I said. I meant the squirrel house.
Grandpa smiled proudly, as if he’d built the Great Pyramid of Giza. “This squirrel house is going to make us a lot of money, Josie.”
“It is?” Money! Yay!
“See, I’m not going to make just the one,” he said. “This is what we call a prototype. I’ll make a hundred squirrel houses.”
A hundred squirrel houses?
“And sell ’em,” said Grandpa. He tapped the side of his nose and narrowed his eyes.
Do people really want to invite a lot of squirrels to their yards? is what I was wondering, when Grandpa pushed his chair back and got up. “Thanks for the chow,” he said. “Places to go, people to see. Man of action! Not a thing in the world to worry about.” Then he dashed out the door and to the truck to go who knows where, trailing squirrels as he went.
“If it wasn’t for the squirrels, I might have believed him,” I said to Winky. We were swinging on the tire swing at Winky’s house. We could hear the TV going full blast inside, through the window. I wound myself up and stuck out my feet and let the tire spin. “You should get Joe Viola to show up,” I said. Winky’s idol had been in town a whole week already, and Winky still hadn’t gone to try to meet him. Winky said he “oughta get a haircut first,” “had to clean the garage,” and was “coming down with something.”
“You said he’s a charity machine,” I said. I spun a little. “I’m a charity.”
Winky went inside and came back out with a snack of leftover Super Tuna Noodle-Bake and two forks. We ate to the tune of the opening music of The Sands of Time.
“Fingers crossed isn’t going to cut it,” I said to Winky. Then I laid out my three-pronged plan for keeping Grandpa and me afloat:
Schemes, like the carnival and the yard work.
Grandpa’s mystery money: cash, deposits, withdrawals.
My bet with Mr. Mee.
Winky climbed onto the tire swing and kicked it around. “This plan is one prong short of a typical fork,” he said.
Then I heard something that gave me a big idea. It was characters talking on the TV. “You’re dead to me, Brock!”
I thought about that. I thought of Mom’s explanation of my dad. “Dead to me!” But not actually dead. No more dead than Brock was, probably.
I grabbed Winky’s feet when they spun by and stopped the tire in its tracks. “I know what the fourth prong is.”