On the detective’s orders, we were told to stick around Aunt Gertie’s one more day. One more day in Greenburg, Illinois, population: one less ferret. It wasn’t that much to ask. Just stay close by in case Detective Strong wanted us to come into the station. And don’t get into any more trouble.
Maybe it was asking a lot.
We didn’t have much planned for the day. We’d completed Aunt Gertie’s quest and found—I suppose—whatever it was she’d wanted us to find, though I think it was something a little different for each of us. At Mom’s earnest request, the rest of Papa Kwirk’s ashes had been transferred from the vacuum cleaner to an old cigar box, which seemed slightly more normal in the grand scheme of things. At least we weren’t mixing him with bananas and having him for breakfast.
Afterward, Dad insisted on taking us fishing on the pond near where he grew up as a sort of tribute to Papa Kwirk, even though none of us really liked to fish. Mom came along this time, though we had to promise to bait her hooks for her because she couldn’t bear to hurt the worms. Aunt Gertie declined, saying that the only kind of fishing she liked to do was for men who were ten years younger than her and ripped, or ten years older than her and rich. I doubted poor Mr. Oglesby fit either of those categories.
We took all four of Papa Kwirk’s old fishing poles and dug for worms close by the water this time, staying a fair distance from Dad’s old house, just to be safe. It was a good day for fishing: bright and crisp, the kind of spring morning when you could count the dew drops on the grass stems and everything hummed around you. We sat in a row, with Lyra and Mom sharing a pole, Cass in the center, Dad and me on the other end. Of course Cass caught a fish in the first five minutes—a bluegill she christened Captain Hooked before throwing it back.
I didn’t catch a thing, but I wasn’t trying too hard either. I sat at the edge of the pond with my bare toes skimming the surface and watched the sunlight shimmer across the water and thought about Papa Kwirk. About the difference between living hard and having a hard life. Papa Kwirk had done both, I guess. When somebody dies, you try to only remember the good parts, but nobody’s life is made up of only good parts.
One thing could be said for my grandfather, though: he was one of a kind. And there was a whole town full of people who would never forget him.
I was lost in my own head, mulling over all these things, when Dad bumped my shoulder with his. “Is fishing really that boring?” he asked. He seemed to be back to his old self again, smiling and cracking jokes. Even his bow tie was back, this one patterened with multicolored jelly beans. It was perfect for him.
I smiled back as best I could. “It’s not that,” I said.
“Wanna talk about it?”
I glanced down the bank to make sure my sisters weren’t paying any attention; Cass was busy rebaiting her hook and Lyra and Mom were whispering to each other. I looked back at the pond. The sparkles on the water reminded me of the shards of shattered glass scattered across the table at Bailey’s Pub. I wouldn’t have thought to just shatter the bottle like that.
“You ever feel like you don’t quite belong?” I began, making it a point to keep my eyes focused on the orange float bobbing up and down in the water, because I knew if I looked at Dad I might freeze up and not say what was on my mind. “I mean, Papa Kwirk lived this extraordinary life. He had all these friends and did all this stuff. And Aunt Gertie is, like, sixty-something years old and still does yoga at six a.m. And you and Mom are, like, both these genius scientists. Cass is freakin’ Zorro and seems to know exactly what she wants out of life, and Lyra’s like this ten-year-old Shakespeare, and I’m just so . . . you know . . .”
Dad shook his head, waiting, silent. He wasn’t going to finish the sentence for me. I just had to spit it out.
“You know . . . I’m just so . . . ordinary.”
There. Finally. It was the same thing I’d been saying to Manny for years. “They’re so weird.” Except they weren’t the problem.
I looked over at Dad, who was frowning now, and I figured I must have disappointed him somehow.
“Rion Kwirk . . . you are anything but ordinary.”
“You have to say that,” I mumbled. “You’re my father.”
Dad set his pole down in the grass beside him, never taking his eyes off me. “That’s not true. If I’ve learned anything from your grandfather, it’s that you don’t have to say anything. You can go through your whole life keeping it all bottled up. I’m saying it because it’s true. You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re terrific with numbers. You’ve got your father’s crazy good looks,” he joked, running a hand through his hair. “And you’re a helluva tree climber.”
“I fell,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but you didn’t break anything,” Dad countered.
Only because you caught me, I thought.
Dad’s glasses had slipped down his nose. He drew in his knees and wrapped his arms around them, resting his chin on top. Sitting there, by the edge of the pond, he looked like a kid. “Remember that story about the milk and cookies?”
“You mean graham crackers and Gatorade?”
Dad nodded. “Yeah, those too. It turns out I was wrong. Aunt Gertie told me last night. It wasn’t your grandmother who left them outside my door, it was Frank. It was him every time. I just always assumed it was my mother because . . . well, you can probably guess why.”
I could guess. Because of all the times he woke up to an empty house. Because sometimes we remember only what we want to remember, or we let one memory cloud over all the others. But I could picture Papa Kwirk standing outside Dad’s door with a plate of Oreos in his hand, contemplating if he should walk in and say something, then talking himself out of it, knocking, and leaving the plate and glass on the floor. That was his way. I wondered if he did it the day Dad broke his arm. If he thought about doing it any of those nights after Grandma Shelley died—nights that he spent at the pub instead, drinking two fingers of bourbon at a time. I wondered how different things would have been if he’d just opened the door, just once.
“Here’s the thing,” Dad continued. “You don’t always get the chance to say it. Or maybe you have chances, but for one reason or another, you let them slip by until, before you know it, you’ve run out of time. So no matter what—no matter what you think of me, or I think of you, or whatever happens between us—I don’t want you to ever, ever think that I don’t love you for exactly who you are.”
Dad blinked at me, waiting for confirmation like he always did.
“I know,” I said.
I did. I knew without him saying it, because he’d said it a million times already. Because he wasn’t the kind of dad who just left the plate by the door.
My father cocked an eyebrow. “Wait a sec, did you just Han Solo me?”
I cracked a smile. I couldn’t help it.
“You did. You totally just Soloed me, you little stinker.”
Dad shook his head and smiled too. Then he took his pole back up, and for the next hour we sat shoulder to shoulder and hummed as many cartoon theme songs as we both could remember. There was nobody around to hear us, of course, but I wouldn’t have cared either way.
We quit in time for lunch, having caught a total of three fish between us, and after ten minutes trying to figure out how the photo timer worked on Mom’s phone, we managed to get a halfway decent picture of the five of us: Fishin’ Fletcher and His Equally Fishy Family. Dad said he was going to print it out and frame it alongside the old Polaroid we’d dug up when he got back home.
He also said that his collection of old Garbage Pail Kids cards were mine if I wanted them. They might be collectors’ items worth a lot of money by now. I suggested maybe we should just hang on to them, maybe bury them in our backyard for future Kwirks to find someday. Like a family heirloom.
“So does that mean you want to have kids when you grow up?” Dad asked.
“They’re called progeny,” I told him.
Only boring people have kids.
The Garbage Pail cards weren’t the only thing my father was ready to part with.
Before we left for home, we also had to decide what to do with the rest of Papa Kwirk’s stuff. According to his surprisingly short will, Francis T. Kwirk left nearly everything “to my son, Fletcher,” with the exception of a few minor possessions of sentimental value. All his old LPs were to be distributed among the members of his beloved barbershop quartet, the Salty Shakers. His poker table—which he’d also eaten off for the last five years, according to Aunt Gertie—went to Larry Demotte, who still owed him sixty-five dollars from their last game. His bowling ball went to Pastor Mike. Apparently, they’d been in a league together.
For her part, Aunt Gertie got Papa Kwirk’s old biker jacket, the black leather faded and cracked from too much sun and snow, though she just called it “broken in.” She also inherited a set of earrings that had once been Grandma Shelley’s, a sugar and creamer set that was shaped like spotted cows, and Grandpa’s old vacuum cleaner to add to her collection, bringing her operational total up to six. I would have thought he would have left her more—she was his best friend, after all—but when I said something about it, Aunt Gertie huffed. “I told Jimmy I didn’t need any more junk.”
“That’s good,” Mom said, overhearing the conversation. “The first step is admitting you have a problem.”
“Says the woman with a sixteen-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer in her purse,” Aunt Gertie fired back.
Yet even with the bowling ball and spotted-cow creamer accounted for, it still left us with a storage unit full of furniture, several boxes of clothes, and, of course, a motorcycle that nobody in our family knew how to ride. Dad declared his intention to let Gertie sell most of the stuff and give the money to charity. Something local. Something Papa Kwirk would be proud of.
“We could donate it to the museum,” I suggested. “As a thank-you to Mr. Oglesby.” I wasn’t sure how much Papa Kwirk’s stuff was worth—his Salty Shakers vest did have some pretty fly sequins—but it might be enough for the curator to buy another rusty sword to put on display. You never knew when something like that would come in handy.
“You don’t want to keep any of it?” Aunt Gertie asked. “What about the pictures? Or the books? There’s at least three boxes of books.”
“We’ll take the pictures,” Dad said. “But I’ve still got a book I need to finish.”
We were packing the boxes of photo albums up in the Tank when a black sedan drove up the road to Aunt Gertie’s house. I froze, first thinking maybe it was Freckles and Broomstache, somehow escaped from the county jail and here to finish the job. Or worse still, Garvadill had upped their game and hired members of the Mafia to come rub us out. Then I thought it might be Detective Strong, come to interrogate us some more about yesterday’s events. Maybe she’d discovered that we’d been trespassing in the Bur-somethings’ backyard and come to arrest us.
What I didn’t expect to see was Tasha Meeks getting out of the car, followed by her father.
Mr. Meeks waved hello to Aunt Gertie, who was standing on the porch, smoking one of Papa Kwirk’s old cigars. It was a habit she’d taken up only yesterday, her own personal way of carrying on Jimmy’s legacy, she said.
“Hey there, Gertrude. Hello, Kwirk family,” Mr. Meeks called out. The owner of Mallory’s ice-cream parlor shook hands with my parents in the driveway. He was wearing a T-shirt that said Scream for It and had a drawing of an ice-cream cone. It was perfect. “Just wanted to come say farewell,” Mr. Meeks said. “I missed you at the restaurant yesterday.”
“Yeah. We had no idea you owned it,” Mom said. “That place is fantastic!”
Mr. Meeks shook his head, embarrassed by the compliment. “Believe it or not, it was actually Frank’s idea. He had fond memories of Mallory’s as a kid. Told me I should fix it up and bring it back, just like it was. You know, for nostalgia’s sake. I’m just sorry I wasn’t there when you all tackled the Mountain.” The breathless way Mr. Meeks said it—the Mountain—made it sound like conquering it was some kind of death-defying feat. Maybe it was.
“Thirty-six scoops is a lot of ice cream,” Dad said.
“Don’t look at me. That was all her idea,” Mr. Meeks said, pointing at Aunt Gertie, who smiled behind a waft of cigar smoke. “She wanted me to make you work for it, so I told my manager on duty extra whipped cream and don’t go easy on the sauce.”
While Mr. Meeks and my parents continued to talk, I shuffled to stand next to Tasha. In the last twenty-four hours I’d climbed a giant tree, faced a couple of armed hooligans, and helped extract a dead ferret from a python’s mouth, but I think I was more nervous walking up to her.
“All packed up?” she asked, looking at the Tank, which was one hungry snake away from being full. She was wearing a bright yellow sweater. It reminded me of dandelions.
“Pretty much . . . yeah,” I said, smooth as sandpaper.
“I heard about what happened last night. All that crazy stuff at the museum. I’m glad you’re okay.”
You, plural, like my whole family? Or you, singular, like me specifically? “Oh, you know. Just a couple of jerks looking for money,” I said, repeating the half lie Mom had instructed me to tell. “It was really no big deal.”
I could tell by the look on her face that she didn’t believe me. “Well, it must have been scary. I know I would have freaked out.”
“Yeah, I mean, it scared me a little, but what are you going to do? My whole family was in danger.” I didn’t bother to tell her that I was the one everyone else had saved.
“It had to take some guts to climb that tree too,” she added.
I tilted my head. “Wait a minute. How do you know about the tree?”
Tasha pursed her lips and rolled her eyes. “Puh-lease. You don’t really think your sixty-year-old aunt climbed forty feet to put that book there, do you? I mean, she’s crazy, but she ain’t that crazy.”
Of course. It had all been Aunt Gertie’s idea. But she’d had help. Including from the girl who used to get rides on Papa Kwirk’s motorcycle. Which meant Tasha Meeks and I had both climbed up the only magic tree in all of Greenburg, Illinois. That seemed significant somehow.
Mr. Meeks glanced over at us and gave his daughter the one-minute warning sign. Which meant that in one minute, she woud disappear, and soon there would be two hundred miles between us.
I thought about Papa Kwirk, stationed over in Vietnam, which was like ten thousand miles away, and all his letters to Grandma Shelley. All that distance, all that time spent apart, not knowing for sure when they would see each other again, or even if. And yet they still found a way to be together. He still found his way back home to her.
I could almost hear Papa Kwirk’s voice inside my head. What are you waiting for, kid, an invitation?
Even rejection’s better than regret.
“So, I don’t actually have my own phone yet,” I began hesitantly, “but I do have a computer. We could, like, Skype or something. You know. If you wanted to.” I glanced over at her, bracing myself for the what-planet-are-you-from look. The same look I gave my family all too often, I realized.
Tasha Meeks smiled her turquoise smile. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” I repeated, sounding surprised. Papa Kwirk wouldn’t have sounded surprised.
“Yeah. That sounds good,” she said. “I’ll get your email from your aunt.”
“Time to go, Tosh,” Mr. Meeks said.
I rejoined the family circle just as Mr. Meeks and my father were shaking hands goodbye. Then the owner of Mallory’s reached into his pocket and brought out something concealed in his fist. “Before I go, there’s something I want you to have. I meant to give it to you at the service but never got around to it.”
His fingers peeled back to reveal a necklace—a medallion or coin of some kind, suspended on a leather string. Not exactly fine jewelry, but still cool looking. The coin had a triangle in the center, with the letter I, and around the triangle were engraved the words To Thine Own Self Be True.
“It was Frank’s,” Mr. Meeks explained. “He gave it to me the year after I had my accident. He was my sponsor at AA. By that time, he’d already been sober for eight years. He helped me get my act together. And he looked out for my little girl. He was almost like family to us.” Mr. Meeks draped one arm around Tasha, pulling her against him. She smiled, partly embarrassed but mostly proud. I could tell. “As his real family, you all should have it.”
Dad—normally an ask-are-you-sure-three-times kind of guy—took the medallion without question. This wasn’t the kind of gift you said no to, I guess.
“Thank you,” he said. Then he got an idea. I could see the flash of inspiration behind his glasses, as if he’d finally unlocked the formula for armpits. “Turns out I’ve got something for you too,” he said, and turned and started walking toward the garage.
Stopping right beside Jack Nicholson.
Before they left, Mr. Meeks told us how nice it was to meet us all again and to stop by the parlor anytime we were in town—“Just don’t expect thirty-six free scoops.” He also told Aunt Gertie he’d come back and get the bike later—after he’d convinced Mrs. Meeks that a motorcycle was also the kind of gift you just didn’t say no to.
I stood close by their car on the off chance that the movie music would kick in, and Tasha would swoop in for the goodbye kiss. But it didn’t happen. Instead she just waved and smiled, which, somehow, was even better. Besides, if she had kissed me, out there, with everyone watching, I’d have had to listen to Cass and Lyra tease me about it all the way home. No doubt Ly knew at least fourteen different synonyms for smooching.
I watched their car disappear down the long dirt road, only hearing Mom call my name on the third try, asking me to help my sister with the snake.
Once Delilah was safely inside the Tank, the top of her aquarium securely fastened (double-checked by yours truly), it was time for us to say goodbye to Aunt Gertie. We had a basket full of brownies and peanut butter sandwiches to see us across the Indiana border. The old tackle box full of cards was in the back seat for me to sort through. Dad’s Thundercats toothbrush was tucked under his arm, along with his dog-eared copy of Bridge to Terabithia. He’d already decided he would just start over from the beginning. Sometimes that’s just what you have to do.
He and Aunt Gertie faced each other, squaring off like they were preparing for another duel, though I think they were both just trying to find the right thing to say. Aunt Gertie got there first.
“Jimmy hated jelly beans,” she said.
Dad looked confused. “What?”
“Jelly beans,” she said, pointing at Dad’s tie. “He didn’t like them. Didn’t like how they always got stuck in his dentures. But he ate them anyway. And not just when he came to visit you, either. He’d buy them here and take them to the Legion or to his Saturday-night card game and make all the other old farts try them. And he said that whenever they got an unusual one, they’d make the most hilarious faces and say things like ‘How do they do that?’ and ‘Who thinks of such things?’ and then Jimmy would say, proudly, ‘My son, that’s who.’”
“He never told me he didn’t like jelly beans.”
“Add it to the list,” Aunt Gertie replied.
She then went down the line of Kwirks, whispering something in each of our ears, some little bit of Kwirk wisdom, starting with Cass. When she got to me, she leaned in close, and I could smell the acrid combination of her perfume mixed with Papa Kwirk’s cigar smoke. She looked deathly serious all of a sudden. Her breath tickled the hairs in my ear.
“Be nice to your sisters. They’re good to you. And who knows, they might just end up being your best friends someday. Got it?”
“I got it,” I said. After everything I’d experienced this weekend, I supposed anything was possible.
“Good.” Her stern look softened. She gave me a pat on the cheek and then looked me in the eyes. “And don’t forget to floss.”
Once Aunt Gertie had gotten her hug from Lyra, we all piled into the Tank, my sisters sharing the middle this time, me lording over the back. I had to admit I was a little sorry to go. And not just because of Tasha Meeks—though my left eyebrow still twitched whenever I thought about her. Turns out Greenburg wasn’t entirely terrible. It had its good parts. Like everything else.
“Everyone buckle up,” Dad said, beating Mom to the punch, though she still twisted around to make visual confirmation.
“Did we get all the toiletries?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“And the phone chargers?”
“Yes.”
“And you gave your aunt the check to help cover the memorial expenses?”
“She refused. Again. But I snuck it into her purse. It seemed like the least I could do, after all the sneaky stuff she pulled on us.”
“You checked the tire pressure?”
“Actually, hon, the car has an onboard computer that monitors tire pressure,” Dad said. “But yes. I checked it manually as well. We’re all good.”
Mom turned to us. “Did everyone use the restroom—numbers one and two?”
The collective groaning should have been answer enough, but she waited for us all to say yes. “Okay.” My mother took a deep breath and placed her purse in her lap, then nodded to my father, who put the Tank in reverse.
He’d made it three feet down the driveway when she told him to stop. “My sunglasses,” she said, digging frantically through the Bag of Holding. “They’re not in here. I must have left them on the kitchen counter.”
Dad reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled them out with a flourish. “Ta-da,” he said.
“What would I ever do without you?” Mom kissed him on the cheek.
Dad finished backing out of the driveway, and we all waved goodbye to Aunt Gertie standing on the lawn. Her last words, shouted out to us, were “Drive safe!”
“It’s safely,” Lyra mumbled.
When we were on the road, Mom turned on the radio and started flipping through stations. “What should we listen to?”
“Stuff You Should Know,” Lyra suggested.
“Wicked,” Cass said emphatically. “No. No. Into the Woods. But only the first act. The second act is such a downer.”
“Anything other than what these two want,” I pleaded. Being nice to my sisters didn’t mean having to like everything they did.
“I’m the driver,” Dad proclaimed, “which means I get to decide.”
He gave my mother an almost Aunt Gertieish grin and cued up something he’d loaded onto his phone.
Three seconds later, I heard the four-part harmony kick in. I looked at Cass and rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t help smiling, and neither could she, as the Salty Shakers, led by their golden-voiced tenor, Francis T. Kwirk, started singing us home.