Twenty minutes later, Delilah sat in the back with Cass, and I was in the middle next to Lyra. Thankfully the Tank had three rows of seating—otherwise my sisters and I would have ripped each other’s heads off before we ever got anywhere. At the very least I would have passed out from the fumes of Cass’s body spray.
We hadn’t left the driveway yet, though, because my mother was in check-down mode.
“Did you remember to turn off the coffee pot?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Lock all the windows?”
“Did it.”
“Did you lock the back door and put the door stopper in?”
Dad nodded.
“You unplugged all the computers in case of a lightning strike?”
“And the TVs.”
“What about the fireplace? Did you shut off the gas? I read somewhere that this couple went away for two weeks and forgot to shut off the gas to the fireplace and when they came back their house had exploded because there was a leak that got triggered by the pilot light on the furnace. Did you turn off the furnace?” My mother had her fingers clenched around her giant purse.
“We don’t need to turn off the furnace. Everything is going to be all right. We emptied the fridge of perishables. Shut off all the lights except for the one in the family room that makes it look like someone is home. Locked the back gate. Notified the credit card company.” By the sound of it, you’d think we were leaving to spend the rest of the year in Costa Rica, not driving four hours to spend a long weekend with our great-aunt.
“And you’re sure you turned off the coffee maker?”
My mom and dad stared at each other. Standoff. Finally Dad unbuckled, got out of the car, went to the door, unlocked both locks, shut off the alarm system, and went inside. He appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later with something in his hands.
The coffee maker.
He showed her the plug dangling from it like a dead snake (as opposed to the perfectly alive snake sitting behind me). He nodded as if to say, “Happy now?”
Mom gave him two thumbs-ups.
He set the coffee maker back inside, reset the alarm, and relocked both locks. He jiggled the handle, just to prove to her that it wouldn’t open, then kicked the door repeatedly to prove that it wouldn’t cave in from brute force. Not that my father was the best test subject. He was one hundred percent Banner, zero percent Hulk.
When he started buckling back up, my mother leaned close to him and put her head on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said.
“Love you,” he said.
“Blech,” I said.
Finally we managed to get out of the driveway. “We’re off.” Dad’s voice held an unusual amount of enthusiasm for someone heading to his own father’s funeral. “What should we listen to first?”
“BBC,” Mom said.
“A Way with Words,” Lyra offered.
“Wicked. Original Broadway cast recording!” Cass shouted.
“Best of the Eighties it is,” Dad said.
In our family, the driver is the DJ, which is why I didn’t even bother saying anything. Within seconds, someone Dad identified as Pat Benatar started telling us that we all belonged together. Stuck in the car for hours with my family, I had my doubts. In the house you could always get away, escape to the basement, sneak off to your room. Here we were literally strapped in. No way out, unless you wanted to fling yourself from the speeding car—but even then you’d have to find a way past the child locks.
Might be worth a shot.
As we were about to turn off our street, Mom snapped her fingers.
“But did you remember to lock the garage door?”
Dad put the car in reverse.
Chomp. Smack. Chomp.
Flip. Giggle. Flip. Gasp. Sluuuurp.
Smack. Blow. Pop.
Flip. Sluuuurp. Flip. Giggle.
“De do do do, de da da da, is all I want to say to you.”
Chomp. Chomp. Smack. Pop. Slurp. Flip. Gasp.
There’s a story by Edgar Allan Poe about this guy who kills this other guy and then buries him under the floorboards. But the murderer mistakes his own heartbeat for the sound of the dead guy’s still-somehow-beating heart and goes crazy and confesses to the crime.
Dad was still listening to Best of the Eighties, though it was turned down low enough that I could hear nearly every annoying sound my sisters made. And for some reason, I started to feel a little like the murderer in that Poe story.
“De do do do . . .”
Chomp. Smack. Scritch.
“De da da da . . .”
Flip. Sluuurp.
One look in the back of our SUV will tell you everything you need to know about my sisters. Cass in the way back, dressed in skinny jeans and combat boots, a bottle of SoBe green tea cradled in her lap (sluuurp), reading book four in her favorite fantasy series, the Vendar Chronicles, for what I assume is the five hundred and fortieth time (flip, giggle, gasp).
Button-nosed Lyra to my left, going to town on her sugar-free gum (chomp, smack) and skimming through Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary (she left her eleventh edition at home because she didn’t want to lose it), notebook in hand, jotting down new words to spring on us (scritch). Yesterday morning, for example, I was told that all boys were “infantile” and me especially. I responded by making farting sounds to drown her out until she screamed and left me alone.
And there’s me, the normal one, head pressed to the window, staring at a cornfield that looks like it might stretch as far as an ocean. Amber waves of grain, except it was mostly green and brown and boring.
“Who could possibly eat this much corn?” I wondered to myself, unfortunately loud enough for my father to hear, even over the sound of the gum smacking and page flipping and terrible music.
“Oh—a lot of this won’t be eaten. Not by humans, anyway,” he said, and then he was off. My father felt obligated to make every moment a teaching moment, whether we wanted to learn or not. “Most of it will go to feed animals. Some of it will be used to make fuel. Corn byproducts are used in crayons and glue, and we use a lot of it in the lab to make candy, mostly as a sweetener. In fact, did you know that the ancient Aztecs—”
“Dad . . . Dad . . . Dad.” I had to say it three times to get him to stop. Kind of like summoning Beetlejuice. “It was a rhetorical question.”
“Oh. Okay.” Dad went back to his driving. I wondered if maybe I’d hurt his feelings. But really, it’s corn. Nobody in their right mind would find it interesting.
I looked at the clock on the dashboard. We were only halfway there.
The page flipping was interrupted by a sniffle from behind, then another, followed by a whimper. I twisted and looked over my shoulder to see Cass with her book in her lap, staring out the window too, except she had tears in the corners of her eyes. At first I assumed it had to do with Papa Kwirk. Then I wondered if maybe she just found the endless fields of corn as depressing as I did.
“What?” she said, noticing me staring at her.
“What?” I said back.
“Why are you looking at me?”
“You’re crying.”
“Of course I’m crying!” she snapped. “Prince Teldar just sacrificed himself to the Arkfiend so that Zen and Elsalore could escape.” She held the book up for me to see.
It took everything I had not to laugh. She was crying over a book. And not even one of those sad books where the dog dies. She was crying over some shlocky fantasy novel. And Elsalore? What kind of name is that? Make up your mind: Elsa or Eleanor. Why do fantasy authors have to use such ridiculous names? My sister adored Elsalore, but she also had a major crush on Prince Teldar. As much as you can have a crush on an imaginary elf prince.
“Come on, it’s not like you didn’t see it coming. You’ve read that thing, like, twenty times.” All right, maybe five hundred and forty was a little extreme. I felt solid with twenty though.
“It’s still sad!” Cass snapped. “Just because you see it coming doesn’t make it any less sad when it gets there. And this is only my fourth time, thank you.”
“Four too many,” I said.
“At least I read books.”
“I read books,” I snipped, pointing to the stack of comics sticking out of my backpack. Mostly old issues of the Avengers and a few Uncanny X-Men. Uncanny. Now that’s a good kind of weird. I wouldn’t mind being part of an uncanny family. Provided they could fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes. Cass could only roll hers dismissively. Which she did. Constantly. Including now.
“It’s actually good for you,” Lyra chimed in, coming to her sister’s defense, like usual. “Scientists did a study and found that rereading the same book over and over lets you make an even stronger emotional connection to the characters and events, thereby intensifying the previous experience.”
Intensifying the previous experience. My little sister often sounded like one of those guys who talk at the ends of prescription drug commercials and tell you the hundreds of side effects you’ll experience trying to cure one thing.
“See?” Cass said, and stuck out her tongue at me. I was getting it from both sides now—standard sister flanking maneuver. I should have just kept watching the corn go by.
“Yeah. I’m sure you’re making a real strong emotional connection with that dictionary,” I said, pointing at the book in Lyra’s hands.
“For your information, I read this to expand my vocabulary so that I can more intelligently converse with those around me,” she huffed. “Though given that the person around me is you, it’s probably superfluous.”
“Yeah, it’s superfluous,” I said, wishing I knew what superfluous meant.
“The thing about Prince Teldar,” Cass continued, “is that he loves Elsalore so much that he’s willing to sacrifice his throne, his inheritance, even his own life for hers—a simple peasant girl with an amazing gift.”
“Is it the gift of going on and on about stuff that nobody else cares about? Because if it is, then you two have something in common.”
“For your information, we do have a lot in common.”
“Yeah. You’re both in love with the same guy,” Lyra said with a snicker. My little sister had the working vocabulary of an English professor, but she still thought boys gave you cooties. Which meant when it came to the topic of romance, she and Cass didn’t see eye to eye. I gave Lyra a fist bump, thankful to have her switch sides for once.
“Neither of you has an appreciation for literature,” Cass concluded, and pressed her face more firmly into her book. Lyra went back to her list of words. I went back to the window to find—surprise!—even more corn.
Chomp. Smack. Flip. Slurp. Sniffle. This trip was going to take forever.
Out of nowhere, Mom asked Dad how he was doing. I shifted a little so I could see his face in the rearview mirror.
“I’m okay,” he said, glancing back at me, at us. “We’ll be there in no time.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Mom said, a little more insistently. She was giving him a hard look. I tried to hide the fact that I was eavesdropping by keeping my eyes on the corn parade. Lyra still had her dictionary open, but her eyes were fixed on the back of Dad’s head; she was just as interested in his answer as I was.
Dad let out an exasperated breath. “What do you want me to say, Moll? I told you last night. I mean, it’s not a huge surprise or anything; Frank didn’t exactly embrace a healthy lifestyle. Besides, he must have been anticipating it somehow if he’d already written a song for a clown to sing about him after he died. I mean, who does that?”
It was the same question I’d asked in the planetarium, but Mom had a different answer ready this time. She put a hand on Dad’s shoulder. “Maybe he thought it would make it easier somehow. Lessen the blow.”
Dad snorted and stared straight ahead, following the thread of road that seemed to stretch on and on, past dilapidated barns and exit signs with promises of Waffle Houses open around the clock. “Since when did Frank Kwirk ever make anything easy on anybody?” he said.
That one she didn’t have an answer to. Or maybe she thought it was a rhetorical question too.
Dad pointed out the window at a billboard. “Look, kids,” he said, quickly changing the subject. “The world’s largest mailbox. At the next exit. How big do you think it is?”
The way he said it, I knew we were about to find out. That’s how he is. He gets his mind fixed on something and he makes it happen. Like when he left home to go to college all the way out in New York. Or put himself through graduate school by working two jobs. Or built his own solar-powered, automatic, self-guiding lawn mower—though admittedly Mr. Sunshine did take out Mom’s azaleas on his first outing and was relegated to only tackling the backyard.
One word for that kind of personality is determined. Another is stubborn. You’d have to ask my sister for the rest.
Dad changed lanes and took the ramp. “It will only take a few minutes. Just a quick look-see. Besides, it will do us good to stretch our legs.”
Maybe he really did want to see the world’s biggest mailbox. Or maybe, now that we were on the road, he wasn’t in such a hurry to get back to the town where he was born. Where his own father would be laid to rest. Maybe we were just delaying the inevitable.
I exchanged looks with Lyra.
“Superfluous means unnecessary,” she said.
Admittedly, it was really big.
Maybe not the world’s largest mailbox ever, though I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to build a bigger one. I mean, there was a stairway you had to climb to go inside it, and your voice echoed off the cavernous metal walls. If only the Tank had this kind of roomy interior.
At my mother’s insistence, the three junior Kwirks had to stand inside the giant mailbox while she got a picture of us from down below. Then we had to walk up the block to take in the other ginormous things the town had to offer. A giant bird cage with a perch for you to sit on. (Cass actually made cawing sounds.) The world’s biggest wind chimes. A pair of shoes fit for Jack’s giant that my sisters and I had to pose inside for even more pictures. Apparently, this was what this place was known for—its collection of grossly oversized objects, all made by the same guy, and all on display in a town so small that it had only one McDonald’s and no Starbucks.
It took us about thirty minutes to see everything the town had to offer.
Afterward, we stood beside a pencil that was longer than our car while Mom took more pictures. Lyra and Cass seemed fascinated, but Dad was clearly disappointed. I could see it in his drawn face. I’m not sure what he was expecting; it was exactly as advertised. The giant wind chimes even worked, though I’m guessing it would take a tornado to get them to produce any sound, as heavy as they were.
“I don’t know,” he said, staring up at the mailbox across the street. “I just don’t see what the big deal is.”
My mother and sisters laughed. I shook my head. Dad’s jokes were cornier than all those fields we’d passed.
“Some people want to make their mark on the world,” Mom replied. “You make jelly beans. This guy made a giant mailbox. We all want to leave something behind. This is his legacy.”
“Legacy,” Dad repeated. “I wouldn’t call it a legacy. Einstein had a legacy. Darwin had a legacy. Marie Curie. Louis Pasteur. These are more like . . . trophies.”
“Still got us to pull over,” I said. Dad looked at me and frowned.
I took in the giant pencil he was leaning against. Make your mark. That was one way to go about it. Dad made his mark with his candy. Mom taught busloads of elementary school kids about the cosmos. Cass would probably grow up one day and be on Broadway. Lyra would go on to win Jeopardy! And I . . .
I didn’t know what I would do. Hard to tell what your legacy is going to be when you don’t even know what you’re good at. What sets you apart.
I thought about Papa Kwirk and everything he left behind. His son. His sister. His grandkids. A Harley. A ferret. And what else? There had to be more. So much more. I mean, there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my grandfather. Things that Dad wouldn’t tell me. Stuff that I never got a chance to learn.
I’d find out, though. Sooner rather than later. After all, I was on my way to his hometown to remember the kind of man he was. I was bound to uncover a few new things about Papa Kwirk.
Sometimes it sucks being right.