When we got downstairs, the others had moved from the living room to the dining room in search of tea and coffee. Aunt Gertie was a coffee fiend. Six mugs a day, bare minimum. You could get a caffeine high off her breath. Mom and Dad sat on one end of Aunt Gertie’s old wood table, scrunched close together as usual. At the other end, Aunt Gertie was telling a story to Cass about Papa Kwirk, which I guess meant that it was okay to talk about him again. It was a story from before my dad was even born, though it probably led to that moment eventually.
After all, it was about my grandma Shelley.
“Ah,” Dad said when he saw Lyra and me. “You’re just in time for another one of your grandfather’s harrowing adventures.” Judging by the tone of his voice, he could just as easily have said, “Ah, you’re just in time for your root canal.”
Aunt Gertie ignored him and continued her story, speaking mostly to Cass, who sat, riveted. “So it was their third date, and your grandfather was determined that he was going to ask your grandmother to go steady with him.”
“Wait. Why would she want to study on their third date?” Cass asked.
“Not stuh-dee. Steh-dee. That’s what we called it back then.”
“She means ‘going out,’” Mom clarified, though that just seemed to confuse Cass even more.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Aunt Gertie continued. “Jimmy wanted to make Shelley Harper his girlfriend, so he took her to the carnival, where he was hoping to woo her.”
“You mean make out with her,” Cass said.
“That’s not what ‘woo’ means, sweetie,” Mom said.
“It’s sort of what ‘woo’ means,” Dad offered.
“Can I please tell this story?” Aunt Gertie interjected. “So your grandmother asks Jimmy if he could win her one of those giant stuffed bears—the ones that are almost as big as Lyra over there. And he figures his best chance is at the duck-shoot game. Jimmy had been hunting lots of times. He knew how to shoot real ducks, so metal ones that couldn’t even fly should be no problem, right?”
Nobody had to answer. Whenever something shouldn’t be a problem is precisely when it becomes one. Especially in this family.
“He tried seven times to win that bear for her. Seven times, at a dollar a pop,” Aunt Gertie said. “Spent most of the money he’d brought along and barely had enough left over to buy her a soda. Of course your grandmother insisted she still had a nice time, but Jimmy wouldn’t have it. He was just like that: get an idea in his head and there’s no shaking it.”
Yeah. I knew somebody like that. I glanced at Dad, who appeared to be scratching at a nick in the wood table with his fingernail, only half paying attention. Maybe he’d heard this one before.
“But Shelley Harper wanted that bear, and she was going to get that bear,” Aunt Gertie continued. “So in the middle of the night, your fool grandfather wakes me up and tells me he needs my help. And because I didn’t know any better, we sneak out to the fairgrounds where the carnival’s shut down for the night, and he uses my shoulders to help him scrabble up over the metal fence. He whispers at me to keep guard and to make a sound like a duck if I see anybody. So I just stand there, waiting for what feels like an hour. And it’s cold and I’m getting scared and I’ve got to pee, but as I head for a bush I hear dogs barking. So of course, I start quacking as loud as I can. And then I see your grandfather come tearing around the corner with the giant stuffed bear draped over his shoulders like a wounded soldier, huffing and puffing, face purple as a turnip. It takes him three tries just to throw the thing over, and I’m panicking, yelling at him to hurry, wondering how he’s gonna get back over to my side when he needed my shoulders the first time. Then these two Rottweilers round the corner, flashing their big teeth and growling for blood—and your grandfather jumps higher than he ever jumped in his life, getting his hands on the top of the fence and pulling himself up, those dogs tugging at his pant cuffs, trying to drag him back down so they can have him for breakfast. Jimmy heaved himself over, landing on top of that giant, cushy pink bear just as a shotgun blast cracked the sky. Kapow!”
Aunt Gertie slammed her hands on the table and both Cass and my mother jumped high enough that they probably could have cleared the metal fence as well.
“Jimmy grabbed that bear, tossed it over his shoulders again, and we ran for our lives, all the way back home.”
“Then what happened?” Cass asked.
“What do you think happened?” Aunt Gertie said. “The next morning, your grandmother-to-be woke up to find that giant bear sitting by her back door with a little dried mud on its fur and a note pinned to its belly. The note said, ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.’ Your grandma got her bear. Your grandpa got the girl. And I got in trouble for making too much noise and waking your great-grandparents up in the middle of the night sneaking back into my room.” Aunt Gertie shook her head. “The crazy things we do for love.”
“If that was their third date, I wonder what the first date was like,” I said.
She gave me a sly wink. “That’s a whole ’nother story.”
“Wait a minute,” Lyra said. “You mean Grandpa stole the bear? Doesn’t that make him a criminal?”
“And a trespasser,” Dad pointed out.
“Well . . . yes,” Aunt Gertie hedged. “If you look at it that way. Though the guy running the game probably made a fair bit a money off Jimmy that night too. And the game was rigged. They used to bend the barrels of those guns so they didn’t shoot straight. There isn’t anyone a hundred percent honest in this world.”
“It’s still illegal,” Dad countered. He looked at Lyra. “Just because somebody wrongs you doesn’t automatically justify wronging them back. Your grandfather had a habit of doing whatever he pleased, regardless of the consequences.”
“Well, the consequences of this were that he made Shelley Harper fall in love with him,” Aunt Gertie said. “And if that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be around now to criticize, would you, Fletcher Kwirk?”
Dad looked down at the table and resumed scratching at the wood.
Sensing a sudden shift in the room’s temperature, I grabbed the ThunderCats toothbrush stand from Lyra and held it out.
“Look what we found upstairs,” I said. “It still works.” I pressed the button, and the toothbrush stand called the ThunderCats into action again. The toothbrush itself lit up blue and orange. Dad looked at Lion-O crouched, ready to knock the plaque right off your teeth. I expected his eyes to light up too, expected him to press the button himself. To at least tell Aunt Gertie thank you. Instead he pushed his chair back with an ear-grating creak.
“I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mom offered, but Dad shook his head.
“No. That’s okay. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Cass and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. When, in the entire history of Fletcher and Molly Kwirk, had one ever refused the other’s company? There were gravitational forces that held them in orbit around each other. They even gargled their morning mouthwash together.
Dad went out the back door, banging it shut, my mother frowning after him.
“Is Dad okay?” Lyra asked.
Mom nodded and put an arm around her. “Your father’s fine,” she said. My mother was a terrible liar. She just didn’t have it in her.
Aunt Gertie sighed. “Been meaning to get that door fixed,” she said. “It slams every time.”
I figured that wasn’t true either.
I had never heard that story about the stuffed bear before. Maybe Mom and Dad didn’t want Papa Kwirk telling it to us for fear that we would all grow up to be hardened criminals—though I couldn’t think of a single girl I’d risk getting attacked by dogs for. Then again, Papa Kwirk had told us plenty of stories that didn’t model good behavior. It was always understood that we were not to follow in our grandfather’s footsteps when it came to most anything.
Or maybe I’d never heard it because it was also a story about my grandmother, and no one in my family talked about her much either. Occasionally Dad would mention something—like the thing with the milk and cookies. He could describe what she looked like, the dresses she wore all the time, kind of like Lyra. The sweet, earthy smells she brought home from the nursery where she worked selling flowers, or during the holidays, the nose-tingling scent of freshly cut Christmas trees.
I knew that her name was Michelle but everyone called her Shelley. I knew her father ran a hardware store here in town and that she never got to see the ocean. I knew that she was supposedly the most “drop-dead, knock-your-teeth-out, catch-your-pants-on-fire gorgeous woman in Greenburg, Illinois,” because Papa Kwirk said so. To hear Papa Kwirk tell it, Shelley Harper was the brightest star in the whole universe.
I can sort of picture her, but only from the photo that Dad keeps on his nightstand. One of the two of them, when he was younger than Lyra, sitting side by side on a park bench, feeding pigeons. It’s the only picture of her we have. At least it’s the only one I’ve ever seen.
I know that my grandmother used to knit blankets. I have one, given to me when I was a born. It was my father’s once. It has the words Precious Little Boy stitched into it, otherwise Cass probably would have gotten it instead. It’s up in my closet now, tucked away in a corner, out of sight. The last thing I need is Manny to come over and see it; I’d be “pweshus widdle boy” for the rest of the rest of my middle school career.
Dad said he kept that blanket the whole time he was growing up. It was pretty much the only thing he took with him when he went away to college—the rest he left for Papa Kwirk to throw away. He remembered how sometimes he would curl up underneath it with Grandma Shelley, and they would read books together in his bed, even when he was old enough to read them himself. She would wrap her arms tight around him, and he would drift off in the protective shell she’d made, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find she had somehow slipped away without him knowing.
The habit must have rubbed off on him, because he used to read to me too. Every night without fail, right up until a few years ago.
When I finally begged him to stop.
Dad returned from his walk just in time for dinner, delivered from the only Chinese restaurant in a ten-mile radius. Aunt Gertie adored her house out in the middle of nowhere, but it meant she had to tip big when the teenager finally showed up with giant containers of mu shu pork, General Tso’s chicken, and what seemed like a bucket of fried rice.
“Thanks, Paul. Tell your father I said hello.”
“Will do, Ms. Kwirk,” the delivery guy said. My aunt was a regular customer of the Lucky Dragon, apparently. I suspect everybody in town probably knew who she was, though. Some people have that kind of personality.
“Know what I miss most about New York?” she said as she handed me the bags with orders to set the table. “The food. Out here the only thing people really know how to make is hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.”
“And fried-chicken-flavored jelly beans,” Lyra said as we sat down.
“Fried chicken!” Aunt Gertie exclaimed, unwrapping chopsticks that she was the only one skilled enough to use. “I don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Something new in the works, Fletcher?”
Dad stared at his chopsticks doubtfully, then put them down and grabbed a plastic fork. “It’s really not that big a deal,” he mumbled.
I nearly choked on my bite of rice. Not a big deal? Less than twenty-four hours ago, he was acting like he’d just discovered a new planet. Now it was nothing?
“Don’t be modest,” Mom chipped in. “It’s remarkable. He’s been working on it all year long. He says Garvadill is not even close to unlocking anything like it.”
“And it actually tastes like fried chicken,” Cass seconded.
Dad grinned. “It is a breakthrough,” he admitted finally. “But don’t tell anyone. We want to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. If we’re lucky, Garvadill won’t even know about it until it hits the shelves.” There it was again, Dad’s paranoia that the Slugworths would get their hands on his Everlasting Gobstopper.
“Fried chicken. That’s amazing,” Aunt Gertie said, taking a bite of chicken herself. “Now if you could only make one that tastes like cheesecake . . . I mean actual New York cheesecake, not that frozen crap you find in the grocery store, pardon my French.”
“None of that was French,” Lyra informed her. Aunt Gertie poked my sister’s belly with her chopsticks.
“And they already have cheesecake jelly beans,” I added. Though I doubted they would live up to Aunt Gertie’s expectations. Sort of like all the men she’d ever dated.
“You kids know that eating too much candy will rot your teeth,” Aunt Gertie said. “Especially those sticky jelly beans.”
I froze, a piece of pork half chewed in my mouth. Here it comes. There probably wasn’t a kid in the world who didn’t know that, but Aunt Gertie felt the need to tell us every time we saw her. Not surprising for a lady with a treasure chest full of toothbrushes, but still.
And every time she said it, Dad’s face would redden.
This time he let out a long nasally breath. “Those jelly beans are our livelihood, Gertie. They help put a roof over our heads,” he said. “They help pay for groceries. They will help pay for college someday.” As he spoke, a funny image popped into my head: my father standing in the checkout lane of the grocery store, counting jelly beans into the clerk’s hands, then driving home to a house made of candy, just like the witch in a fairy tale.
Aunt Gertie looked taken aback. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Honestly, Fletcher, I think it’s wonderful. You work hard and you love what you do. And like you said, you provide for your kids. What more could you ask for?”
“Better than making the kids provide for themselves,” Dad mumbled loud enough so I could hear, but I was sitting next to him.
“What was that?” my aunt asked.
“Nothing,” Dad said.
“No. If you have something you want to say, please, feel free to say it. We’re all family here.” Aunt Gertie stared at my father and he stared back, as if their eyes were having a conversation we weren’t a part of.
After a few seconds, my mother turned to Cass. “Why don’t you tell Aunt Gertie how your acting is going?”
Cass was all too happy to oblige. “Okay. Get this. . . .”
The next ten painful minutes were spent hearing about how Marissa Innes was a terrible Belle because she couldn’t fake cry and her voice wasn’t strong enough and how she was only picked as the lead in the musical because she had naturally big eyelashes and looked good in a yellow dress. Then, to compound the torture, Aunt Gertie requested a serenade, and Cass broke into song right there at the table, flailing her arms around until she knocked over Lyra’s glass of milk.
From there it was typical Kwirk chaos. Lyra called her a “foozler,” which sounded like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, and threw a piece of chicken, which got stuck in Cass’s hair, causing her to scream so loud that Dad jerked, banging his knee on the bottom of the table while Mom swabbed frantically at the milk with her napkin, desperate to keep at least one part of the house clean. Aunt Gertie said it wasn’t worth crying about, I assumed in reference to the milk, though it could have been the flung chicken or the banged knee or something else entirely, though nobody was actually crying. Not at the moment, anyway.
For my part, I just sat and watched, thinking, Yup. Totally adopted. No doubt in my mind.
When the mess was finally cleaned up—and after Lyra apologized for calling Cass names—Aunt Gertie dug the fortune cookies out of the bottom of the take-out bag and handed them out. At her insistence, we all took turns going around the table reading our little slips of paper out loud. Most of them were terrible. Things like The greatest risk is not taking any and To love your life you must live the life you love. Mine was Be happy. You can read and you get a cookie, which was hard to argue with. Aunt Gertie’s was strangely specific: You will find love on Thursday. She said that was good because it gave her a few days to get her nails done.
When it got to Dad, he shook his head, then balled up his fortune and tossed it into the middle of the table, where it almost landed in the still-half-full carton of rice.
“I’d rather not,” he said. Then he thanked Aunt Gertie for dinner and excused himself to the family room. Mom followed closely behind, their personal gravity working this time. I could hear them whispering to each other but couldn’t tell what they were saying.
As soon as they were both out of the room, Cass and I both reached for Dad’s crumpled fortune, but I got to it first.
Apologizing is hard. Foregiving is even harder.
Lyra leaned over my shoulder and pointed. “They spelled ‘forgiving’ incorrectly.”
“Maybe spelling is the hardest,” I joked, but neither of my sisters laughed.
Aunt Gertie cracked a smile, at least, but I got the impression she was thinking about something else entirely.
That night after Cass and I washed, dried, and put away the dishes under Mom’s direction (“at least this will be one thing back where it belongs”), I gave in and tried to help Lyra find Beelzebub. But the ferret—like the chemical formula for the taste of armpits—proved elusive. We ended up back in the Vault, where Lyra discovered the boxes of National Geographics, and we spent the next hour side by side, flipping through them, mostly looking at the pictures.
At one point, Ly leaned over and showed me a photo of the aurora borealis overlooking some glaciers near Greenland. Iridescent waves of light with wispy edges, purple and green, stretching toward a dark horizon, like fingers reaching for something nobody could see. It was pretty amazing. And it made me wish I was in Greenland instead of Greenburg. Though, to be honest, just about any place could have made that list.
“I bet that’s what heaven looks like,” Lyra said in a singsong sighing voice.
But before I could say “That would be nice,” she had turned the page.