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  “What part do you want?” I asked.

  “Gretel. Most of the girls want to be Gretel. Jodie wants to be the witch. I’m glad Jodie doesn’t want to be Gretel, because it would be awful if you and your best friend wanted the same part and only one of you could get it, don’t you think? But it will still be pretty awful if Jodie is the witch and I’m a bird. But I’ll act happy for her.”

  “Maybe you’ll be Gretel and Jodie will be a bird,” I suggested.

  “No, Jodie will definitely be the witch. You should hear her say, ‘Nibble, nibble, little mousie. Who’s that nibbling at my housie?’ It would make your blood run cold.”

  I doubted that greatly.

  “You haven’t nibbled a bite,” Mom told Carly. “Drink your hot chocolate before it gets cold. Cooper, what’s new and exciting for you at school these days?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing in Food Fun?”

  “We’re going to cook dinner at the Community Table next week. For homeless people. Or anybody who needs a free dinner. Each Food Fun class has a different night. My class has Tuesday. We’re going to make spaghetti and salad and garlic bread. We’re not making desserts, because we’ll have cakes and pies donated by one of the big grocery stores.”

  “What a wonderful idea! I’m so glad you’re doing something to help those poor, desperate people. Can parents help?”

  I wanted to say no, but the fact was that in my backpack at that very moment was a permission slip I was supposed to give to her, and right on the permission slip was a box where parents could sign up to assist.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I think Mr. Pasta’s going to end up with too many parents who want to help. He only needs a few.”

  Mom laughed. “You mean you don’t want to be embarrassed by having your mother there. Right? I was in middle school once myself, and I remember thinking I’d die if my parents helped out at school with anything.”

  “So you won’t sign up to help?” I was relieved that she understood.

  “No! Of course I’m going to sign up to help; Carly can spend the evening with Jodie. I meant that you won’t be the first or last middle school kid to be embarrassed by your parent. I was embarrassed by my parents, and I’m sure someday your kids will be embarrassed by you.”

  I sighed and pulled the permission slip out of my backpack. It might be true that all kids were embarrassed by their parents. But it was also true that some parents were more embarrassing than others.

  Still, at least my mom cared about homeless people, unlike Gran-Dan. All we were going to be doing was making spaghetti and putting it on plates. There was no reason to be nervous about Mom being there. No reason at all.

  9

  Dinner at the Community Table started out all right. As soon as the final bell rang, the kids from our Food Fun class went by school bus with Mr. Pasta to the church that hosted the dinner. The parent helpers were supposed to meet us there, but Mom was late.

  Mr. Pasta handed out jobs from his long printed list. Spencer took cutting up desserts. Ben took chopping onions. “I need two people to chop the green peppers,” Mr. Pasta said.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Lindsay said.

  I felt myself flushing. Had Lindsay volunteered for the green peppers because she wanted to chop green peppers, or because she wanted to chop green peppers with me?

  Either way, there we stood, side by side, facing a huge bag of peppers. Wordlessly we ran them under cold water and then began slicing them in half, scooping out the seeds, and cutting them into small pieces.

  I tried to think of something to say. “Your pieces are smaller than mine,” I observed.

  Lindsay studied my cutting board. “I think that’s okay.”

  “They’re all going to get mixed up together anyway,” I agreed. “Your peppers and mine.” I blushed again. I hoped she didn’t think I was trying to be romantic.

  “This pepper is funny-looking.” Lindsay held up a pepper that had two dents that looked sort of like eyes, and a bulge beneath them that resembled a nose.

  “We should give it a name,” I suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “Peter Pepper?” It was a dumb, obvious name, but I had never been asked to come up with a name for a pepper before.

  “Hi, Peter,” Lindsay said to the pepper.

  “Hi, Lindsay,” I made the pepper say. I had never made a voice for a pepper before, either.

  “Now I don’t want to cut him up,” Lindsay said.

  “We don’t have to. The sauce will taste the same without him.”

  “We could rescue him!”

  “Take him home!”

  “He could be our pet!”

  “Our Peter Pepper pet!”

  We were both laughing now.

  From the stove, Mr. Pasta called out, “Onions! Peppers! Garlic!” Still giggling, Lindsay and I hastily chopped up the remaining peppers under Peter Pepper’s watchful gaze. We kept him apart from all the other peppers, so we wouldn’t chop him up by mistake. I had never dreamed I could have so much fondness for a vegetable.

  By five o’clock the huge cauldron of sauce was bubbling on the stove, a vat of spaghetti had been boiled and drained, the garlic bread was staying warm in the oven, and the salad was tossed. For the first time I became aware that the dining room beyond the kitchen had filled up with perhaps a hundred people waiting to be served. The man in charge of the Community Table welcomed everyone, led a short moment of silence, and then the homeless people lined up for their food.

  I was relieved not to be one of the kids doing the serving. It had been hard enough making conversation with Lindsay and Peter Pepper. I had never tried to talk to anybody who was homeless. But as the diners filed through the serving line, they didn’t seem like homeless people, and they certainly didn’t seem like lazy bums. They just seemed like people. Most were men, but some were women. They joked about the weather, commented on the food, thanked the servers for helping.

  “Hi, honey.” I whirled around. It was my mother. “I’m sorry I’m late. What should I be doing?”

  Mr. Pasta overheard the question. “You and Cooper can take the dessert carts around.”

  Two carts held a selection of donated cakes and pies cut up into pieces. I took one cart, and Mom took the other. I wheeled my cart silently from table to table, but Mom talked to everybody. It was nice to talk to people, I reminded myself. She was just being friendly.

  But I could hear her across the room, talking too loud, too fast. She was telling one homeless man about her quilts, the show she was going to enter, how much she loved color. I couldn’t hear what the man replied.

  “Exactly!” Her voice rose above the hubbub of the crowded hall. “I knew you were an artist, too!”

  A woman with two missing front teeth took the last piece of pie from my cart. I had just begun wheeling the empty cart back to the kitchen when I heard someone clinking a spoon against a glass to get everybody’s attention.

  “Excuse me!” my mom called out. “I have an announcement to make! I’m going to be organizing a Community Table art show. Art by and about the homeless.”

  What?

  “I know that some of you here are artists—I mean, everybody is an artist in some way, right? So I’m inviting you to create your own artwork and submit it for the show.”

  The man she had been talking to asked a question, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

  “Art in any medium—painting, sculpture, ceramics, fabric art, you name it. Preference will be given to pieces that illuminate the experience of homelessness.”

  The Community Table leader approached her and said something in a low voice. He probably was surprised to find that his organization was now sponsoring an art show.

  “Call me at home,” she continued, “and I’ll give you the details, once I have them.” She recited her name and our home phone number.

  Back in the
kitchen, I was put to work drying dishes with Ben and Spencer. Lindsay had been helping to serve, but the long line of diners had finally come to an end, so she joined the crew of dryers.

  “Your mom is brave,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. That was one way of looking at it.

  “Are you going to help her with the art show? I can help, too. I mean, if you need help.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, what?”

  I thought of the still unfinished quilt for the quilt show; the competition deadline had come and gone. “My mother’s ideas don’t always end up happening,” I told her. These days they didn’t.

  “At least she has ideas,” Lindsay said.

  I didn’t know how to reply to that. I dried the rest of the mugs from the dishwasher while Lindsay dried a stack of trays. Maybe we would all be lucky and the art show idea wouldn’t happen, either.

  But I couldn’t shake the memory of my mom there with all the homeless strangers, acting like they were her best friends in the whole world, words and ideas pouring out of her in a flood, washing over everybody in the room. Washing over me.

  On Wednesday, Carly was going to find out what part she was getting in the play. I walked home more quickly than usual from the bus stop, though if Carly was going to be in tears, I didn’t particularly want to see it. Even when my mom had been depressed for so long, I had hardly ever prayed that she would get better. It somehow had seemed too big a prayer for even God to handle. But I prayed now: “Dear God, please don’t let Carly be a bird.”

  As soon as I came in the front door, I knew it was all right. Carly ran up to me, her face radiant.

  “I’m Gretel!” she announced unnecessarily. “And Jodie is the witch!”

  “And I’m building the set!” my mom chimed in as she followed behind Carly.

  I felt a twinge of uneasiness. “When is the play?”

  “The first week in December!” Carly said. “We have four weeks of rehearsal. I already know most of my lines. I thought maybe it was bad luck to learn them ahead of time, but I learned them anyway. Do you want to hear them, Cooper? I have the very first line in the whole play. I hold my stomach and I say, ‘Hansel, I’m hungry.’ Because we’re poor, you know, and our parents have no money to buy food to feed us.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “You can say the rest for me later.” I wasn’t worried about Carly learning her lines in time for the play. I was worried about my mother finishing the set in time for the play. “What kind of set is it going to be?”

  “I’ll need to make the witch’s gingerbread house, and the cage where Hansel is fattened to be eaten, and the oven.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Well, I don’t see how you could stage Hansel and Gretel with less, do you? Don’t worry, honey, it will go fast. I can get started on it as soon as I finish my quilt for the quilt show.”

  “I thought you missed the deadline for the quilt show.”

  “For the other quilt show. And I need to apply for a grant to get funding for ‘Homeless, Not Voiceless’—that’s what I’m calling the art show for the Community Table. Don’t look so panicked, Cooper. Have you ever heard the saying ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’?”

  I hadn’t. It seemed like a dumb saying. She was in a good mood, so I took a chance. “What about the saying ‘Don’t bite off more than you can chew’?”

  She laughed. “Funny you should say that. I learned a little poem once that went like this: ‘Bite off more than you can chew, and chew it. Plan for more than you can do, and do it. Hitch your wagon to a star, keep your seat, and there you are!’ ”

  Carly loved the poem and made Mom say it again.

  I wanted to ask, But what if you don’t keep your seat? Then what? But I had said enough already.

  Carly and I had started building a little stable house for Princess Inchitella. The roof was made of toothpicks, glued together, with tufts of cotton covering it for snow. Carly had taken a pinch or two of lint from the dryer and used it to stuff a tiny mattress made of two felt rectangles stitched together, and an even tinier pillow. Inchitella’s table was made of a penny propped up on legs sawed from a toothpick with my Swiss Army knife. Instead of chairs, Inchitella and Parsley had teeny stools made from brass fasteners. A seashell the size of my pinkie nail served as their sink.

  I had wondered if Carly would trim the stable with Hansel-and-Gretel-style candy decorations, but the only way the play rehearsals affected Inchland was that Inchitella and Parsley had become friends with a flock of kindly birds.

  “The birds bring them food,” Carly explained Thursday after school, as I was trying to construct a miniature stone fireplace out of a cupful of gravel collected from the driveway.

  “Worms?”

  “Of course not, silly. Nuts and berries. Even birdseed is good. Inchitella grinds it into flour to make tiny loaves of brown bread. She makes jam from the berries. And the bees bring her some of their honey.”

  “In the winter?” I asked. “I thought bees made honey in the summer.”

  “They make it in the summer, and then they eat it in the winter.”

  I had no idea if Carly’s statement was true, but it sounded plausible enough.

  “Nothing has ever tasted so good to Inchitella as that homemade brown bread spread with honey,” Carly continued. “At the castle she used to eat . . . What are some fancy foods, Cooper?”

  I tried to remember Mr. Pasta’s favorite delicacies. “Artichoke hearts. Smoked salmon.”

  “At the castle she used to eat artichoke hearts and smoked salmon, all by herself, on silver plates edged with gold, and she’d wipe her mouth on a silken napkin. But she’s happier eating brown bread and honey with Parsley.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  I looked up from sorting through the gravel to find Mom standing beside me, gazing down at my work.

  “Inchitella,” Carly said. “The princess of Inchland. Remember Gran-Dan’s deeds?”

  Mom looked blank.

  “To one square inch of the Yukon? Well, Cooper and I put our square inches together, and we’ve made them into a country called Inchland. And it has a king named King Inchard, and a queen named Queen Incharina, and a princess named Princess Inchitella, and Princess Inchitella has run away, and now she lives in a stable, and Cooper and I are making the stable.”

  “You have a wonderful imagination, Carly,” Mom said, when my sister paused for breath. “Both of you do. I’m so proud of your stories, Carly, and Cooper, of your talent for art. What are you making there, Coop?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I shielded my work on the gravel fireplace with my hand. “I’m just messing around.”

  “I have an idea,” Mom said. “You could make plates for Inchitella and Parsley using a hole punch on laminated paper, or colored plastic, the kind from a report cover for school.”

  It was a good idea, but I didn’t want anybody else’s good ideas. Carly and I had enough good ideas of our own.

  “I’ll go look for one,” Mom volunteered. “I know we have heaps of plastic covers around here somewhere.”

  “Actually,” I said, “we were just finishing up for today. I have to practice my trombone. And then I have homework. And Carly has homework, too, don’t you, Carly?”

  “Yes, but we can make the plates first, can’t we, Cooper?”

  “We’ll make them tomorrow.”

  “And you could make drinking glasses by snipping off the ends of plastic straws,” Mom continued.

  “I have to go,” I said. I didn’t want to be mean, so I added, “Big test on commas tomorrow for Alpert.”

  I left for my room, but not before I heard her say, “What could they use for a bathtub? I know—a peanut shell!”

  I played my trombone extra loud so I wouldn’t hear Carly’s high, piercing voice telling Mom more about Inchland, and Mom’s voice, too loud, too fast, too enthusiastic in reply.

  Wasn’t Carly the one who had wan
ted to keep Inchland secret? Wasn’t she the one who said that something terrible could happen if big people ever discovered it?

  10

  Of the three of us, Ben’s birthday came first, in October, then Spencer’s the middle of November, and finally me in May. Ben had had a big party on his twelfth birthday—a dozen guys going to see the football game at the university. Spencer’s party was just a sleepover for the three of us.

  I walked over to Spencer’s around five o’clock with my sleeping bag, not that I planned to sleep, and my toothbrush, not that I planned to brush my teeth.

  It now seemed unbelievable that I had ever considered Spencer’s house messy. Compared to my own house these days, Spencer’s was a model of neatness. You could sit on any couch without having to move heaps of fabric or quilting magazines. You could walk across vast expanses of bare floor—dodging the occasional pair of shoes or empty pizza box, to be sure. Dirty dishes filled the sink, but not the kitchen counters. Being at Spencer’s felt almost like being at Ben’s.

  Ben arrived soon afterward, and we claimed the game system in the basement rec room, using Spencer’s birthday privileges to banish his older brothers. Around seven we joined Spencer’s family for huge quantities of pizza. As usual, everyone was shouting rather than talking, grabbing rather than reaching, jostling each other to get the last piece of sausage and pepperoni. Spencer’s dogs barked incessantly. It was all good-natured and jolly.

  Spencer’s cake was lit: twelve candles. In another year we would all be thirteen: teenagers. Spencer’s mom started singing “Happy Birthday to You” in a high, fake-operatic voice. Spencer’s dad drowned her out with his booming bass. One of Spencer’s brothers added lyrics I had never heard before: not the standard “Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too,” but something that had “You just stepped in poo” as one of the lines, and “You smell like dog doo” as another. All three dogs were howling, each in a different key.