Absolutely Truly (4 page)

He ignored me. “You can stay and help your aunt and me when we're done with tutoring, then Danny can pick you up on his way home from practice.”

“But—” I tried again.

“We're about to start inventory, and we could use an extra pair of hands,” he continued. He glanced down at his own left hand, which was awkwardly gripping his fork, and frowned briefly. “I'd enlist your brothers, but they'll be too busy to help right now, what with wrestling season starting.”

The table fell silent as he jabbed his fork into a bite of lasagna. Hatcher and I exchanged a glance. Wrestling was a sore topic these days. Before Black Monday, Dad had always helped coach Hatcher and Danny when he was home, but now—well, now he could barely even say the word.

“But—”

“No buts, young lady. That's an order.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lovejoy is big on orders, too.

“What about swim team tryouts?” I burst out, unable
to contain myself any longer. I did remember to add “sir,” though. Lola and Gramps had checked for me, and the tryouts were scheduled for the end of the month.

“You bring your grade up, then we'll talk swim team,” my father replied coolly. “Until then, young lady, this is a done deal.”

Good-bye sunshine, hello snow
, I thought glumly the following morning, staring out the window of our minivan as we pulled out of the driveway. It's not a very long walk to school from where Gramps and Lola live, but Mom had offered to drop us off on the way to her first class because of the storm.

Heaps and heaps of the white stuff had fallen overnight, at least a foot of it, and it was still coming down. Just to torture myself, I'd checked the weather in Austin this morning: sixty-two degrees and sunny. It was practically summer there. The thermometer outside Gramps and Lola's kitchen window, meanwhile? A frigid seventeen degrees.

If we were thinking maybe school would be canceled, though, we were wrong. My father snorted when Hatcher brought it up at the breakfast table.

“A snow day in Pumpkin Falls? Don't get your hopes up,”
he'd told us. “A little precipitation never stops anything here in the Granite State.”

A little? Staring out at the yard, which was barely visible, I caught a flash of red by the bird feeder as a male cardinal swooped down from a nearby tree. Cardinals are already on my life list, of course—they're a really common bird—but they're still one of my favorites. I just love those bright red feathers, especially this time of year.

“How about cold, then?” Hatcher clearly wasn't going to give up. He'd tapped the newspaper lying on the table in front of Dad. Half the front page of the
Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle
was devoted to a picture of the town's famous waterfall, along with a headline that screamed
FALLS FREEZE FOR FIRST TIME IN A CENTURY!
I couldn't believe this was what passed for news here. A frozen waterfall? Seriously?

“Nope, cold won't do it either,” Dad had replied calmly. “Better get your jackets on.”

A snow day would have been really nice. I wasn't feeling ready to face a new school again. After our move to Austin, I'd thought I was finally done with that.

The snow crunched beneath the minivan's tires as Mom turned off Maple onto Hill Street and headed down toward town. Tourists call Pumpkin Falls picturesque because of the waterfall and the covered bridge and the old-fashioned bandstand on the village green—village white, this morning—that anchors the center of town. They flock here like migrating
geese every fall to tour the college campus, famous for its cluster of white clapboard buildings, and to take pictures of the steeple on the church, with its giant clock and the bell made by Paul Revere, and to buy maple syrup and maple sugar candy and souvenirs at the General Store. Mostly they come to gawk at the fall foliage, though. Everybody calls them leaf peepers, but I call them stupid. Who cares about a bunch of leaves?

We skirted one end of the village green, passing several big, square, Colonial-style houses, the post office, the Pumpkin Falls Bed & Breakfast, the Pumpkin Falls Savings & Loan, and, right by the iron gates and big driveway leading onto the campus, the official residence of the president of Lovejoy College. I knew this because the sign out front said so.

“The wheels on the bus go round and round . . .” From her booster seat in front of me, Pippa belted out a tuneless rendition of her favorite song. Lauren was seated next to her with her nose in a book as usual, and Hatcher was in the front passenger seat, talking to Mom. I was in the way back in my seat of choice by the right-hand window. Usually Hatcher is beside me because Danny likes to ride shotgun, but Danny was long gone. He'd gotten up at zero dark thirty this morning to drive himself to West Hartfield.

I'd noticed that Danny wasn't complaining much about the move to Pumpkin Falls. Probably because Gramps and Lola had given him their car to use while they were in Africa. He'd hardly stopped grinning since he got the keys.

“Round and round, round and round,” droned Pippa.

My mother glanced in the rearview mirror. “Could you maybe keep it down a little, please, peanut?”

Pippa cranked it up a notch instead. “ROUND AND ROUND, ROUND AND ROUND!”

My mother sighed. We eased to a stop across from the world's teeniest public library, then turned onto Main Street, which Gramps always rather grandly refers to as “the heart of the business district.” If this was the heart, I figured it must be on life support. There were only a handful of businesses besides the bookshop, and if you ask me, which nobody ever does, the only one that's the least bit interesting is the Pumpkin Falls General Store.

Dad says it's the biggest tourist trap north of Boston, but my brothers and sisters and I love it. They're not kidding about the “general” part. You can buy anything there. Need a mop? They've got it. Tulip bulbs? Those, too. From plumbing supplies and fishing tackle to printer ink, livestock feed, kitchen gadgets, snow shovels, postcards, T-shirts, underwear—if you can think of it, the general store probably has it. At Easter, they even sell baby chicks and ducklings. Plus there's a penny candy counter and an old-fashioned soda fountain with homemade ice cream that's almost as good as Amy's in Austin. One of my favorite things to do whenever we visit Gramps and Lola in the summertime is to sit out on the store's front porch in one
of the rocking chairs, eating a strawberry ice-cream cone.

Mom slowed as we approached Lovejoy's Books. A big sign across the front window read
CLOSED FOR INVENTORY
. Someone was standing outside, and Pippa stopped singing long enough to shout, “Daddy!”

“No, honey,” my mother told her. “I think it's Aunt True.”

It was kind of hard to tell from the back, because whoever it was was wearing a big hooded jacket. Then I realized they were shoveling snow, which meant it probably wasn't Dad. Stuff like that is still awkward for him, even with his new prosthesis.

Aunt True spotted us and waved the shovel. We waved back. Mom pulled over to the curb and lowered her window.

“Howdy!” she said. “Working hard, I see.”

My aunt grinned. “You bet. Everybody ready for school?”

Pippa and Lauren nodded happily. Hatcher and I shrugged. Kindergarten and fourth grade are still something to get excited about, but once you hit middle school, it's not as much of a thrill.

My aunt smiled at me. “Your dad says that you'll be joining us at the bookshop later, Truly.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“That's way better than stupid day care,” Lauren grumbled. Mom's class schedule means that my sisters have to go to after-school care, and Lauren is not happy about it.

Aunt True reached over my mom's shoulder and plucked
Lauren's book away.
“The Long Winter,
huh?” she said, reading the title. “Good choice for a day like today.” She gave it back. “I love Laura Ingalls Wilder. I have all her books—maybe there's one you'd like to borrow. How about you come over for tea at my apartment one afternoon soon?”

“What about me?” said Pippa. Her lower lip trembled, poised to turn on the waterworks if the answer was no.

“You're invited too, of course,” Aunt True told her.

My aunt is living above the bookstore. Gramps and Lola own the whole building, and she moved into the apartment upstairs when she came home to Pumpkin Falls to help out.

To be honest, Aunt True is a bit of a mystery. She's visited us a few times over the years, and she always remembers to send presents at Christmas and birthdays, but I don't really know her very well. Everybody says we look alike, but I think it's just because we're both tall. Well, maybe that and the freckles. She sure isn't quiet like me, though. If I had to compare Aunt True to a bird, I'd have to pick a loud one.

Mom I've always thought of as a robin. They're such cheery, dependable birds. And Dad's an eagle for sure, what with his strong jaw, piercing gaze, and prominent nose. He got stuck with the Lovejoy proboscis, just like Gramps. So far, none of us kids have shown signs of sprouting it, although I've caught Hatcher staring at his profile in the mirror a few times recently. He's worried it's going to appear out of the blue one of these days, like chest hair or zits.

My gaze settled on Aunt True's hat. Multicolored and lumpy, it had braided yarn ties dangling from the earflaps and was obviously hand-knit. It was identical to the ones she'd brought back for Danny and Hatcher and me from her trip to Peru. We were smart enough not to wear ours in public, though.

Parrot, maybe? Yeah, that fit. Aunt True was a parrot, loud and bright and squawky.

“Bye, kids! Have fun!” she called as we drove off.

Fun? I sincerely doubted it. I felt a prickle of nausea as we made a left onto School Street—how original—and pulled up in front of a brick building with the words
DANIEL WEBSTER SCHOOL
carved in stone above the entrance. A bunch of kids were milling around outside, trying to make a snowman, but the snow was too dry and powdery.

We went directly to the front office inside, where the principal came out to greet us.

“You must be Dinah Lovejoy,” he said, shaking Mom's hand. “I'm John Burnside—J. T. and I were at school here together many moons ago. I was so sorry to hear about his injury.”

That's another thing about small towns. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's business.

“I'm looking forward to catching up with him as soon as you're settled in,” Mr. Burnside continued. “I hear he and True are going to be running the bookshop?”

“That's right,” Mom replied.

“Excellent, excellent. Wish you could have been here for the good-bye party for Walt and Lola. It was a humdinger.” He cocked his head and looked me and my siblings over.
Flamingo
, I thought. Tall and bony, with thinning red hair and a skinny neck that popped up out of his shirt collar like a periscope, Mr. Burnside reminded me of the large pink birds we saw last spring break in Florida. I half expected him to tuck one leg up under him, the way flamingos often do. “We certainly are looking forward to having Lovejoys here at our school again.”

“And they're certainly looking forward to being here, aren't you, kids?” said my mother, nudging Hatcher, who nodded and gave the principal one of his big sunflower smiles.

“You'll practically double our school population!” Mr. Burnside joked.

That almost wasn't a joke, as it turned out. Daniel Webster School had fewer than a hundred students, with kindergarten through eighth grade all crammed under one roof.

“It's like the one-room schoolhouse in
Little House on the Prairie
!” said Lauren, sounding excited.

Mr. Burnside laughed. “Not quite.”

After sorting out all the paperwork and locker assignments, our new principal offered to show my little sisters to their classrooms. Pippa was acting clingy, so my mother went with them.

“Got your lunch?” she called back to me over her shoulder. I nodded, and she blew me a distracted kiss.

“Daniel Webster doesn't have a real middle school, but they put the seventh and eighth graders upstairs so they can pretend like we do,” said the bubbly girl who'd been assigned to escort my brother and me to our classrooms. “You're Lovejoys, right? My name is Annie Freeman and I'm in fourth grade. I live on a farm with my family up near the ski run on Lovejoy Mountain.”

Not only had Nathaniel Daniel founded the college, he'd also named a mountain and a lake after himself. I guess he figured why not, since he was one of the first settlers in the Pumpkin River Valley. “Mountain” is a pretty grandiose name for the big hill on the far side of the covered bridge, though. Especially for someone like me who spent two years in Colorado, where the real mountains live.

Hatcher's classroom was at the top of the stairs. “You'll like Mr. Mazzini,” Annie told him. “He's the most popular teacher in the eighth grade.” She grinned. “Of course, he's the only teacher in the eighth grade, except for Mr. Bigelow, who doesn't count, because he teaches science to everybody.”