All Fall Down (8 page)

As the sun rose in the sky, Tommy flipped
the sunflower sunglasses down from the top of his head to his nose.
He might look stupid, but who was here to see?

He'd saved the note she'd left him, too. It
was folded up neat and safe, and tucked carefully in the zipper
pouch next to the picture of his parents.

"I'm glad you taught me to fish, too," he
said.

Someday he might even learn to like the
taste.

~ ~ ~

Missy and
the Man

Missy just wanted to see the kittens, that
was all. She'd seen cats before. All kinds of cats—orange cats with
white paws, white cats with pink ears and noses, and black cats
with yellow eyes that looked like they should be mean but they
weren't—but she'd never seen little baby kittens. Missy knew how to
pet cats good. Mommy said cats liked to be petted soft, like Missy
did with her doll's hair. Missy and her mommy both liked cats, but
her daddy didn't, so they didn't have any of their own.

Their neighbor did, though. He didn't seem
like he was a very nice man, but he had a pretty gray cat with a
white face and long fur and a fat belly that Mommy said was full of
kittens, so the man couldn't be all that mean. Missy didn't think a
cat, especially a cat about to have kittens, would live with
someone who was mean.

The man wasn't really
their
neighbor
neighbor, like Missy's friend Laura's daddy, who lived next
door to where Missy and her parents lived. The man with the kittens
was just the man who lived in the house next to the house where
Missy's daddy had his shop.

Missy's daddy fixed other
people's furniture, and her mommy helped. They were always too busy
to play with Missy, so when she was done watching
Gilligan's Island
or
My Three Sons
on the little television in the back room where Mommy worked,
Missy went outside all by herself to play in the backyard behind
Daddy's shop, just like a Big Girl.

The backyard behind Daddy's shop didn't have
grass like the backyard at home. Instead it had lots of dirt and
rocks and weeds, and grasshoppers that were almost as big as her
fingers. Sometimes Missy took her dolls outside and pretended the
backyard was a great big desert and her dolls needed Missy to
rescue them. But sometimes she left her dolls inside so she could
play her absolute most-favorite game: being a cat.

When Missy pretended she was a cat, she'd
walk as quiet as she could through the weeds along the edge of the
yard so she could surprise a grasshopper. Grasshoppers were fun to
play with, but Missy was careful never to hurt them, even though
she was pretty sure a real cat wouldn't be so nice to something it
was hunting.

Stalking along the fence in search of
grasshoppers was how Missy found the hole in the fence.

One of the big, tall boards in the fence was
broken. The hole was just big enough that Missy could look through
the fence into the man's backyard. It was as full of weeds as the
backyard behind Daddy's shop. Daddy didn't have time to take care
of two yards, Mommy had told Missy, he was too busy working. Missy
didn't care. Besides pretending to be a cat and playing with her
dolls, Missy got to dig in the dirt with a big old spoon. Sometimes
she pretended to dig for buried treasure and other times she dug
just to see what was there. Mommy called Missy her little explorer.
Missy wasn't quite sure what Mommy meant, especially since whenever
Mommy said that, she also told Missy never to go exploring in the
front yard and especially not in the street.

Mommy never said Missy couldn't explore in
someone else's backyard.

Even so, Missy never would have even thought
about going through the hole in the fence if the man's pretty cat
hadn't scurried inside the man's garage through a broken window.
Missy put her ear next to the hole and listened really hard. She
heard teeny, tiny cries. The kittens had to be the in garage! No
one would mind if she looked, would they? It wasn't like she was
going to hurt anything or take anything. She just wanted to see the
kittens.

The hole in the fence wasn't quite big
enough for Missy to fit through. She was a little girl—Daddy always
said she was his cute little girl—but Missy was too big to fit. She
wasn't allowed to go out in the front yard by herself, so she
couldn't just walk down the sidewalk to the neighbor's house and
ask to see his kittens. But maybe if she worked at it, she could
make the hole in the fence bigger.

Missy watched her daddy sometimes when he
worked on furniture. Most of the time he had to take things apart
before he could put them back together. He said it made the
furniture stronger so that it would last longer. If she made the
hole in the fence bigger, Daddy could put it back together stronger
and it would last longer, and everyone would be happy.

Or at least that's what she told herself as
she spent all afternoon trying to make the hole bigger with her
spoon. She stabbed and scraped and dug at the broken board, but by
the time Mommy yelled at Missy to come inside and wash up before
they went home, the hole still wasn't big enough for Missy to crawl
through.

She needed a better tool, that was all.
Spoons were only good for dirt. Daddy had a whole workbench full of
tools. One time when she'd asked Daddy why he had so many, he said
different jobs needed different tools, and a person had to use the
right tool for the right job.

Maybe she could find the right tool on
Daddy's workbench tomorrow.

That night when Mommy came to tuck her into
bed, Mommy asked what Missy had been doing all day. "You were so
quiet," Mommy said. "I had to look out the window to make sure you
were still there."

Missy's heart pounded hard. Had Mommy seen
what she was doing? And why did that make Missy feel scared?

Mommy was looking at her funny, like she was
waiting for Missy to say something. Missy didn't think she should
tell Mommy about the fence. She didn't want Mommy to say she
couldn't go see the kittens.

She wouldn't have to worry about it at all
if Daddy only let her have a kitten of her own.

"Why doesn't Daddy like cats?" Missy
asked.

Mommy blinked, a surprised look on her face.
"Why do you think that? Daddy likes cats."

"He won't let me have one."

"Ah." Mommy brushed the hair away from
Missy's face. Mommy's touch was soft, like it always was, even
though her fingers were rough from sewing all day on the big
machine Missy was never, ever to touch. "Daddy had a cat a long
time ago," Mommy said. "It got hurt, and that made Daddy sad."

Mommy looked sad now, too, like she might
cry. Missy didn't want her mommy to cry, but she needed to know
what happened to Daddy's cat.

"Did Daddy take care of it?" Daddy took care
of Mommy once when Mommy got sick, and Mommy said he was good at
it, even if the soup Daddy made didn't taste as good as
Mommy's.

"No, sweetheart. When Daddy took the cat to
the doctor, the doctor said it wouldn't get better, and it was
kinder not to make it suffer."

Now Missy felt like she might cry. She knew
about death. Death was forever. Death took people away, like her
Grandma, and never let them come back. Grandma used to take care of
Missy when she was really little. When Grandma died, Missy had to
come to work with Mommy and Daddy instead of staying home and
playing with her friend Laura. She didn't like that Daddy's cat had
died, too.

Mommy cupped the side of Missy's head. "We
just have to give Daddy a little time, sweetheart." She kissed
Missy on her forehead and turned off the lamp on the table next to
Missy's bed. "Sleep well."

But Missy didn't sleep well. All she could
think about was the not-very-nice man's cat and its little kittens,
and how things that died didn't come back.

The next morning after Missy's parents
started working—her daddy in the room by the front door and her
mommy at the sewing machine in the back—Missy walked around the
little kitchen where they all ate lunch and looked for something
that would be a better tool for making the hole in the fence
bigger. Daddy kept his tools on his workbench, but sometimes when
he was really busy, he left one in the kitchen.

Like the little hammer he'd left in the
drawer with the forks and spoons.

Missy couldn't hit the board with the
hammer—that would make too much noise—but she could use the other
side of the hammer. She'd seen her daddy pry out nails using the
back of a hammer. Maybe she could pry out the nails in the board so
she could move it out of the way.

Which was exactly what she did.

It took her a long time because she had
never used a hammer before and the nails were really long, but the
board was old and dry and the nails weren't tight anymore.
Eventually she pried out enough nails out that the board hung
loose. Missy pushed and wriggled and squirmed, and she finally made
it through the fence to the other side, no worse for wear than a
couple of little splinters in her back.

By now the sun was pretty high in the sky.
Soon Mommy would be calling Missy in for lunch. Missy needed to
find a quick way into the garage to look at the kittens and then
wriggle back through the hole in the fence, all before lunch.

Missy thought it must be her lucky day. The
back door to the garage wasn't locked. Only when she pushed the
door open, it made a rusty, creaking sound, and the bottom of the
door scraped against the concrete floor of the garage. Missy held
her breath, waiting to see if the not-so-nice man had heard the
door open, but no one came out to yell at her.

The inside of the garage
was packed full of stuff. Missy had never seen so many boxes in her
life. Stacks and stacks of boxes, all marked with numbers on the
sides. Missy couldn't read her numbers yet except for two, four,
and eight, the numbers on the television dial for the shows she
liked to watch. She saw a couple of twos and fours on the boxes,
but most of the numbers weren't her television numbers. Mommy said
Missy would learn numbers when she went to first grade after summer
was over. She wished she knew her numbers now because maybe then
she'd understand why being inside the garage with all these boxes
was making her scared. More scared than she'd ever been of
anything, even the evil witch and her flying monkeys in the
Wizard of Oz
. The garage
smelled damp and dirty, like something rotten was hidden in all
those boxes. The broken window where the momma cat had come inside
was high up on the wall and the glass was dirty, so not much light
got inside.

Missy didn't want to stay in this dark,
scary garage, not one minute more.

Then she heard the kittens cry.

Teeny, tiny meows, like they were as scared
as Missy.

Why would their momma leave them alone in a
place like this? Missy hadn't seen the pretty momma cat at all that
morning. She thought she'd find her in here with her kittens, maybe
in a basket with a blanket, but there was no basket that Missy
could see. Only piles of junk and stacks and stacks of boxes.

What if a lid had fallen down on one of the
boxes and the momma cat was stuck inside with her kittens? What if
Missy was the only one who could save them all?

Missy followed the sound of the kittens'
cries. She had to climb over a stack of old magazines and around a
pile of canvas-covered metal poles before she found a box with a
hole chewed out of one side near the top. Missy stood up on her
tip-toes and listened. The meows were coming from inside!

Without warning, a door on the other side of
the garage banged open.

Missy nearly fell off her tip-toes. She
grabbed onto the cardboard box with the kittens inside just to keep
her balance. The not-so-nice man was standing in the doorway
peering out of his house into the garage.

Had he seen her? She ducked her head down
and tried to keep quiet, but her heart was beating so hard, he had
to hear it.

She shouldn't be here.
She'd forgotten the rest of Mommy's rules, like
don't touch things that don't belong to you.
Missy was doing more than touching things that
didn't belong to her. She was in someone else's garage, and she
didn't think the not-so-nice man would be okay with her being here
even if all she wanted to do was look at the kittens.

The overhead light in the garage came on.
This time Missy couldn't help the little cry that escaped her
lips.

"Who's in here?" the not-so-nice man
asked.

Missy kept quiet. So did the kittens. Where
was their momma? Had something happened to her like to Daddy's
cat?

"I'm gonna find you," the man said. "Whoever
you are, you got no right to be in here."

Missy heard him scuff down the steps from
the house to the garage. He sounded angry, but his words sounded
funny, too, like they were all blurred together.

She wished she could just run out of the
garage and through the fence into her own backyard, but the
not-so-nice man was between her and the back door. The only thing
she could do was stay quiet and hope that he wouldn't find her.

One of the kittens inside the box cried,
then another.

"What the hell?" the man said.

No, no, no. Missy wanted to tell the kittens
to be quiet, but they were all crying now, scared little yelps,
like they were as afraid of the not-so-nice many as Missy was.

The not-so-nice man stomped toward the front
of the garage where she was hiding, pushing things out of his way
and saying bad words over and over again. Missy wanted to run away,
run and keep on running, but she couldn't leave the kittens alone
with someone who sounded so angry.