Bigger than a Bread Box (6 page)

After class ended, it was time for lunch. I followed Hannah to what was clearly the cool-girls’ table and set down my bag. Then I followed her through the line and ordered exactly what she ordered: a chicken salad sandwich and SunChips.

At the table, the other girls made a game out of teasing each other. Or that was what it seemed like to me anyway. They especially picked on a girl named Megan, who had supercurly bright red hair. They called it a ’fro and, giggling, tossed wadded-up straw wrappers at her head. When the bits of paper got stuck in her hair, everyone laughed, including Megan. But even though she was smiling, she didn’t look like she was having too much fun to me.

Another girl, Maya, actually
did
have an Afro, but everyone seemed to think her Afro was cool. I guess it just wasn’t cool on Megan. But I was the New Girl, so what could I do? I ate my chips carefully, trying not to drop crumbs, and smiled in a way that could or could not have been
at
Megan. I practiced being mysterious.

I tried not to look surprised when a girl named Cat talked about how she was “going out” with a boy named Henry. Henry was in eighth grade, she told me, and a good kisser—“not too slobbery.” I tried not to blush when she said that. I don’t think I succeeded, but I also think Cat kind of wanted me to be uncomfortable. Anyway, everyone was giggling a lot and glancing over at the
table next to ours, which was, I guessed, where the cool boys sat. Coleman with the Mohawk was there.

After lunch we had gym class, where the other kids ran sprints and I didn’t have to do anything but sit and observe, since I didn’t have any gym clothes.

Then in English class, a really young-looking man named Mr. Cook read poems aloud and asked us over and over how the poems made us feel. I didn’t want to be the one to answer him, since nobody else was saying anything, but I felt bad for him. He was trying so hard.

Actually, it was a little bit hard to look like I wasn’t listening, because the poems were really good. A lot of them were about birds and made me think of the gulls, but I could tell they were about more than birds too. One of the poems was about horses, and I couldn’t stop thinking of one summer when Dad and I went to Chincoteague and saw the wild horses.

“They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs,” read Mr. Cook.

I felt flutters inside. I could see the horses, lonely. I could see my dad on the beach. I couldn’t stop thinking that line, like an echo.

Toward the end of the poem reading, Hannah passed me a note from three seats away. I was surprised to see the little folded-up square of paper appear on the corner of my desk. When I opened it up, it said, in extremely round letters, “How do I FEEL? Bored!”

When I looked over at Hannah, she was smirking at me, waiting for my response. I looked back down at the piece of paper and picked up my pen. I wasn’t sure what to write back. I didn’t feel bored myself, but of course the note passing was a good sign, so in my own roundest handwriting, I wrote back, “Ha!”

C
HAPTER 6

“H
ey, kiddo,” said Gran when I met her in front of the school. “How was it?”

“Not too horrible,” I said, walking quickly past a long line of parked minivans, toward the house and my bread box, and wishing Gran wasn’t such a moseying person. I could tell she wanted to hear every little detail—what I ate for lunch and who I talked to and what my teachers were like. But I didn’t want to say, “I sat with the cool kids at lunch and one of the girls was talking about kissing a boy and mostly I just kept my mouth shut so people would like me.” I didn’t think Gran would necessarily think those were good things, so I just said, “We read some poems.”

“That’s always nice,” said Gran.

After that we moseyed some more. Gran pointed out a gravel alley where she said there was an urban farm with hives of bees and chickens too. “And the best dang rope
swing you ever saw!” she said. “We’ll come back here with Lew sometime next week.”

“He’d like that,” I said, though I really hoped we’d be gone by next week.

Then Gran said, “Hey! What say we give your old dad a call when we get back to the house? Your mom is out with Lew. I think she took him to a movie.”

“Oh no!” I stopped walking and stared at Gran.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Dad,” I said. “I never called him. I meant to call this morning.”

Gran patted my shoulder. “It’s okay, kiddo. You’ve got a lot going on. He’ll understand.”

But would he? I’d forgotten again! How had I forgotten? I’d sworn to myself I’d call in the morning, but then I’d been so tired and distracted. All the goodness of the day—the coolness and the poems and even the bread box waiting for me—melted away. I ran the rest of the way to the house, with Gran panting to keep up. I bolted up the brick steps to the porch.

I still had to wait for Gran to let us inside and find her phone, which turned out to be in a bowl of apples on the kitchen counter, of all places. It was black, with paper scraps taped to the back of it, each of them scrawled with phone numbers.

“You know,” I said to Gran as I dialed, “you can program the numbers
into
the phone.”

Gran laughed. “Maybe
you
can. I can barely get used to having this thing at all. I got rid of my old-fashioned, regular, normal, perfectly fine phone when I bought this little gadget, and I find I can barely work the thing. In fact—”

The phone was ringing, so I ran to my room and shut the door behind me.

My hand shook a little as I waited for Dad to answer. It had been two days too many. I was scared he’d be mad at me.

At last he picked up. “Hello?” he asked. His voice was like usual, calm, happy-sounding. His voice was Home. I stopped shaking, but I couldn’t seem to make any words come out.

“Hello?” he repeated. “Who’s this?”

I wasn’t sure why my mouth wasn’t working.

“Hello?” he asked a third time. He sounded mildly irritated but surprisingly like his normal self, not at all like a man curled up in a lonely ball on the couch. “Helloooo? Anyone there?”

He was going to hang up if I didn’t say something. So I managed to bleat out, “Dad?”

“Becks!”
he yelled. “Monkey! How are you?”

It made me feel warm all over when he called me monkey. “Fine,” I said. “I
guess
I’m fine, sort of. I miss you.”

“Me too. Oh, man. So much I miss you. I didn’t have your gran’s number. I tried to look it up, but it’s unlisted or something. And your mom’s cell phone is going
straight to voice mail. I’ve been going nutso not being able to get you guys on the phone. Tell her to charge that thing!”

“I will,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I’m just so glad to hear your voice!”

“I’m glad to hear yours,” I said.

Then, without any warning, he got serious. “Don’t worry, Becks. Your mom and me—we’ll get it worked out. I want you guys home.”

“I want to come home too,” I said.

“I know you do,” he said. “I know.” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “But how was the drive? And how’s everything going? Everything else, I mean …”

“Everything’s awful.” As I spoke that sentence, I knew it wasn’t entirely true. That wasn’t fair. Everything wasn’t awful. Gran was great, of course, and school hadn’t been so bad. Then there was the bread box. But my anger felt like something I could give him. I could say it was awful for him. Maybe it would even get me home sooner if I did. If I had a lot of fun, it would just be easier for Mom to feel okay about staying.

“I know, monkey, I know,” he said softly. “I get it.”

I touched Grandma Shapiro’s locket with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone.

He asked how Lew was doing, and I said he was fine, though the question made me realize I didn’t really
know because I hadn’t been paying much attention to Lew. I’d been too busy thinking about other things. “Gran’s been playing with him a lot,” I added.

“And how’s your mom doing?” he asked in a serious voice.

“I … don’t know,” I answered. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.

“No, no, I guess it isn’t your job to know,” he said softly.

“Anyway,” I added, “I’m not really talking to her.”

“Oh, Becks,” he said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m so sorry.”

“Well, it isn’t
your
fault,” I said.

He just laughed a weird little laugh then, like a breath with a laugh inside it. Then he changed the subject and told me about what was happening at home. He said that he’d started looking really hard for work and had a lead on a teaching job at a boys’ high school.

That surprised me. Long ago, before he started driving his cab, Dad had been a history teacher at a college, but he always said he liked driving the cab better. He said the people in his cab were smarter than the people at the college. It made other grown-ups laugh when he said that.

“You’re going to teach again?” I asked.

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

Dad said Mary Kate wanted him to tell me that she missed me. Now that he had Gran’s number, he promised to give it to her. I told him I’d email her.

Dad said he’d cleaned the house, and he asked me to tell Mom, so I said I would. Then it was like he ran out of things to say. Since I didn’t know what to say either, I told him I’d call again, when I could put Lew on the phone. I knew Lew wouldn’t have much to say. He always gets quiet when you put the phone near his face. But it would make Dad happy, and Lew would smile when he heard Dad’s voice.

When I said goodbye, Dad said, “There are things, Becks—your mom—I wish I’d done differently.…”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I told him I was sending him a hug. Then I hung up the phone and sat on my bed, thinking. I was glad I’d called. I was relieved that he was okay and that he was doing all the things Mom wanted. I felt better. Ten times better. A hundred times better. One little phone call and I felt like me again.

So I pushed a chair under the doorknob like people do on TV. I wrestled the bread box out of the suitcase and set it on my bed. I took out all the money, smoothed and folded the bills, then bound them in bundles using ponytail holders. It felt good to get everything organized. I buried the bundles under my clothes in the suitcase. After that I sat down on the bed, cross-legged, and stared at the empty bread box.

I wished for a bunch of things right away, things I’d been wanting forever. I wished for an iPod and got it. I wished for a supersize bag of Twizzlers and ate them
while I wished for a phone of my own so I wouldn’t have to ask Gran for hers anymore. When the phone arrived, it was purple.

The wishing was nuts. Practically anything I wanted I could have! It was like my birthday, with no bad gifts.

Then it occurred to me that I’d have to explain where I was getting all these things, so I stopped and tried to think of tiny things I wanted. I knew if I wished for something hard to hide—like a computer or a kitten—I was sure to get busted. I tried to think of small things worth having. I couldn’t think of many. What was tiny and wonderful?

At last I said, “I wish for … a diamond.”

A
diamond
?

I reached across the bed and opened the box. Inside it was a diamond, a real diamond! I—Rebecca Rose Shapiro—owned a diamond of my own! How crazy was that?

I sat holding my diamond cupped in my hand for a bit. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. What do you
do
with a diamond? Especially a diamond you can’t tell anyone about?

I climbed off the bed and carefully placed the diamond in a tiny box on the dresser, a little pink butterfly-shaped box that had probably been my mom’s when she was a kid. I hid the Twizzlers bag in the suitcase with the money and the phone. I set the iPod—which had come loaded with songs I’d mostly never heard of before—to shuffle. Then
I lay back on my pink pillow and listened to the music, glancing now and then at the unfamiliar names of the bands.

I really liked a group called The Flaming Lips, even though I thought they had a weird name. Their songs were kind of bouncy and floaty, and I was so tired from my late night that I fell asleep listening to them. I was still lying there, snoozing on my pink bed with the plastic red taste of Twizzlers on my tongue, when a song woke me up.
The
song.
Dad’s
song. The song that was emblazoned in my brain more deeply than any other song ever could be. I heard it and opened my eyes.

It was the song that the three of us—on good nights when my parents were still getting along, before Lew was even born—had danced to in the living room before bed. Mom would dim the lights and Dad would push
PLAY
on the CD player on the fireplace mantel and we’d all dance. I’d stand on the coffee table and my parents would hold my hands. I’d belt out the words. I knew them by heart, which was funny, because I’d never really
thought
about the words before, though I’d sung the song all my life.

Suddenly wide-awake, I stared at the ceiling as I sang along under my breath. I couldn’t stop myself. What a weird coincidence!
That
song, sent to me now, as if by magic. I felt like there was a ghost in the room. How had the bread box known?