Hippomobile! (2 page)

Grandma Ida came back with a tray balanced high up over her head. She was one heckuva soup jockey
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all right, and everybody in Wymore appreciated her, us and Mom and Pops probably most of all. Because without Grandma Ida promising to keep a fine eye on us, Mom never could've taken that summer job she needed in order for us to make ends meet.
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Last summer was the first summer she went away. The morning Mr. Buzzard came to drive her off, her faucets leaked something awful,
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and we almost had to roll up the bottoms of our pants. But we all got used to it over time, and Mom eventually stopped calling every hour to see how we was doing and whether we'd skinned a knee or got bit by a bug. So the day she left this summer wasn't half as big a deal, but of course we're ten now.

Anyhow, Grandma Ida came back and served us our tall drinks and said, “We're sure lucky with that ol' gal. Ain't many cows left will give you chocolate milk these days.”

Grandma Ida always made that same joke, and we always smiled and said, “Thank you, Grandma Ida.” Because Pops says there ain't nothing like a good pair of manners.

“So what kinda trouble you two planning on getting into today?” Grandma Ida asked, and gave us a wink.

And, in fact, we'd just been discussing that very same topic. We were figuring on climbing Old Tom Wood and then maybe seeing if Grandma Winnie would take us for a spin in her golf cart. All our grandmas and grandpas used golf carts to get around town, since there wasn't no one left in Wymore to fix their cars once they broke down. And that's how come there was so many clunkers rusting away on the square, their tires flat, their windows busted, and their fenders dropped clean off.

“We ain't sure, Grandma Ida. You got any ideas for us?” we asked.

“Well, lemme think,” she said. And she rested her dishrag over her shoulder and looked up at the cracks in the ceiling and them two brown splotches that looked like a tricycle and a boat.
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Then she snapped her fingers and said, “I got it! Why don't you do your homework?”

And we said, “Aww, Grandma Ida!” And now you know we weren't kidding about her keeping a fine eye on us.

“I ain't the one who assigned it to you,” she said. “And, besides, we've all had to go through it.”

That was true enough. It was school tradition going all the way back to when our grandmas and grandpas were our age that kids starting the fifth grade had to memorize all the presidents over the summer. And not just the names, but they had to be in the right order, too. It was the perfect way to ruin your vacation worse than a dropped egg.

“Can't we do something else?” we asked. “We already learned the first two by heart.”

“Who are they, then?” Grandma Ida set a hand on her hip like she could tell we were putting on the bluff.

“George Washington and Tom Adams,” we said.

Grandma Ida looked at the ceiling again and sighed something awful. “
John
Adams.”

“Stella, I told you it wasn't Tom!”

“Maybe you did, Jimmy James. But you didn't say it was John, neither.”

We were on the verge of getting into it, but Grandma Ida pulled the fuse clean out of us when she said, “You know what, summer ain't that far along just yet. Why don't you go on over to the library instead and get yourselves a book and climb up Old Tom Wood and read for a while.”

At last we found something we could all agree on.

 

 

 

 

NOW, WE AIN'T SAID
nothing about Wymore having a library. And it's true, there ain't one, at least not a real one. Alls there is, is a pile of books all jumbled up in some milk crates a few booths down, right there at Mabel's. So when Grandma Ida suggested us to go to the library, alls we had to do was hop on down and slide into what we call the library booth.

A long time ago, things were different. We've been told Wymore used to have an honest-to-goodness library with one whole room full of books and a magazine rack full of magazines telling you how to keep your house clean and other rotten news. You even got your own library card, and there was a real live librarian, our Grandma Henrietta, who kept telling you to hold your potato. That was her way of saying to hush it no matter how hushed you already was.

But what happened was the library started falling apart, just like lots of places here in Wymore. The front door came off its hinges, and then the windows stopped opening because the building went crooked, and after that red bricks began popping out of the walls like buttons off a shirt. Then the ceiling began sagging like an old mattress, and whoever was in the library at the time grabbed their canes and ran out as fast as their bones could carry them.

Most of the books got lost in the rubble when the library caved in for good. But the few that remained got hauled off in milk crates and taken over to Mabel's. And them were the ones we were picking through now.

The problem was, by that time we'd darn near read the whole lot of them. Plus there were some books we didn't want to read at all. Because take our word for it, you could find some peculiar-sounding books in them milk crates. Like one is called
Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good
, and that has to be just about the very last thing any kid is ever gonna wanna read about. But lucky for us there's some good ones in them crates too. One of our favorites is
The Rover Twins and the Gigantic Waterfall
, and that's because it's so dang hot and dry in Wymore that not even the water fountain outside Mabel's works no more.
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We'll read our favorite books over and over, either sitting up in Old Tom Wood's comfy branches or laying on our beds back at the hotel when the day's too dusty and you can't hardly see nothing at all outdoors, let alone read.

So we were excited as a cat-and-mouse show when our hands grabbed hold of a book we swore we ain't ever seen before. It was called
The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing
and was about as thick as one of Grandma Mabel's triple-decker mousetraps
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and chock-full of all kinds of stuff you never knew you could ever know. So we couldn't get out the door quick enough.

Grandma Ida saw us and yelled, “Be back in time for lunch!”

She didn't have to tell us that. Because we knew she was serving zeppelins in a cloud, which in Wymore is sausages and mashed potatoes, and we wouldn't miss them for nothing in the world.

 

 

 

 

BY NOW YOU'RE PROBABLY
wondering how come we keep calling everybody Grandpa This and Grandma That and how anybody could ever have forty-seven grandparents. So we better be up-front with you now before we get to the exciting part where we tell you what we found in
The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing
.

They ain't really our real grandparents.
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We just call them Grandpa This and Grandma That because they're all old and have either gray hair or no hair at all. And since we're the only two kids in Wymore, and Mom and Pops ain't even in Wymore during the summer, every person we come across is either gonna be a grandma or a grandpa.

But here's how we began calling them as such. It all started quite some time ago with Grandpa Bert and his last name, Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen, which ached our tongues every time we tried to say it. One hot and dusty day, we were outside of what used to be the post office
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playing mailman, where one of us was the mailman and the other one of us was the barking dog. That was when Grandpa Bert cruised up in his golf cart quiet as a one-handed clap.

Grandpa Bert is the one who used to own the haberdashery. His clothes were a bit old-fashioned, and we liked the deep pockets they had because they often contained a treat or two for us. Grandpa Bert got off his golf cart and pulled out a couple of jawbreakers. We said, or at least tried to say, “Thanks, Mr. Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen.” At that time he wasn't Grandpa Bert yet, although we're getting to that part right now.

His name must've come out in all the wrong order because he smiled and said, “You know what?”

And we said, “What, Mr. um . . . ?”

And he said, “Why don't you just call me Grandpa from now on. It'll be easier on all of us.”

We liked that idea a lot, and we waved and called out, “Bye, Grandpa!” and jammed our jawbreakers in between our cheeks and gums as he slowly vanished in a cloud of dust. And that was that. At least we thought that was that.

What happened next was that the other old folks in town heard about how Bert Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen was now going by Grandpa, and for some reason that really rode their britches.
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It seems that they all wanted a piece of the grandma-and-grandpa pie. And soon, one by one, when they thought no one else was looking, they started coming up to us and pinching our cheeks and bending down toward us as best they could and saying, “Why don'tcha just call me Grandma from now on?” Or, “Wouldn't it be funner to just call me Grandpa instead of Mr. Snuggerud?”
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And so on and so on.

That seemed fine with us. Until the next problem happened. Whenever we walked into Mabel's and said something like “Howdy, Grandpa!” or “Mornin', Grandma!” all the heads in the café would turn around.

So finally one afternoon as a majority of the town was gathered at Mabel's, enjoying one of her famous barked pies,
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we counted to three and slid out of our booth and snucked over to the lunch counter and climbed up on them stools and turned off the weather report
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and said, “Grandmas, Grandpas, we all know the forecast ain't gonna change much. It's around here that things have gotta change. So listen up, because here's what we're proposing.”

And they did listen, too. The ones with hearing aids turned up the volume, and those with natural hearing cupped their hands around the back of their ears.

Our plan, as you may have figured out by now, was to start calling them Grandpa or Grandma plus their first name. Because we reckoned that if we started calling them Grandpa or Grandma plus their last name, then we'd be back to square one and the whole problem with saying “Grandpa Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen.” So we asked, “Is it a deal?”

We weren't sure how they were gonna react. It's sometimes hard to change people's ways once they turn old, wrinkly, and forty. And so after we stopped talking, our eyes darted around the café to the other eyes in the café, which were also darting around the café. Nobody said a word, and for a moment it sounded as quiet as Grandma Henrietta's dream library. But then all of a sudden, they all busted out laughing, and one by one they got out of their booths and lined up and told us what their first names were, and we wrote them down on the back of our paper place mats. And it's been that way ever since.
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