Nekomah Creek (7 page)

Dad stopped the van at the two big fir trees that stood like gateposts at our driveway. He made the rest of us wait while he disappeared into the dark dip where our little bridge crossed the creek. One by one, starting from the house, he lit the jack-o’-lanterns.

“Okay,” he said, finally climbing back in. “Are we all ready for a spooky ride?” He cut the headlights.

“Bill!” Mom said.

“Don’t worry, I can see.”

In the dimness I watched Freddie’s eyes get big.

Dad inched the van up the driveway through the drifting ground fog, past the glowing faces. He took it as slowly as he could, but still, it was over too soon.

“Wa mo tine!” Lucy said. That’s Lucy-talk for “One more time!”

“Hey, why not?” Dad said. He cranked the car around, drove out over the bridge, and headed back in.

We repeated the little parade, everybody oohing and ahhing. I got in on it too, and at the top of the drive I said, “One more time!”

“No, that’s enough,” Dad said, unbuckling his seat belt.

Huh. Somehow the babies’ magic words never worked for me.

Mom opened the front door and groaned. “I always forget when we’ve left it like this.”

Toys covered the floor of our big main room. The babies had done a shredding job on the day’s newspapers and mail. Sofa cushions and extra blankets were strewn around—their morning fort. Over all this the ceiling fan turned slowly, trailing crepe paper and a glob of limp balloons from Freddie and Lucy’s birthday party last month.

“Yup.” Mom picked up a sprouted potato somebody’d been playing with and tossed it toward the kitchen end of the house. “Looks like rustic elegance to me.”

Dad laughed. “Like I said, I didn’t write that. Blame it on the auction committee.”

“Hey Dad? Are you really going to serve this fancy romancey dinner
here
?”

“Robby, under all this stuff is a perfectly charming house.”

“Are you sure?” Mom shrugged out of her jacket. “When was the last time we looked?”

“It’s not that I don’t like our house …” I said. It was pretty nice, really, especially when you thought about it starting out as a barn. Now it looked like most of the other houses along here—weathered shingles blending into the woods. The inside was fixed up with all sorts of recycled stuff—leaded windows from a church in Astoria, maple floors from the old Coos Bay High School gym, and antique brass light fixtures from every place in between.

I picked up a stray rubber band and shot it toward the second-floor balcony. “It
is
kind of messy, though.”

“Just looks like we live here,” Dad said.

Mom made a face. “
Wallow
here’s more like it.”

“Relax, Beth,” Dad said. “We’ll clean it all up and light some kerosene lamps. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“It better be,” she said. “For sixty dollars.”

Dad and I looked at each other. Maybe Mom was sore because her painting only went for fifty.

Mom pulled Lucy away from her studio door. “Don’t even think about it, kiddo.”

Lucy flashed her wicked grin. She was coming dangerously close to mastering doorknobs, and
you could tell she was dying to get busy on the only tidy room in the entire house.

Mom’s studio had to be neat. Her pictures were small and delicate. One fingerprint could ruin an original worth a hundred dollars or more. So it wasn’t like an artist’s studio you might imagine, with messy oil paints and my mom in a splattered smock. More like a nice, organized office. Sometimes when she got sick of trying to keep up with the mess in the rest of the house, Mom would yell, “I can’t take any more of this!” Then she’d go in there and shut the door.

I watched Lucy climb up to join Freddie in leaping from the sofa arms into the remains of their fort.

“When you have this dinner,” I said, “what are you going to do with these guys?”

Dad dragged Freddie from the pillow pile and unzipped his jacket. “They’ll be the waiters, of course.”

“Da-ad.”

“Don’t you think Lucy would look cute in a little white apron?”

“Mom, he’s kidding, isn’t he?” With Dad, you never knew.

“Freddie could wear a bow tie …”

“You can all go over to Mrs. Lukes’s,” Mom said. “Why do you think I bid so high on those babysitting coupons?”

“Oh.” They’d have to clear me out, too. Sometimes
I forgot that I was one of the kids instead of a grown-up.

I guess that comes from having been an only child for so long. I mean, I’d been here for
seven years
before these little guys showed up.

And believe me, I’d been wanting a brother or a sister. My mom says being an only child was okay for her, but Dad had four brothers and that sounded a lot better to me. Their house was wild. Dad used to fake nightmares where he’d fall off the upper bunk onto Uncle Fred and pound him, going “Oh, help! Monsters! I’m fighting monsters!”

I wanted a brother to try that on.

Mom and Dad kept telling me they were doing everything they could to get me one. Mom took special pills. When that didn’t work, Dad had to give her shots of some super powerful medicine they got in Portland.

Still no luck.

Then one day when I’d practically given up, I climbed down the ladder from my sleeping loft and found them hugging in the kitchen. I was just heading for the stash of leftover Christmas candy, minding my own business, when they kind of gathered me into the hug with them, their faces all glowy.

“Guess what?” Mom had tears in her eyes. “You’re going to have a baby brother or sister.”

And then it turned out to be one of each! Boy,
did we ever hit the jackpot! Five in our family. That was more like it.

I climbed into my loft now. I had a picture I’d drawn at school taped to the wall up there—me with the two of them. We were all three different. Freddie had Dad’s dark curly hair and brown eyes, Lucy had Mom’s green eyes, and so far her hair was nothing but crazy tufts of yellow fuzz. And me … well, drawing me was the hardest because I’m just kind of average. Average brown hair, average gray eyes. Average height. A little on the skinny side. In the picture we’re playing one of our favorite games—Mountain Climbers—where we crawl up the stairs and go avalanching down in a pile of blankets and pillows. I had our eyes all bugging out and surprised as we tumbled to the bottom. “Forevermore!” Mrs. Perkins had said when she saw my drawing. “Your folks let you do this?”

Now, in the loft, I flopped into the pile of stuff I sleep with—a zipped-open sleeping bag, a wool blanket, my old baby quilt, and a wadded-up sheet that had probably stayed tucked around the mattress for about two hours when Mom first put it on. I pulled a book out from under my pillow.

Down below, I could hear Dad talking to Mom in the bathroom while they wrestled the babies into their jammies. He sounded pretty jazzed up about his gourmet production.

“I thought salmon, for sure. And that sautéed
mushroom recipe? The one that calls for the spendy chanterelles? That’d be impressive. They don’t have to know we went out and picked them ourselves! Lucy, stop wriggling! We have plenty of frozen raspberries, right? And we ought to get a local wine …”

“How about some fancy dessert cheeses?”

Cheese for dessert. Now there’s an idea that should have been squashed the first time some lame-brain put it into words. I don’t care if Tillamook cheese is a big deal around here. Dessert ought to be chocolate. Period. Oh well, I wouldn’t be eating it …

After the kids were dressed, Mom started reading them
Home for a Bunny
, one of my old books. I always thought it was too sad … that bunny going down the road and down the road, looking for a home. I never let Mom read long enough to find out he got his home in the end.

But Freddie and Lucy like it. I lay there on my quilt, staring at the ceiling, listening. Funny, I’d heard her read this story to them hundreds of times by now, but I’d never noticed before how much that mean old groundhog sounded like Orin Downard. “No, you can’t come in my log!”

After the story, Lucy and Freddie padded over and hollered for me to climb down and give them their good-night hugs.

“Well, Robby,” Dad said when we had them all tucked in. “This is kind of exciting, isn’t it? A
fancy dinner for the new Nekomah Creek counselor.”

“What?”

“The new counselor,” Mom said. “Didn’t you notice she was the one who bought your dad’s dinner?”

My eyes bugged out. I felt my jaw working but no words came.

“What’s the matter?” Mom said.

Dad was watching me with a puzzled smile. He leaned toward Mom. “Looks like a fish thrown up on a streambank. What’s the matter, Robby? Don’t you have any confidence in your old dad?”

They laughed and turned away.

“Maybe this is her way of thanking you,” Mom said to Dad. “She probably realizes it was
your
impassioned testimony that convinced the school board to hire a counselor in the first place.”

“You think so?” Dad said. “No, I’ll bet she’s just interested in fine dining.”

Nobody seemed to notice that the gasping fish on the bank—me—was in total shock.

Because I knew the real reason Mrs. Van Gent wanted to come here.

She wanted to spy on our family!

  4  

A shadow fell across my desk. I looked up from the picture I was working on.

“Aw, ain’t that cute!” Orin said. “Look at all them little animals.”

I went stiff.

He aimed a pretend rifle at my picture. “Blam! Blam!”

I jerked my arms across the paper as if his make-believe bullets could really hurt.

“Run, li’l Bambi! Run!”

Mrs. Perkins was frowning over some papers. She had a way of acting real busy whenever Orin goofed off.

Somebody said she was his mom’s second cousin or something. Could be. Lots of people whose families have lived around here a long time
are related to each other. So maybe that’s why he got away with stuff. Maybe she liked him.

He cackled all the way back to his seat.

Rose Windom and I traded looks. Rose had only started at Nekomah Creek this year, and already she’d had her fill of Orin Downard. No wonder. On the first day, Orin sized up her clothes and said, “Oh, great, another hippie.”