One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street (17 page)

“Madam,” said the dispatcher, after Ms. Snoops had described the situation. “9-1-1 is not for garden emergencies, as someone has explained to you earlier this morning. Please don't call us again.”

Ms. Snoops caught her breath. “Have I already called this morning?”

“Yes, dear. And yesterday morning, too. Maybe a little note near your phone would help.”

“I am so, so sorry to keep bothering you,” said Ms. Snoops. “I'm having a bit of a memory problem, lately . . . I promise it won't happen again.”

Ms. Snoops peeled off a yellow Post-it note on which she drew a circle with 9-1-1 inside of it. She drew a thick, dark line across that circle and stuck the Post-it to the phone.

“Now, now, magic now,” Ms. Snoops whispered.

Then she plopped herself down on her orange and green striped couch again and began to cry. She cried and cried until her chest ached. She cried for all the neglected plants that had died over the years, and for her disappearing memory and for one beloved tree and all its stories.

Gone, going, and about to be gone. Mitzi jumped onto her lap, licked a tear that had fallen onto Ms. Snoops's knuckle, then curled up for a nap.

“The only thing I can do,” Ms. Snoops said, stroking her cat, “is dream the impossible.” That was another rule of life that she tried to follow, from time to time.

Mitzi's tail quivered in her sleep, as if to say: If something's impossible, what's the point of dreaming about it?

“I know, I know. Cats dream only of possibilities, such as chicken and catnip,” said Ms. Snoops, wiping her eyes on a sleeve of her bathrobe. “There's no point in dreaming the impossible. It just makes me feel better.”

Ms. Snoops began to dream and imagine and wish for two impossible things.

First she wished she could go back in time.

She wished she were that same girl with bony knees, that girl who liked to look at the world upside down from tree limbs, with her best friend, Gertrude; that girl who, dizzy from the blossoms' perfume, made up stories, even before she got the idea to write them all down.

She wished she were that girl who learned to make ambrosia from her mother, who learned it from Mrs. Stott; that girl who believed Mrs. Stott when she said ambrosia was the food of the gods and made you immortal; that girl who had pleaded, “Mr. Stott, please, please, please let your orange tree live!” when old Mr. Stott bragged about his plans for a backyard swimming pool—and Mr. Stott said that he would consider her request.

Ms. Snoops wished she could go back in time, better yet,
stop time
, right on the morning of that very day, because that had been one of the happiest, amazing mornings of her life. She had been so relieved. Though old Mr. Stott died before the day of the planned backyard excavation, Ms. Snoops wanted to believe he would have honored her request.

Now Ms. Snoops dreamed and imagined and wished for the second impossibility, the craziest one of all: She imagined she was a main character in a book, or maybe even a Hollywood movie! Just around now she would do something important to save the day.

But I'm not a character in a book or a movie
, thought Ms. Snoops. The day had come and she didn't know how to save it. This thought made Ms. Snoops leaping mad. That is to say, so angry she leaped up from her orange and green striped couch, sending Mitzi tumbling. She ran to the window and jerked it open.

“Hey, you! LEAVE THAT TREE ALONE!” hollered Ms. Snoops, shaking her fist at the driver of the brown truck. There went another of Ms. Snoops's rules: Always speak in modulated tones. But Ms. Snoops didn't care, because a rule
of life maybe broken for an important reason. And that was another rule of life.

The kids of Orange Street were standing in a knot at the edge of the empty lot. Startled, they all turned and looked up at her.

et's go back in time, but only a few minutes or so. Sid (according to the name embroidered on his shirt) had begun to relay the gruesome details of the killing to come. He thought the kids were interested in learning about his job.

“First thing you do is strip off all your smaller branches and limbs,” Sid said calmly, his hands in his pockets. “Debranching, we call it.”

Ali felt dizzy.
Debranching
sounded unsettling.

“Then, we feed the branches and limbs into that wood chipper over there.” Sid, his hands still in his pockets, jerked his head toward a huge funnel on wheels, attached to the
back of the truck, “That does the trick. A big mess of sawdust is what you get!”

It was clear those weren't gruesome details to Sid. They were just the ordinary details of Sid's job, in which he took great pride. It was easy to imagine him telling other kids those details, say, on Career Day at his son's or daughter's school.

“Then comes the stump grinder,” Sid continued.

“The stump grinder?” whispered Bunny/Bonita. That sounded like something from a horrible, bone-chilling movie, the kind she wasn't allowed to watch. (Except for those trailers that popped up unavoidably, every now and then on TV.)

“Rocks the tree's stump back and forth to loosen 'er up,” Sid said. “Then it's easy to dig the stump out, just like a big, fat molar.”

The kids turned to the Valencia, looking as fresh and morning-pretty as ever, not like the condemned prisoner it really was. There was a silence, and for one whole minute, even if any of them had known the entire
Oxford English Dictionary
by heart, not one of the kids could think of a single word to say.

There was a peculiar smell to that moment: Sid's cigar
mixed with Ruff's fresh poop on the parkway (which Bunny/Bonita quickly scooped into a bag), and oranges and musty leaves; or maybe it was the smell of sadness, or fear, if those feelings had a smell.

Ruff himself ran into the lot to curl up under the tree, as usual.

As Bunny/Bonita's watch clicked, suddenly the words returned, in the form of questions.

“Hey, what about all the oranges?” asked Robert.

Robert pictured the truck crushing all the fruit, then a great geyser of juice gushing up and splattering all over Orange Street, lost magic and opportunity disappearing down curbside drains, forever.

“Kid, oranges are a dime a dozen, or whatever the going rate is at the supermarket,” Sid said with a not unkind, lopsided grin.

“You'll dismantle the swing for us, won't you?” asked Manny, who'd arrived with Edgar in his stroller.

Sid shrugged, as if dismantling a child's swing was a very, very minor problem. “Of course. We'll make sure you get it.”

“What about the birdhouse? And the wind chimes?” asked Bunny/Bonita.

“The nests! What about the nests?” asked Ali. “You can't
see them, but believe me, there are nests there! Some are as small as walnuts.”

Then Leandra whispered, “What about the babies?” She murmured something into her FedEx box, and that's when Robert realized she had been comforting something tiny and alive.

Robert also realized something else.

It was a terrible time for a magic show.

He could have a hundred, a thousand, a million bucks of incredible equipment in his shoebox. He could have, say, an elephant in there, an elephant just waiting to disappear into thin air! Even magic in the shape of some orange chunks and tuna fish cans! But all that wouldn't make a bit of difference. Manny was right. If your audience doesn't want to be wowed, there's just no magic there.
Incredible Magic Tricks for a Rainy Day
had neglected to tell him that.

“Whoa, wait a minute, kids,” said Sid, holding up his hands as if they'd all been hurling eggs at him, instead of questions. “You'll get your belongings, and some oranges, too, if you like. The rest, I can't help you with.”

“Is there anything we can do to save the tree at this point?” Manny asked. Edgar began to fuss in his stroller, as if he, too, recognized that something was very wrong.

“Sorry,” said Sid. “The tree is on private property.”

Bunny/Bonita glanced at her watch. There were ten more minutes to touch the sky.

Then Ali asked the question everyone had been thinking, but hadn't gotten around to asking: “Why are you doing this?”

“The owner—hey, there he is now—wants to clean up and level the land. He'll be building a house on the lot. He said something about wanting to say good-bye to the tree.” Sid chuckled. “Imagine that . . . Saying good-bye to a tree!”

A green car was turning the corner, just around the time an amazing chain of events began to unfold on Orange Street.

hat's when Ms. Snoops leaned way out over her windowsill and hollered, “Hey, you! LEAVE THAT TREE ALONE!”

 

Then

the kids of Orange Street turned to look up at her.

 

At that moment

the owner of the empty lot, Larry Tilley, got out of his green car.

 

And it was at that moment—

not a moment you'd expect anyone to be pondering the meaning of words—that Ali suddenly realized the amazing complexity of the word “owner.” She thought about how dollars and cents and deeds of sale and all those thick sheaves of paper Leandra's real estate agent mother made sure people signed, well, all that meant piddley-poo and diddley-squat.

“YES, YOU LEAVE
OUR
TREE ALONE!” she hollered at Sid, who blinked and took three steps backwards, as if she'd just turned on a wind machine.

 

And then

Bunny/Bonita, struck by her own sudden thought—a thought that took her breath away, concerning squirrels and hummingbirds and ladybugs and other living things that foraged for food for their families (which, when you came right down to it, were nature's equivalent of BUSINESS TRIPS!!!), all returning to find that their homes and families had
disappeared
off the face of the earth,

drew herself up as tall as she could, then gave the same brave shout as that wonderful pioneer woman of long, long ago, the original Bunny Perkins.

“AU-AU-AU-GUSTUS!” she hollered.