Penelope Crumb (11 page)

Both Grandpa’s legs are going now. “I really don’t like hospitals.”

“You don’t look so good,” I say. “Want me to get you a magazine?”

He shakes his head. We watch other people, people without frozen peas on their faces, drift into the waiting room. “The last time I was in a hospital was with your father,” says Grandpa Felix.

“When he died,” I say, nodding.

He leans forward in his seat. “No, when he was born.” He rubs his head. “I wasn’t here when he got sick. I couldn’t help him.”

I reach my arm around his shoulders, like he’s the one who’s hurt. “I couldn’t help him either. Nobody could.”

Grandpa clears his throat and gets to his feet, shrugging off my arm. “I’m afraid there’s no getting around it,” he says. “I’m going to have to call your mother.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t say a thing like that,” I say, tossing the peas onto his chair. “See, I’m fine. Let’s just go.” I get up and pull on his arm.

For a second he looks like he’ll say, “Okay, my little darling, let’s go.” But then a lady with a clipboard pushes open the door to the waiting room and says, “Crumb? Penelope Crumb?”

She makes us follow her through a set of doors, down a hallway, and into a little room that has shower curtains for walls. She helps me onto a bed and tells me she’ll be right back. Grandpa Felix takes off his coat and sits in the chair next to my bed.

The push buttons on the bed keep me busy for a while, until Grandpa Felix tells me that my legs
going up and down like a bucking bronco is making him sick. “You’re awful green,” I say.

“I’m going to step outside for a minute,” he says. “Get some air.”

I give him a look that says, You’re Coming Back, Aren’t You? but I don’t know if he sees me because the lady with the clipboard gets in the way and makes me stop pushing the buttons. She points to her name tag. “My name is Margaret. So, you bumped your nose, dear? Tell me how this happened.”

“Do people call you Marge?” I ask.

“Not if they want me to answer,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “Because the name Marge sort of looks like Margaret, only shorter. Kind of like Penny is short for Penelope. But I don’t like to be called Penny.”

“Good to know,” says Margaret not Marge, writing something on a folder.

“The reason I asked,” I explain, “is because my best friend, Patsy Cline, has an eyebrow named Marge. Your eyebrows don’t look like Marge, though. They look more like a Wendy.”

Margaret not Marge raises her Wendys at me and then writes some more.

“Patsy Cline, my best friend that I was telling you about,” I say, “is mad at me now, though. On account of the fact that I’m a defacer. She’s in this All-Star Kids singing contest in a couple of days. Did I tell you she was a singer?”

Margaret doesn’t answer and instead asks me a lot of questions while she looks at my nose. I try to be brave and keep my eyes on the door for Grandpa Felix. “Is it swollen?” I ask.

“There’s a little swelling,” she says.

“I can’t smell anything.”

“That’s normal,” she says.

“Not for me,” I tell her. “Not for this nose.”

She laughs. Which I think is kind of a rude thing to do to somebody you hardly know and who is having the kind of day that lands you in the hospital.

“Can you go see if my grandpa is out there? I think maybe he forgot which shower curtain I’m in.”

Before she leaves, she takes my bag of peas away
and gives me a cold pack wrapped in a white cloth. As she lays it across my nose I wonder how I’m going to keep this secret from my mom.

A long while later, the buttons on my bed have stopped being fun. I don’t know where Grandpa Felix has gone to, and Margaret not Marge has disappeared. Which makes me start to worry. I don’t know if they’ve forgotten about me, or if my nose is defaced forever. And what does that mean for my nose powers? “Hello! Hello!” I yell. “Somebody needs to fix my nose!”

A man in a white coat pulls back my shower curtain. He tells me that his name is Dr. Linus and to please be quiet because I’m upsetting the other patients.

“Is my grandpa out there?” I ask.

“I didn’t see anyone,” he says. “I’ll check in a moment, okay?” He lifts up the cold pack.

“This is no ordinary nose,” I say. “I can’t smell anything. It’s broken and needs to be fixed.”

He touches my nose and wiggles it gently. “Well, it isn’t broken. Just bruised,” he says, smiling.

“But it is broken! The smeller doesn’t work.” I sniff at him. “Nothing.”

“You’ve got some swelling,” he says, “so that’s probably why. Don’t worry, it’s not permanent.”

The shower curtain opens again, and this time it’s Margaret not Marge. But she doesn’t have Grandpa Felix with her. She has my mom. And Terrible’s right behind her.

“Penelope!” Mom’s face has worry rubbed all over it. “Are you all right? What happened?”

I try to smile, but it hurts. “My nose ran into the floor.”

That makes Dr. Linus smile, but then he sees the look on my mom’s face that says, You Had Me Scared to Death, so he stops. Terrible keeps staring at me, and I’m waiting for him to say something about my swollen, big nose. But he doesn’t.

“She’s going to be fine,” Dr. Linus tells Mom. “She should see her regular doctor in a few days just to make sure her nose is healing properly. Keep ice on it, Penelope. And don’t worry, your old nose should return in a couple of days.”

Mom thanks Dr. Linus and pats my knee. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

“What about Grandpa?” I say. “We can’t leave without him. He doesn’t like hospitals.”

Mom reaches for my hand.

“No! We can’t leave without Grandpa.” I fight back the tears.

“He’s gone,” says Mom.

“He is not gone!” I tell her, pulling away. I point to the chair. “His coat is right there!” My voice cracks, and then I start to cry.

Mom sits beside me in the bed and takes my hand in hers. She looks at me, right at the heart of me. “I don’t want your feelings to be hurt, Penelope. But you should know that you cannot depend on Grandpa Felix.” She strokes my hair with her finger. “After your father died, Grandpa Felix didn’t want to see us. That was his choice. We needed him, and he left. Just like he did today.”

“So did Dad leave us,” I tell her, “and you’re not mad at him.”

“That’s different, Penelope.”

“Well, maybe he has a reason why he left,” I say. “Maybe if you just talked to him.”

“There aren’t words,” she says. “I wouldn’t know what to say to him after all this time.” She wipes the tears from my face and then from hers, and wraps her arms around me. She pulls me close, pressing her cheek against my head. I can feel her heart beating.

I think about seeing Dad in Grandpa Felix’s face. Proof that he was here. “I want to talk about Dad more.”

“All right,” she says. “Shhh now. It’s going to be all right.”

Over her shoulder, Terrible stares at us from the other side of the room. He gives me a smile, one that I haven’t seen on his face in a long time. And it says that my brother is back, at least for now.

I
want to call Grandpa Felix,” I tell my mom as soon as we get home.

She gives me a look that says, Don’t Even Think about It. And then she tells me I’m to stay on the couch with ice on my face and not to get up for any reason. She also says that if I think she’s kidding I should just try her, missy.

Staying on the couch at first sounds pretty good because I pretend the couch is a pirate ship and I’m out at sea with eels all around me. The scary kind that can shoot electricity out of their eyeballs and
turn your insides to soup. “Arrr! Would be a mighty fine day at sea, matey, if it weren’t for those blasted eels!” I say to Terrible.

Only, Terrible doesn’t talk pirate, I guess. He only talks alien. Because he says, “You’re a dork,” and then goes to his room.

After a while, I get hungry.
Pirate
hungry. I yell loud so that Mom can hear me all the way in the laundry room, “Ahoy! Bring me some grub, ya cockroach!”

And when she appears with her hands on her hips and calls me “missy” again, I know that’s the end of my pirate life. “Can I at least call Patsy Cline?” I ask her after she brings me apple slices with peanut butter. She tells me fine but then says that just because I’m injured and she’s bringing me snacks doesn’t mean she’s forgotten about how much trouble I’m in after not going to school for two days and sneaking around like I’ve been.

I tell her that I know she would never forget anything as important as that, and she gives me
a look that says, Don’t Be Smart. Which I really wasn’t being.

“What’s the matter with your voice?” Patsy Cline asks me when I call her up. “You sound funny.”

“My nose is broke,” I tell her.

“You have a broken nose?”

“Not broken, just broke. I fell on top of it. And now I have to keep ice on my nose to keep it from swelling up to the size of Jupiter.”

“You’re just saying that so I’ll feel sorry for you and won’t be mad at you anymore.”

“Am not,” I say. “But I did have to go to the hospital.”

“Stop your fibbing,” she says.

“There was blood coming out of my nose holes and everything.”

“Penelope.”

“True blue.”

Patsy Cline doesn’t say anything for a while. But I know she’s still there because I can hear the video of her from her last singing contest playing in
the background. And her mom telling her to smile with her eyes at the people in the audience. Patsy Cline always says smiling with her eyes would be a lot easier if they had lips and teeth. “I’ve got to go,” she says. “Mom wants me to meet with some people who’ll take pictures of me so I can get more singing jobs. You’re still coming to All-Star Kids, aren’t you?”

I tell her that I’ll come if she’s not mad at me, and she says she won’t be mad if I come, so we’re back to being best friends again, thank lucky stars. And then I say, “Wait a minute, did you say you want someone to take pictures of you?”

“Not me, my mom does.”

“Patsy Cline,” I say, “I know the best person for the job.”

I tell her all about Grandpa Felix and his picture-taking business but leave out the part about Winston because he has a tail. Right after I hang up, Littie plops on the couch beside me. Her eyes get great big when she sees my nose. “You look
like your face has been stampeded by an African rhinoceros.”

“My face was stampeded by Grandpa Felix’s floor,” I tell her.

She stares at my nose while I explain what happened. When I get to the part about Great-grandpa Albert and his nose powers, she says, “Are you pulling my leg?”

“It was in the newspaper,” I say, “so it has to be true.”

“Do you have nose powers?”

“I don’t know yet,” I tell her. “I didn’t have a chance to really practice before this happened.”

“I hope you do,” she says, “because it would stink to have a big nose for no reason. I’m just saying. Anyway, I’m not supposed to stay. I came over because I have something to tell you.” Littie watches my mom pass through with an armful of glass paint jars.

“What?” I say.

“Momma found out about me and you going to
Grandpa Felix’s yesterday,” Littie whispers. She points toward the kitchen. “Does she know about it, too?”

“Yep,” Mom answers loudly. “I do.”

“Oh,” says Littie. “In that case, Momma says I should say I’m sorry.” Then she adds, “Even though nothing bad happened to us.”

Mom sticks her head back in the living room and says, “Thank you, Littie. That’s nice of you to come over here and speak from the heart.”

“Well, my momma made me,” she says. “That’s part of my punishment.”

“And Penelope will be sure to do the same,” says Mom, nodding at me.

Right away I tell Littie that I’m sorry that her momma found out. But Mom says that’s not what she meant.

Littie shrugs. “It’s not all that bad. My momma’s blood pressure went up when she found out what we did, and she had to go to bed with a hot water bottle. But it went back down, her high blood pressure,
I mean, and when it did, she said if I promise not to do anything like that ever again, she’ll buy me a helmet and let me skateboard. So.”

“That’s lucky,” I say.

Littie nods. “I better go now before she changes her mind about the skateboard. If you ever want another adventure to your grandpa Felix’s, let me know.”

“Not a chance,” calls Mom from the kitchen.

“She’s got good ears,” Littie says. “I hope you find your nose powers. I’m just saying.”

“Me too,” I say. My nose twitches just then. Which makes me think about Grandpa Felix. I go to the hall closet, which is where Mom put his coat after we got home from the hospital. When I swing open the door, his green coat brushes my arm. I pull the coat down off the hook and put it on.

I bury my nose in the collar and breathe in, but I can’t smell him. I shove my hands into the pockets and pull out two nickels from one and a stack of “A Thousand Words” cards from the other. I use
my finger to trace over
A Thousand Words.
Then I whisper to him, at the card, “Mom said that there aren’t words. And that she wouldn’t know what to say to you, Grandpa Felix. I wish I had a thousand words to give her.”

And then my brains must start to unfreeze about what to do for my coat of arms because right then and there I know what Grandpa Felix means when he says a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe I don’t need a thousand words to make things right. Maybe a picture is all I need.

A
fter a quick trash-can tour, I’m in my room and I dump out all of my art supplies on the floor. I pull out poster board from under my bed, sharpen my No. 2 Hard drawing pencil, and write “Penelope Crumb’s Coat of Arms” in big letters at the top.

Inside my toolbox, I find all the magazines that Grandpa Felix gave me. Real careful, I tear out the pictures that he took, including the one of Winston. Then I pull out Mom’s creepy insides drawings, the ones I found in her trash can. And the photograph of Grandpa Felix, and the one of my dad.

I tear out the pictures from my drawing pad that I drew of my family: Terrible’s alien spaceship and Dad’s toolbox and shoehorn. I add a picture of Great-grandpa Albert as a war hero. I cut around them and lay them out on the poster board, fitting them into the shape of a shield. All I have left to do is paste them on, but when I look over the pictures and drawings, my coat of arms doesn’t really look like anything special.