The Seventh Most Important Thing (7 page)

A
rthur got two weeks off from his probation for Christmas.

Of course, he still had 112 more hours to serve, so it wasn't really a gift or anything. Officer Billie gave him the news. He wasn't expecting her visit.

In fact, when Arthur looked out the window and saw a cop car pulling into their driveway late on Monday afternoon, his first panicked thought was that something bad had happened to his mom and Barbara.

They'd gone shopping after school because Barbara needed new shoes and his mom needed a nice dress to wear for a big job interview she had at a dentist's office on Wednesday. The dentist was looking for a full-time receptionist. If his mom got the job, it would mean she could quit her two lousy part-time waitressing ones. Arthur was trying not to hope too much, but he really wanted her to get it.

When Officer Billie stepped out of the car, Arthur released the shaky breath he'd been holding. At least he knew everything was okay with his mom and Barbara—even if it probably wasn't okay for him.

The officer was carrying something as she came up to the front door. From a distance, Arthur couldn't tell what it was, but it looked like some type of round container. He figured it was from the Junk Man. Returning something else he didn't like.

As he fumbled to open the door for Officer Billie, Arthur wished he weren't wearing the wrinkled jeans and undershirt he'd thrown on when he got home from school. He also hoped he didn't have peanut butter on his teeth from the sandwich he'd been eating.

“May I come in for a minute, Mr. Owens?” Officer Billie said in her official cop voice when he finally got the door open.

“Sure, okay, yes,” Arthur said in a rush, stumbling backward to let her in.

As the officer stepped inside and took off her cap, Arthur glanced around nervously, worrying what she might notice. The collection of dirty glasses on the coffee table? Barbara's paper dolls strewn all over the living room? The misshapen Christmas tree? The stacks of unopened and unpaid bills drifting out of the bookshelves?

“I have come on official and unofficial business,” Officer Billie stated, remaining squarely in the middle of the hallway. “First, the official part: I have not received any further complaints from Mr. Hampton, so I assume you followed his directions successfully on Saturday. Is that right, Mr. Owens?”

“Yes, ma'am. I guess so,” Arthur replied carefully, wondering if the officer had any clue what the directions were.

“Well, I expect this will continue to be the case,” Officer Billie said crisply. “However,” she continued, “Mr. Hampton has informed me that he will be away for the Christmas holiday, so he has requested that you be given two weeks off from your probation. Your work for him will resume on the first Saturday in January. Is that clear?”

Arthur nodded.

“Here. I've written down the date for you. Saturday, January fourth.” Officer Billie handed him a piece of paper. “And now for the unofficial business.” She held out a cookie tin with a rocking horse on the top. “Every Christmas, I make caramel corn for my kids. It's my specialty,” she explained. “Merry Christmas.”

Arthur had no idea how to reply. Officer Billie wasn't the kind of person you'd expect to get a gift from. Especially not something she'd made. It also took him a minute to realize that when the officer said “my kids,” she probably wasn't talking about her real kids—she meant juvenile delinquents like him.

“Stop.”
Officer Billie's hand went up as the awkward silence continued. “When someone gives you a gift, it is polite to look them in the eye and say in a clear and appreciative voice, ‘Thank you very much.' ”

Arthur forced his eyes upward. “Thank you very much.”

“You're welcome,” Officer Billie replied. She pointed one of her square fingers at him. “Share it with your family. And don't mess up over the next couple of weeks. A lot of people mess up over Christmas. It's a tough season. Don't let me catch you being one of them.”

Arthur nodded. “Okay.”

Officer Billie put on her cap. “Have a good evening.” She pulled the door closed behind her with a firm, official-sounding thud.

After she left, Arthur leaned against the door, still holding the caramel corn and feeling kind of shaken up. People could surprise you, he thought.

O
fficer Billie was right about one thing, Arthur discovered. Despite having the least sweet personality of anybody he knew, she made awfully good caramel corn.

And she was also right about another thing.

Christmas was a very tough season.

The one bright spot was that his mom got the receptionist job. The dentist called a few days before Christmas and told her she could start in January. After his mom got off the phone with her new boss, she sat down on the kitchen floor and started crying into a dish towel because she was so happy. That's what she told Arthur when he came running into the kitchen to check if she was okay—she was crying because she was happy.

Sometimes he gave up trying to figure out his mom.

Christmas Day was a different story. If it had been up to Arthur, he would have pulled the covers over his head and pretended it was a regular day. But Barbara and his mom were counting on him.

So when Barbara poked him in the arm at about six o'clock and whispered loudly in his ear that Santa had been there, he managed to say “Good, let's see” in a fake excited voice. He followed his sister's polka-dot robe downstairs.

“Merry Christmas, guys!” Arthur's mom said extra cheerfully as they came into the living room. She'd put on bright pink lipstick, even though it was six in the morning and nobody else was around. “White Christmas” was playing on the record player. The air smelled faintly of burned cinnamon rolls.

Arthur could tell his mom was trying hard to make Christmas nice for them. But it seemed strange. Like they were actors in a play. Or aliens on a planet that looked exactly like their own, only it wasn't.

Barbara squealed as she tore open her gifts of baby dolls, and paper dolls, and Barbie dolls—and more dolls than Arthur could be bothered to pay attention to. He'd already been warned about the gifts. How there wouldn't be many and most of them would be for Barbara. Money was still tight.

He handed his mother the small gift he'd wrapped for her. “Here, Mom.”

“For me?” she said, looking surprised.

“It's nothing, Mom, really.”

His mom opened the tissue paper slowly. Inside, there was a small metal flowerpot in the shape of a watering can.

“It's a flowerpot,” he explained, just in case she didn't get it.

“I know what it is,” she said, still acting surprised. “But you shouldn't have spent money to buy me anything this year. Not with all that's happened. I was fine with nothing.”

Arthur shrugged. “That's okay. It wasn't much.”

Because the truth was—it was free.

He'd found it on the same Saturday that he'd found the mirror. It had been stuck in a trash can with a bunch of broken clay pots and garden stuff. The silver spout was what he spotted first.

Once he'd managed to pull out the rest of it, Arthur knew it would make the perfect gift for his mom. She always kept a row of African violets on the kitchen windowsill.

He was pretty proud of how it had turned out too. He'd glued the shaky handle back into place and polished the metal with some of his dad's chrome polish. It looked brand-new. If the person who had thrown out the flowerpot could see how nice it looked now, Arthur was sure they would have kept it.

“Well, thank you,” his mom said, squeezing his shoulders with one arm. “However much it was. I love it.”

As it turned out, Arthur's mom surprised him with a gift too. She handed him a flat box wrapped in green paper. When he opened it, he found his dad's silver-dollar collection. Six mint-condition peace dollars displayed in a black frame.

“I saved these for you. I know your dad wanted you to have them,” his mom said softly.

A thick lump rose in Arthur's throat as he remembered looking at these silver coins with his dad. He'd taken them to elementary school a bunch of times for show-and-tell. He'd written a research report about them in third grade called “All About Money.” His dad had often said, “One day, when I'm gone, I'll pass them on to you.”

Now that he had them, Arthur didn't really want them.

Not now—or ever.

“And I got something for you too, Arthur. Open it! Open it!” Barbara flopped on the sofa next to him. For once, he was grateful to his sister for interrupting something.

She shoved a roundish package covered with way more tape than paper into his hands.

“It's a baseball! Did you guess? Did you guess?” she shouted before he had the wrapping half off.

“Thanks, Barbara. That's really nice,” Arthur said, his voice cracking only a little. He tossed the baseball in the air and caught it. “It's perfect.”

“I bought it with my own allowance money,” she said proudly as Arthur's mom winked at him. “I've been saving all year.”

Later, when his mom and Barbara were busy doing dishes in the kitchen, Arthur went upstairs and put the baseball on top of the dresser. He shoved the coins in the back of his closet, though.

It was weird how much they bothered him. He wasn't sure why. When his father's motorcycle cap and coat had been in the downstairs closet, they hadn't bothered him at all. In a way, they had made him feel as if his dad was still there.

But the coins made his throat clench up the minute he looked at them.

Arthur knew his mom was just trying to make up for what had happened in November. He knew she still blamed herself for some of it, even though he'd tried to tell her it wasn't her fault—she wasn't the one who'd lost her cool and hit someone with a brick.

It made Arthur realize how you couldn't always know what things would be important to people and what wouldn't. His mom had thrown out his dad's motorcycle cap, thinking it didn't matter, but it was way more important to Arthur than the silver coins she'd saved. And the flowerpot had been worthless to someone in Mr. Hampton's neighborhood, but it had turned out to be the perfect Christmas gift for his mom.

In other words, there could be a lot of reasons why people decided to save some things and why they threw others away—reasons that might not make any sense until you dug much deeper.

Which, Arthur thought, might be a small clue to the Junk Man's list.

J
ust to get out of the house, Arthur took a walk to Mr. Hampton's garage on the Saturday after Christmas. It was one of those deceptively sunny but frigid end-of-December days. Arthur's breath made clouds. The snow-covered sidewalks crunched like icebergs under his feet.

He passed by an older guy who was walking a dog wearing a ridiculous sweater. Arthur normally didn't wave to people, but since it was just after Christmas and they were the only ones around, it seemed like the right thing to do.

“My wife knitted it,” the guy said, waving back.

Arthur smiled politely and kept going. He wasn't sure what he hoped to find at the garage when he got there, or why he felt the need to go there at all during his two weeks off. It wasn't as if Officer Billie would deduct an hour from his probation for
visiting
the garage. But his curiosity about what Mr. Hampton was doing had gotten the better of him.

Officer Billie had said the guy was going away for the Christmas holidays, but Arthur didn't believe it. A trash picker didn't seem like the kind of person who would take vacations or have a regular family somewhere. It seemed more likely he wanted to work at the garage without being bothered.

Arthur figured if he stopped by unexpectedly, he might get a glimpse of what the guy was up to. The purpose of the Seven Most Important Things still bugged him. He wanted to see what else he could find out.

Of course, the walk turned out to be a complete waste of time.

The garage was locked up and looked as deserted as always. The grocery cart sat in its usual place outside the garage door, with its wheels buried in clumps of snow and ice. Maybe Officer Billie had been right. It didn't seem like anybody had been around the place in days.

Groovy Jim's shop was dark and closed up too. There was a folding iron gate across the doorway, which made the place look a lot more unfriendly than it usually did. A handwritten sign behind the gate said:
BACK NEXT YEAR
.

It took Arthur a minute to figure out the sign meant he'd be back in a few days, when the new year arrived. Not in 365 days.

Since there was nobody around and nothing to see, he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked home, feeling like an idiot. A cold idiot.

When Arthur returned home, he found Barbara sitting in the middle of the living room floor, munching on a sugar cookie. She was wearing her pink plaid coat and mittens. Crumbs were everywhere.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Where's Mom?”

“She went next door to borrow something. I was playing outside. Then I got hungry, so I came in.” Barbara chewed on her crumbly cookie. “Oh, and I talked to your friend too.”

Arthur stopped pulling off his boots. He stood in the hallway with one boot on and one off. “What friend?” he said, because he didn't have any friends. Not since his dad's accident and being in juvie. Even before that, he hadn't had a lot of friends. He wasn't the kind of person who liked to hang out in big groups.

His best friend, Ben Branson, who'd lived a few doors down the street, had moved away at the end of fifth grade. They used to play kickball together and trade baseball cards. He still had a couple of his Roger Maris cards.

“Was Ben back here?” he said, glancing out the window. Despite being good friends, they'd never bothered to write much after he left.

“No. Your friend with the shopping cart. You know,” Barbara said impatiently, glaring at her brother as if he were a dope, “the old man you threw the thing at but now you're friends with again. That's who.”

Arthur stared at his sister. What in the world was she talking about?

“The Junk Man—Mr. Hampton—was here?” he said slowly.

Barbara nodded and took another bite of her cookie. “Well, he didn't have that old cart with him, but I knew it was him when I saw him across the street, so I waved and said ‘Hi, mister.' And he came over and shook my hand and told me ‘Merry Christmas.' ” Barbara stuck out her hand to demonstrate. “So I said ‘Merry Christmas' too, and I told him how you were my brother and how you weren't bad anymore now.” She smiled proudly. “And I said how you had promised not to throw anything else again. Wasn't that nice of me?” she added.

Arthur couldn't believe what he was hearing. It seemed like way too bizarre a coincidence that he'd been trying to find out more about the Junk Man and maybe, at the same time, the Junk Man had been trying to find out more about him.

“Oh, and I also asked him if his kids got lots of stuff from Santa for Christmas. And he said he doesn't have any kids. Isn't that sad?” Barbara gave an exaggerated frown. “But he said it was okay. He likes being by himself.”

Arthur shook his head. How could his little sister have found out more about the Junk Man in five minutes of blabbering than he had?

“What else did he tell you?” Arthur pulled off his other boot. He pretended not to seem too interested in the conversation so his sister wouldn't clam up.

“Well, he told me he doesn't live in our neighborhood. He lives in three little rooms in a building farther away. And I asked him why he always pushes a shopping cart around, and he said it isn't a shopping cart, it's a chariot, but you just can't see the horses. Isn't that funny?” Barbara laughed. “A chariot—but you just can't see the horses!

“And the best part of all”—she stood up and reached into her coat pocket—“he gave me a pretty silver bead to keep.”

She held out her hand.

And there, in his sister's pink mitten, was the missing silver temperature knob from the toaster.