“Well, if He can’t give us what we want, what’s He there for?” I said.
“Maybe to help us get through the times we don’t get what we want.”
I didn’t want to hear it.
“It’s not what happens to us, Al, that’s nearly as important as what we do about it,” said Dad.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” I said angrily. “I can’t bring back Oatmeal!”
“No, but you can let something like this make you angry at the world or you can let it make you a better person somehow.”
I didn’t want to hear that, either. All I wanted was my cat back. All I wanted was to hold her and hug her and feel her scratchy tongue on my hand.
“It’s probably too early to talk about this, but we can get another kitten,” said Dad.
“No!” I said, sitting straight up. “I don’t want another cat. I don’t want anything else I love to be taken away.” Lester, I remember, had said the same thing after Tippy died.
“All right,” said Dad. “But it’s okay if you change your mind later.”
“I won’t!” I said. “Don’t bring me another kitten, Dad. Promise me you won’t do that.”
“All right,” he said.
Lester came back upstairs with the box that his running shoes had come in. I crumpled up old newspaper and put it in the bottom of the box to make it soft. Then we put Oatmeal’s little blanket on top. Dad picked up Oatmeal’s body and placed her gently on the blanket. Crying, I put her favorite toy between her paws.
“O-Oatmeal,” I sobbed, and stroked her head one last time. But I couldn’t really see through my tears.
Lester put the lid on the box and taped it shut. Then Dad got his shovel, and we went out on the back step.
“Where do you think we should bury her?” he asked me. “Next month that azalea bush by the fence will be in bloom. Do you want to bury her under that?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to ask any of your friends to come over?”
I shook my head.
I held the box while Lester cleaned some of the weeds away from under the azalea bush, and then Dad thrust his shovel in the ground and began to dig. I heard a screen door slam and turned around to see Donald and his mother standing out on their steps, watching.
“Tell them to go back inside,” I muttered.
“Now, Al, there’s no reason to be unkind,” Dad said.
“Well, life isn’t being kind to me!” I shot back. I glared at Donald and his mother, and after a while they went inside.
Dad dug down about two feet, and when the hole was wide enough, I knelt down and placed the box at the bottom.
“Maybe we’d each like to say something special about Oatmeal,” said Dad.
“I… I loved her!” I said. “When I picked her up the first time, she was the softest thing in the world.”
“I liked the way she jumped up and crawled into my lap when I read the newspaper,” said Dad.
“I liked the way she’d eat my creamed spinach,” said Lester. I knew he was trying to make me smile, but nothing could make me smile.
“Well… ,” Dad said finally, and lifted the shovel again.
“Wait!” I said. There were some wild violets growing here and there in our yard, and I picked a handful of the best and sprinkled them over the box. Then another handful. And then I went inside while Dad filled the hole.
I was looking for some kind of marker I could put on Oatmeal’s grave. Her toys were scattered around the house, and I chose a little gray rubber mouse that looked so lifelike, you’d think it was real. I stuck it on the end of a shish kebab stick from the kitchen drawer and took it outside. Then I stuck it in the dirt above the grave.
But there were reminders of Oatmeal everywhere. Her food dish, her water dish, all the other toys. There was even her hair on the end of the couch where she liked to sleep and hair on the blanket on my bed.
“How do you ever get over losing something or somebody?” I asked my dad that night.
“You don’t, Alice. You go on remembering them forever until they just become a part of you. And finally you discover that the good memories are the ones that stay with you, and you can let the sad parts go.”
In bed that night, my first night without my cat since third grade, I tried to remember only the good things about her and not the ways I had noticed she was slowing down. But I wished I had been with her that afternoon. I wished I had been sitting on the floor in her patch of sunlight, stroking her head. I couldn’t stand the thought that she died alone.
I was angry at myself for not being there. I was angry at Donald because he came over. I was angry at his mom for watching, at Muffin for being alive, at Sara for not telling me that her family was leaving… .
I guess I was mad at anyone who had a pet, anyone who had a mother, anyone who had a best friend. I was afraid that I might turn into a Mrs. Swick someday for real—the girl who never laughed.
13
REAL TROUBLE
I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL THE next day, but Dad wouldn’t let me stay home. I wouldn’t walk with Donald, though. I waited till he’d gone, and then I set out, my eyes straight ahead. I didn’t even go over to where Rosalind and the other girls were talking by the swings.
When the bell rang and I went inside, Rosalind and the others caught up with me. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“Oatmeal died,” I told her.
“Oh no!” said Rosalind. “What happened?”
“It was her heart. She had a defect.”
“Why didn’t you have it fixed?” asked Rosalind.
People say the stupidest things sometimes. How was that supposed to make me feel?
“Because we couldn’t, Rosalind! Not everything can be fixed, okay?” I shot back.
The girls put on their sad faces, but I saw them glance at each other before I turned away. When I scraped my arm, I wanted them around to comfort me; now I didn’t.
At lunchtime, though, the girls tried to be extra nice.
“Sometimes,” Megan said, “a whole lot of bad things happen at once to somebody. My uncle was in a car accident, and the next week Aunt Sharon had an operation and almost died. And then their garage caught on fire.”
“My mom knows a woman who had four children, and three of them died when they were babies,” said Jody.
“Maybe God was sending a message,” said Dawn, and stuck her straw down inside her chocolate milk carton. We all looked at Dawn.
“What kind of a message?” I asked.
“Like the plagues in the Bible,” said Dawn.
“You mean the woman who lost three children is being punished?” asked Rosalind.
Dawn shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She sucked hard on her straw.
Rosalind looked at Dawn, then at me, and back at Dawn again. “Do you think Alice is being punished?”
“I don’t know!” Dawn said uneasily. “I just remember what we learned in Sunday school about God sending the plagues.”
“You know what I think?” I said, a little too loud. “I don’t think God is fair, that’s what! And I don’t know if He’s so great if He can’t even keep a little kitten alive.”
All the girls gasped, even Rosalind.
“Oh, Alice, you’ll go to hell!” said Megan.
“So what?” I snapped.
They gasped again.
Miss Burstin, our third-grade teacher, was on lunchroom duty. She’d heard Megan say “hell” and moved closer to our table.
The girls finished eating, took their trash over to the garbage cans, then went on outside. I took a long time eating my bag of pretzels because I didn’t care if I had any playground time or not. I didn’t feel like playing.
When I went outdoors finally, the girls had cornered Dawn over by the fence.
“That was a stupid thing to say,” Rosalind was telling her.
“You shouldn’t have said that to someone who just lost a pet,” said Jody, and that rea
lly surprised me.
They turned and looked at me as I walked up. “Well,” I said, “someday maybe her cat will die, and then she’ll know how it feels.”
“Yeah!” said Rosalind.
Dawn started to cry. I just turned and walked away, and the other girls went with me.
Every morning I got up and saw Oatmeal’s hair on my blanket. I felt angry. Angry and sad.
I gathered up all of Oatmeal’s toys, put them in a plastic bag, then took Dad’s shovel and dug another hole in our yard. I put the toys in there and covered them up so I never had to see them again.
To make matters worse, I was having a hard time with math. I hated story problems. They never sounded like real problems to me.
Farmer Brown has two acres of lima beans. He has five men to pick them. If each man does an equal amount of work, how many square feet of lima beans will he have to pick?
“This is stupid!” I yelled. “I’m not a farmer! I don’t have any lima beans! I don’t even like lima beans. Why do I have to do stupid problems like this one?”
I was trying to do my homework at the kitchen table, and Dad was washing pans in the sink.
“Okay, let’s pretend that it’s another problem, Al,” he said. “Let’s say that your rich aunt left you two pounds of pearls. You are feeling generous and want to share them equally among you and your three best friends. How would you go about doing that?”
“I don’t have a rich aunt,” I grumbled.
“So? Answer my question.”
I thought about it. “I’d have to figure out how many ounces each girl would get,” I said.
“And how would you do that?”
“Know how many ounces are in a pound.”
“And… ?”
“Well, if there are sixteen ounces in a pound and I multiply by two, I’d know how many ounces there were altogether. Then I’d divide that number by four girls.”
“Right. So how do you find out how many square feet of land each bean picker would have to work?”
“I’d have to know how many square feet are in an acre,” I said grudgingly.
“Okay. See? If you think of the same kind of problem in simpler terms, sometimes that will show you how to do it.”
I finally finished the story problems and thought I was all done with homework. Then I realized I had a paper to correct.
Check the spelling, Mrs. Swick had written beside a word in my paper about our community. I had written resterant. It looked okay to me.
“How do you spell ‘restaurant’?” I asked Dad.
“Look it up,” he said.
I trudged into the living room and took our dictionary off the shelf. I looked under the r’s. There was no resterant. I tried restorant. That wasn’t there either. I tried resterint. But that wasn’t listed.
I dropped the dictionary on the floor and gave it a kick. “How are you supposed to look a word up in the dictionary if you can’t spell it?” I bellowed. “School is stupid! Teachers are stupid!”
Dad came to the kitchen doorway. “Al, pick up that dictionary and put it back on the shelf,” he said.
I reached down, picked it up, then shoved it back on the shelf so hard that all the other books fell over and two dropped off the end.
“Cut it out!” Dad said. “You’re making the whole family miserable.”
“Good!” I said. I picked up the two books and put them back on the shelf. Then I went down the hall to my room and slammed the door. Hard.
When I got enough money, I decided, I was going to get a T-shirt that read DON’T MESS WITH ME on the front. I would wear it all the rest of fifth grade. When it got dirty, I’d wash it and dry it overnight and put it on again the next morning.
I didn’t smile all the way to school the next morning. I glared at the crossing guard. I barked at a little kindergarten kid who stopped just inside the door to tie his shoe and almost made me fall over him. And when I went home that afternoon, Mrs. Sheavers was taking some bags of groceries out of her car and a bag ripped open. Cans of tomato sauce and some onions fell to the sidewalk.
I didn’t offer to help. I didn’t even say hello. I just went on in the house.
Sometimes I hate the way I’m acting, but I just can’t seem to stop. If I was walking down the street and met a girl like me, I’d tell her to go jump in the lake and take her frown with her. It just seemed as though everyone else in the world was happy but me. Everybody else had something nice to think about, and all I could think about was Oatmeal.
I’d only been inside for five minutes when the phone rang. It was Dad.
“Al, I just wanted you to know we’re at Holy Cross Hospital. Lester broke his leg riding his bike home from school this afternoon, and he’s on his way over to X-ray. I don’t know when we’ll be home,” he said.
14
A GREAT IDEA
I WALKED OVER TO MY BEANBAG CHAIR and sank down. It made a loud squish when I landed, like all the air going out of my lungs at the same time. If I’d had a blanket, I probably would have sucked my thumb.
My brother had broken his leg. The brother who was supposed to go to the prom. The brother who had been working part-time at a miniature golf place to earn enough money to take his girlfriend in a limousine.
Maybe he’d ruined his bike, too, and maybe his condition was worse than they thought. Maybe he’d broken more bones than they suspected. What if he’d banged his head and had amnesia and wouldn’t recognize Dad and me?
I couldn’t sit still, so I got up and walked back and forth between the kitchen sink and the front door, worrying about Lester. I decided the best thing I could do for Dad and Lester was to have dinner ready when they got home. I looked in the cupboard and found a can of macaroni and meatballs and a tin of sardines. I looked in the refrigerator and found some cheese and lettuce. I looked in the freezer and saw some ice cream.
Rosalind called and asked if I got the fourth problem on page sixty-two, and I told her that the fourth problem on page sixty-two was the last thing on my mind right now and that I didn’t care if Farmer Brown sold his lima beans or not.
“That’s not the one,” said Rosalind.
“I don’t care. There’s a family emergency going on right now, and I’m too busy to talk,” I said.
I set the table. I opened the macaroni and meatballs and put them in a microwave dish. I set the sardines on a saucer and got down some crackers for the cheese. Then I cut the lettuce into small pieces for salad and put a little dish for ice cream at each plate.
Dad and Lester didn’t get home until seven. As soon as I heard the car drive up, I ran out on the steps.
Dad got out and went around to Lester’s side. He opened the rear door and took out a pair of crutches. Then he opened Lester’s door and helped him stand up. Slowly, Lester hobbled round the car, his lips tight and his face tired.
I held the door open for them. Lester didn’t seem to know how to use crutches yet, and they swung wildly to the sides as he came up the steps. They clunked against the railing when he reached the top, Dad right behind him in case he fell.
I didn’t know what to say to someone who had just broken his leg, so I said, “How’s your leg?”
“Just wonderful, Al. Never better,” Lester growled.
“It turned out it’s his ankle, Al,” said Dad.
“Oh,” I said. “Then it’s not so bad, is it?” And when Lester gave me a look, I said, “I’ve got your macaroni and meatballs ready.”
“Huh?” said Lester, and hopped up the last step.
“I guess it’s a good thing you don’t have amnesia,” I told him.
“Al… ,” said Dad, so I shut up.
Lester managed to make it to a chair in the kitchen before he dropped his crutches on the floor with a loud bang. I saw the corners of his mouth turn down, the closest I had ever come to seeing Lester cry since he got to be a teenager.
“I’m really sorry about your ankle,” I told him.
“There goes the prom,”
Lester said bitterly. “This just ruins everything!”
Nobody said much at the table. I guess there wasn’t much to say about the food anyway. Each of us got a big spoonful of macaroni and a meatball and a half, four sardines, and some lettuce and cheese and crackers.
“This is all?” asked Dad, looking around.
“There’s ice cream in the freezer,” I said hopefully.
“This stinks,” said Lester. “This ankle stinks. Life stinks.”
“Yes,” said Dad. “Sometimes it does. But it could have been so much worse, Lester.”
What happened, I found out, was that Lester’s bike skidded going around a corner, and when he fell over, his foot was still clipped into his pedal. All Dad could think about was what might have happened if Lester had fallen over in front of a car.
He said that until Lester could get up and down stairs without crutches, he could sleep in Dad’s bed and Dad would sleep in the basement.
“How am I going to do that?” Lester said. “All my clothes are in the basement. All my stuff! My books and CDs and—”
“I’ll be your fetcher, Les,” I said brightly. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll go get it for you.”
“That’s nice of you, Alice,” said Dad.
But I saw tears in Lester’s eyes no matter how hard he tried to hide them. “All I wanted was to take Lisa to the prom, and now I’m going to have to tell her it’s all off,” he said, and turned his face away.
I spent the evening getting things for Lester. I went up and down the basement stairs so much that my legs ached. When I finally fell into bed that night, I discovered that when I was doing something for Lester, I wasn’t so sad about Oatmeal. I didn’t forget her; I could never forget her. I just didn’t think about her all the time when I was worrying about someone else.
I didn’t like the person I had been the last few days, I decided. I wanted to be the girl who had stuck up for Rosalind when the other kids were mean to her, the girl who had wanted to help Sara, the girl who had tried to make Mrs. Swick laugh, and the girl who was kind to Lester. I didn’t know that other girl who wanted to be mean to the whole world, and yet I knew she was part of me too.