ALSO BY JERRY SPINELLI
Stargirl
Love, Stargirl
Milkweed
Crash
Knots in My Yo-yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid
Hokey Pokey
WITH EILEEN SPINELLI
Today I Will
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Jerry Spinelli
Cover art copyright © 2017 by Liz Casal
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780375831997 (trade) — ISBN 9780375931994 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553494631 — ISBN 9781524719241 (intl. ed.)
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Jerry Spinelli
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cammie - 2017
Chapter 1
Cammie - 1959
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Eloda - 1959
Chapter 1
Cammie - 2017
Chapter 1
Thank You
About the Author
To Springton Lake Village
– and –
Anthony Greco (Chubs)
It’s a birdhouse now.
It used to be a jailhouse. The Hancock County Prison.
Cellblocks once rang with beanboppers on iron bars and bad words flying day and night. Now finches and warblers and scarlet tanagers sing and flutter behind walls of glass.
The old Quiet Room, with its glass roof and tin wheelbarrow pouring water into a tiny pool, was designed to keep the prisoners calm. Almost no one went there but the trustees who tended the plants and flowers. Now children squeal as butterflies land on their heads and shoulders.
Where there used to be two exercise yards—men’s and women’s—there is now a single garden, a paradise where turtles and peacocks roam. It has a second waterfall—high as the wall! Pebbled paths. Ponds. Water lilies. Foot-long goldfish.
An occasional turkey buzzard lands wherever it likes.
Except for the sign, it looks the same as always from the front: like a fortress from the Middle Ages. Massive, sooty stone walls. Arched oaken doors. A sky-piercing tower with narrow bow-and-arrow slots should the castle ever need defending.
The prison was one city block long. It was home to over two hundred inmates, men and women, from shoplifters to murderers.
And one family.
Mine.
I was the warden’s daughter.
1
Breakfast time in the prison. The smell of fried scrapple filled the apartment. It happened every morning.
“I could teach you how to do it yourself,” she said. “It’s simple.”
“I want you to do it,” I said.
“You’ll be a teenager soon. You’ll have to learn someday.”
“You’re doing it,” I told her. “Case closed.”
Her name was Eloda Pupko. She was a prison trustee. She took care of our apartment above the prison entrance. Washed. Ironed. Dusted. And kept me company. Housekeeper. Cammie-keeper.
At the moment, she was braiding my hair.
“Okay,” she said. “Done.”
I squawked. “Already?” I didn’t want her to be done.
“This little bit?” She gave it a tug.
She was right. I’d wanted a pigtail down the middle, but all my short hair allowed was barely a one-knotter. A pigstub.
I felt her leaving me. I whirled. “No!”
She stopped, turned, eyebrows arching. “No?”
I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “I want a ribbon.”
Her eyes went wide. And then she laughed. And kept laughing.
She knew what I knew: I was anything but a hair-ribbon kind of girl. I sat on the counter stool dressed in dungarees, black-and-white high-top Keds and a striped T-shirt. My baseball glove lay on the other stool.
When she had laughed herself out, she said, “Ribbon? On a cannonball firebug?”
She had a point on both counts.
Cannonball was my nickname. As for “firebug”…
—
In school two months earlier we had been learning about the Unami, the Native Americans from our area. This inspired me to make a fire the old-fashioned Unami way. For reasons knowable only to the brain of a sixth grader, I decided to do so in our bathtub.
On the way home from school one day, I detoured to the railroad tracks and creek and collected my supplies: a quartz stone, a rusty iron track-bed spike and a handful of dry, mossy stuff from the ground under a bunch of pine trees. I laid it all in the bathtub. And climbed in.
Over the mossy nest I smashed and scratched the stone and spike into each other. My arms were ready to fall off when a thin curl of smoke rose out of the nest. I blew on it. A spark appeared. “What are you doing?” said Eloda from the doorway. I glanced up at her—and screamed, because the spark had flamed and burned my thumb. Stone and spike clanked on porcelain. Eloda turned on the shower, putting out the fire and drenching me. When I dried off and changed my clothes, she put Vaseline and a Band-Aid on the burn and told me to tell people I had
cut myself slicing tomatoes.
—
Eloda tapped my hand. “Lemme see.”
I showed her. The burn was just a pale pink trace by now. She took my hand in both of hers. She seemed to hold it longer than necessary.
“Number one law,” she said.
“No more fires,” I said. She had made me recite the words every time she changed the Band-Aid. She still made me say it.
Then her hands were off me, but I was still feeling her. It was her eyes. She was staring at me in a way that seemed to mean something, but I would not find out what till years later.
“Tell you what,” she said, breaking the spell. “If you make it to three knots, I’ll get you a ribbon.”
Again she started to leave.
Again I blurted, “You’re so lucky.”
Again she stopped. “That’s me. Miss Lucky.”
“I mean it,” I said. “You get to have scrapple every day.”
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s why I decided to live here. I love the scrapple.” She walked away.
“Stop!”
She stopped. She waited, her back to me.
“You can’t go,” I told her.
“I have work to do.” She stepped into the dining room.
“I’m your boss!” I called—and instantly wished I could take it back. I added lamely, “When my dad’s not here.”
Her shoulders turned just enough so she could look back at me. Surprisingly, she did not seem angry. She sighed. “Miss O’Reilly—”
I stopped her: “My name is Cammie.”
“Miss Cammie—”
“No!” I snapped. “No Miss. Just Cammie.” She stared. “Say it.” She kept staring. “Please!”
Now she was angry. My name, barely audible, came out with a blown breath: “Cammie.”
She walked away.
This was in mid-June, the fourth day of summer vacation when I was twelve, and I had decided that Eloda Pupko must become my mother.
2
Though I did not know it at the time, my decision had begun to form about a month earlier. On a Sunday.
Mother’s Day.
As always, that holiday began with my father and me driving to Riverside Cemetery, just west of town. As always, he parked on the grass and we walked up the hill. We stopped at the right of the big tree. We looked down at the headstone and once again read the words we knew by heart:
ANNE VICTORIA O’REILLY
APRIL 16, 1921
FEBRUARY 3, 1947
LOVING WIFE
LOVING MOTHER
As always, I put a vase of daffodils in front of the headstone. As always, we stood there, saying nothing, staring at the stone.
I did not remember my mother. She died when I was a baby. She was hit by a milk truck a moment after saving me.
It was the most famous accident in Two Mills that year. Maybe ever. It made me famous. The Baby Girl Whose Mother Saved Her from the Milk Truck. When my father became warden of the county prison, I became even more famous.
As always, I knew it was time to leave the grave when my father said, “Okay.” We returned to the car and rode off.
We always went somewhere then. Philadelphia Zoo. Boat ride on the Delaware. Lancaster County and the Amish buggies. This year we went to a Phillies game. We went to three or four games every year, always on a Sunday. But never before on Mother’s Day.
At the ballpark they gave pink carnations to the mothers. We sat along the right-field line, in a spot where a lot of foul balls came down. As always, I had my glove. I loved baseball. Since I was a girl and could not join Little League, my next best dream was to catch a major-league foul ball.
Halfway through the seventh inning everyone stood up, but no one faster than me. I took great pride in being the first one to stand for the seventh-inning stretch. I always made sure to flex my shoulders and arch my back, which by then, sure enough, were stiff from sitting for so long.
Then something unexpected happened.
The organ stopped playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The PA announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated.” Thirty thousand people sat. Then he said, “As you know, this is the day we honor our mothers.” A faint tremor went through me. “If you will direct your attention to the box seats on the first-base side, you will see mothers and wives of many of our Phillies ballplayers. Ladies, will you please stand.”
Several rows of women stood and turned to the crowd. Every one of them was smiling and waving. Every one wore a pink carnation. The stadium clapped and cheered and whistled. You might have thought someone had hit a home run.
Then the PA voice said, “And now we ask that every mother in the ballpark please stand and receive our love and thanks for all you do. Ladies…” And there was a great wave of movement throughout the masses, and hundreds, thousands of women came to their feet—young, old, a pink blizzard of carnations—all of them bathing in the cheers and whistles of the multitude.
If I had to write my first thought at that moment, it might have been something like this: Wow, all these mothers and not one of them mine. It was just a flat calculation. There was no feeling to it.
And then there was.
For right beside me, inches from my shoulder, a presence that until then I had barely been aware of abruptly snapped to her feet. Her low-heeled shoes were gleaming white as Chiclets, with gold-trimmed white bows and quarter-size holes in the front for her big toes to peek through. Her dress was mint green. Her snowy white gloves had little slits at the wrists.
I dared to look up at her face. I was surprised she was not smiling. Instead she looked proud. And then laughter suddenly burst from her and she was looking down to the other side as a little voice piped: “Yay, Mommy!”
And then they were all sitting back down, thousands of mothers, and the game was resuming—and I didn’t realize that I had never stopped staring at her until she turned and cast on me the most dazzling smile I had ever seen, and for a moment it seemed as if this perfect stranger had known me all my life.
And then I was bawling. Suddenly. No warning. No reason. Out, as they say, of left field. I couldn’t stop myself. Her smile changed instantly to something like horror. A white-gloved hand went to her bright red lips. “Oh dear,” she said. And then my father’s arm was around me, squeezing, and he was asking me what was the matter and did I want to go, and I blubbered “No!” and I pounded my fist into my glove until the last of the tears went away.
We stayed until the last out. I did not look at the mint-green lady again, and no foul ball came anywhere near us.
3
How do you be a child to a mother you never knew?
For twelve years my father had been enough. Family photos and a yellowing newspaper story had been enough.
Sure, from the time I’d first heard the story, I’d thought about my mother. Anne O’Reilly. The lady who saved me from the milk truck. I cried for her. For myself. Sometimes. And that was it. That’s how the world was. Other kids had mothers. Cammie O’Reilly didn’t. End of story.
Now, in the weeks after Mother’s Day, something was changing. Enough was no longer enough. Dormant feelings stirred by a smile at a ballpark moved and shifted until they shaped a thought: I was sick and tired of being motherless. I wanted one. And a second thought: If I couldn’t have my first-string mother, I’d bring one in off the bench.
But who?
A teacher?
The next lady who smiled at me?
The flash point came in five words.
4
“Put them in the sink.”
Okay, back up….
The last day of school had been a half day. I ran all the way home, burst through Reception, up the long stairway and into our jailhouse apartment. I sat myself down at the kitchen table, where my lunch was waiting. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Tastykake chocolate cupcakes. Empty glass—but not for long. A hand appeared, pouring chocolate milk from a Supplee Dairy glass bottle.
r /> A hand—that’s how I thought of it. There had always been a hand, serving me this, cleaning up that. In the absence of a mother, I had grown up with a parade of hands serving and taking care of me. The hands of women inmates—Cammie-keepers—whom my father trusted to be with me during the day while he was working. The hands came with faces and names, but to me they were mostly hands. Hands that did my bidding, more often than not before I even asked. Handmaids.
The hand that poured my chocolate milk that day was simply the latest in the long parade. It did differ from the others in one way: the name attached to it. Eloda Pupko. It sounded like it belonged in a comic book. I asked my father if it was her real name. He said it was.
So the hand of Eloda Pupko poured my milk, and I ate my lunch and got up from the table and was almost out of the dining room…
When it happened.
“Put them in the sink.”
I stopped, out of sheer surprise. I recognized the voice as the trustee’s but could not determine whom she was talking to.
I heard it again: “Put them in the sink.”
I turned. She was standing by the table. She was looking straight, unmistakably at me.