Girl Unmoored (32 page)

And I couldn’t help it, I smiled.

He cleared his throat. “So what are we going to name her? That’s what I was asking your mother. I’m waiting for her to get back to me.”

“Dad,” I said carefully, the words begging me not to say them. “Maybe we should call her Margie?”

He dropped his smile. “You wouldn’t mind?”

I shook my head. And swallowed.

“Of course, we could always call her the Latin translation for it instead.”

We shook on it. It wasn’t quite as good as my name, but not everyone can be named Apron.

The next morning after my dad and I ate pancakes at our lobsters, he went to change Daisy’s last name to Bramhall and I got out the
Save the Seal
pamphlets.
The bloody hot dog of a mother was still frozen in front of that sad baby seal, but behind them, there were other seals, some small and some big, some in the middle of a roll and some floating in the ocean, that needed to be saved, too.

It was already hot, the kind of day when you think the sun broke down up there and was going to laser beam you forever. When I went into the pantry to get a water bottle for my bike, something twitched.

The Boss was staring at me.

“Hey, little guy,” I said, poking my finger into his cage.

He didn’t look any different, but I could tell he was glad to be back.

Up in my room, I took M’s broken hospital bracelet out of my pocket and slipped it into my drawer next to my mom’s. Daisy might want it someday.

Later, after my dad came back and I had delivered every single one of those pamphlets, my dad sat down with me on the porch stairs.

“Mike only told me it was a man who adopted him.”

“A handsome man?” my dad asked.

“No,” I smiled. Then after a beat I said, “But a nice one.”

He chuckled. “Well, it was Mike’s idea.”

But he was lying and we both knew it.

“So how was the hospital, did you get to hold her hand, too?” I asked, both of us slapping at a fly that was suddenly trying to land.

“You got to hold her hand?” He turned to me, his eyebrows pulled up somewhere between sad and surprised, forgetting about that fly for a moment.

I pursed my lips together.

“Well,” my dad said, slapping my back, and still missing. He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

I smiled a dare back, but noticed that down toward the ocean a line of fog was building up.

“Is she going to be okay, Dad?”

My dad stared at his hands, his fingers crossed over each other into a prayer. “I don’t know,” he said squeezing them once, then dropping them apart and taking my hand instead. I had forgotten how small mine were in his.

We started going back to the cafeteria for dinner again.
Juan
Busboy
was happy to see me, you could tell by the wink. One night at the soda stop, I turned around too fast and spilled my drink down someone’s shirt. “Look out!” a girl yelled, dropping her tray.

We both jumped over curly noodles and tomato sauce.

“Sorry,” I said lifting my head up to Annie Potts’s face.

“Hey!” we said at the same time.

“You got your hair cut,” she said.

“You got braces.”

Right away,
Juan
Busboy
came over with his bucket. “Sorry,” I told him. We thought he would be mad, but he just winked and said, “No problem,” and pretty soon it looked like nothing ever dropped in the first place.

“Where are you sitting?” Annie Potts asked.

I pointed to a corner inside the regular dining room. There was a picture of a red lobster above my dad’s head now. I had just started getting good at drawing it. I only had one chance to get it right when I painted it on the table; a lobster holding a daisy.

“Want to sit with me?”

She nodded and her eyes fell to her empty tray. “But I’ll have to go up and get some more money first,” she said looking a little worried. “My parents are upstairs with my grandmother. She’s getting out tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Carlos,” I said taking her by the arm. “It’s okay, Barbara won’t charge you again.”

After that, Annie Potts started coming to the cafeteria with us, but not to see her grandmother, to see Daisy. She wasn’t a banana bread anymore and every day she got pinker and fatter. Lately, when she saw my big red head rising over her crib, her eyes lit up and she smiled. My dad nudged me with his elbow and said she was just having gas, but then he winked.

I had one week left before starting eighth grade, and three weeks before Daisy was coming home. My dad would be going back to teach full time after that, but Grandma Bramhall wasn’t going anywhere ever again.
Especially
not on a cruise.

“It was like being stuck in a port-a-potty,” she said, her pinched in forehead shaking. Then she told us how her room was the size of a walnut shell and the dining room had just that
one
chandelier from the brochure in it. Mr. John had a great time cannon balling into the pool the size of a coffee mug, but all he ever wanted to do was swim and she decided she was never traveling again, especially with him. “In fact,” she said, a corner of her mouth pulling up. “Now that my car’s in the shop, Mr. Orso says he would be more than happy to pick me up and take me anywhere I need to go.”

Grandma Bramhall had rammed her car smack into Mr. Orso’s car one day while he had been backing out of his driveway. Neither of them were hurt, but they stood for hours together talking and laughing, a whole lot of barking and shaking going on, even after the tow truck came and took Grandma Bramhall’s car away.

“Or,” my dad told Grandma Bramhall, looking up from pruning my rosebush, with some dirt smudged on his cheek. “You could make it easier on the poor guy and hang out here more often. I’ve heard you’re pretty good with little people.” We had been searching the classifieds every day. We didn’t need a maid anymore. We needed a nanny.

Grandma Bramhall looked back and forth between us, faster than her head could shake. Then it started nodding up and down instead. We hired her on the spot.

Eighth grade started out better than you might think.
Johnny Berman wasn’t in any of my classes this year and Rennie hadn’t grown even a centimeter. She wasn’t going to be friends with Jenny Pratt much longer, you could tell. She started slowing down when she walked by me and Annie Potts, playing handball by the swings, or just talking under the big maple tree, but I tried not to notice. Mr. Solo had paired us up for flash-card buddies though, so lately we had started talking again.

When I asked her if her mom was still cooking at 4:30, she said yes, but sometimes she and her dad and Eeebs snuck out to McDonalds before dinner these days. Mrs. Perry was going through an Indian phase right now. She asked me if I wanted to come with them sometime. I told her I would think about it, but that while Daisy was still there, I had dinner at the hospital with my dad.

One night at our new regular table, after I had drawn my tenth perfect lobster in a row, my dad crunched down his newspaper and stared at me.

“Apron,” he said. “Did you enter a poetry contest?”

I shook my head, but he said, “Well, what’s this then?”

My eyes stopped right below my dad’s finger. Right where it said:
Falmouth Middle Schoolers Win Poetry Contest.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Mike told me that Ms. Frane entered my free verse poem in something.”

“Ms. Frane?” my dad said, looking confused. “Did Mike know Ms. Frane?”

I dropped my eyes to the floor. I thought about telling him that she must have been a regular customer at Scent Appeal, but told him the truth, instead.

My dad looked sad, just like I thought he would, but then he smiled and said, “Your aunt and uncle? Doesn’t look like she believed you,” and turned that newspaper around so I could see that Ms. Frane had kept Chad’s name in, right next to mine.

I read it again.

What Love Means To Me
by
Apron Bramhall and Chad Weller

“
Collige virgo Rosas
.” My dad looked up at me. “I forgot about that one. You should send this to Mike.”

And I did.

First, thank you to Caroline Leavitt, who didn’t just knock on doors for me, she blew them down. And to my parents, John and Jinxie, who taught me to see the story in everyone. Thanks to Blake, Hilary, and Curtis, those first stories; and to my exquisitely wonderful mother-in-law, Jane Hummer. Much love to my friends: Amy Olivares, Jessica Benjamin, Carrie Bell, and Tory Morton—all a girl really needs is one true friend and I got four. Thank you to Lou Aronica and Jennifer Unter, both of whom picked me out of their piles and started the career I’d been waiting so long for. Thank you to David Kessler and Jessie Sayward Bright for their expert eyes and colorful vision. Thank you to my stunning and sweet girls: Madison, Daisy, and Tatum—the
every
in my
thing
. And thank you to my beautiful and kind husband, Craig, real winner of “Best Attitude” and my favorite noun ever. And finally, thank you to Mike for being my friend.

Jennifer Gooch Hummer received her B.A. in English from Kenyon College. She lives in Los Angeles and Maine with her husband, their three daughters, and their dog, Apple. Girl Unmoored is her first novel. You can visit her website at jennifergoochhummer.com