The Exact Location of Home (2 page)

“I'm afraid not.”

“Is he going on another trip? Because Monday's a teacher conference day and even if the trip went longer than that, I could go because—”

“No.” She clangs her spoon down onto the counter and turns so fast her some of her coffee sloshes onto the floor. “Just no.” Her look says quit asking. The doorbell rings, but Mom doesn't move to answer it. Instead, she reaches for a paper towel to clean up the coffee. She yanks so hard the whole roll flies off onto the floor.

I hand it back to her and answer the door.

“Hey!” Gianna's dressed in her garage sale clothes—jeans and an old gray fisherman's vest with pockets all over the place for spare change. She got it for a quarter at the Methodist church rummage sale last spring.

Ruby's carrying a newspaper, folded open to the Yard Sale Marketplace page and a little blue pillow with red flowers on it. “Mom wants me to find another cushion this size for a dining room chair.”

“Let me get my jacket and some money.” I have to step around Mom. She's scrubbing the floor hard for such a little coffee splash.

“I'll see you later, okay?”

“That's fine. Bye, girls.”

“Bye, Mrs. Zigonski,” Gianna and Ruby call.

I let the door slam on purpose and glance back to see if she's looked up.

That kitchen floor tile is spotless. And Mom's eyes are red as she watches us leave.

“Can I help you find anything?”

“No thanks, just looking.” The ad in the paper said they had “miscellaneous electronics,” so we came here first, but I've pawed my way through three tables of flower pots and costume jewelry, and I have yet to see a single gadget.

“Are you looking for a gift for someone? Because I have some lovely teddy bear figurines over here …” Garage Sale Lady points to a shelf under the tool cabinet where dozens of little ceramic bears smile out in different shades of pink, purple, and Easter egg yellow. She walks over to them, smiling as if she's the mama bear.

“Aren't these adorable? They're a terrific deal …” She flashes me a smile like the ladies at the jewelry counters where Dad used to shop for Mom.

“Uh … no thanks.”

Ruby and Gianna laugh and fish through a laundry basket full of bright scarves.

An ambulance siren wails, getting louder and louder until it zooms past the driveway and down the street. Gianna looks up from the scarves for a second and frowns. Her Nonna's home today, not at the center where she goes when Mr. and Mrs. Zales are working.

Nonna's memory has gotten a lot worse lately. It started with dumb stuff : Cookies left in the oven too long, dentures in the fridge, but then last fall, she got lost one afternoon. I know Gee worries about her.

“Do you like to read?” Garage Sale Lady shoves a worn copy of
Charlotte's Web
into my hands so forcefully I have to take it. I look down at the cover. Wilbur's laughing at me.

So is Gianna, who's trying on an orange-jeweled frog pin from the jewelry table.

I take a deep breath. “Do you have any, um, electronics? The ad in the paper said—”

“Oh!” Garage Sale Lady's hand flies to her mouth, and she looks like she's about to cry. “George loved electronics….” She blinks really fast. “I decided it was probably time to get rid of some of his things, though. He passed away in April.” Her lower lip quivers.

I look at my shoes. What do you say to a Garage Sale Lady with a dead husband? I didn't even know George.

Garage Sale Lady sniffles again and squints at me. I get the feeling that even if she is selling George's stuff, I'm going to have to pass some kind of test to prove myself worthy. What am I supposed to do? Hug her?

Ruby saves me.

“I'm so sorry about your husband,” she says, putting a hand on the woman's shoulder.

“Thank you dear,” Garage Sale Lady pulls a lace handkerchief from her dress pocket and dabs at her eyes. “I miss him so much.”

Ruby nods. “My grandma died a year ago. I miss her, too.”

“I'll bet you do.” Garage Sale Lady smiles. “My George was a wonderful man. He could fix anything.”

“So can Zig.” Gianna steps up to us, wearing the frog pin on her green hoodie and a purple tweed beret on her head. Her hair looks like a wig sticking out from under it. “He made an alarm for his backpack so Kevin Richards can't get in to steal his math homework anymore.”

Gee grabs my backpack and almost pulls me over backwards trying to unzip it.

WHOOT
…
WHOOT
…
WHOOT
… The alarm goes off.

Ruby laughs and wanders back to flip through the box of seventies albums she found.

Garage Sale Lady raises her eyebrows and looks impressed. “You remind me of George.” She takes a deep breath, puts her hands on her knees, and grunts as she pulls a cardboard box from under the nearest table.

“I'm not even sure what he had in here,” she says, pulling the dusty flaps open. “He used to tinker around in the basement for hours.”

She steps aside, and I bend down to look into the most amazing collection of gadgets and parts and pieces in the universe. Geek heaven.

There are wheels and motors, rolls of wire, toggle switches and button switches, batteries of every voltage level. Propellers. Motherboards from at least half a dozen computers. An old telephone ringer from the days when they used to really ring instead of playing computerized electronic tones or songs.

I look up at her. “This is amazing.”

She smiles into the box, then right at me. “Georgie would have liked you, Ziggy.”

“Zig.” Gianna corrects her, but I wave my hand. This lady can call me whatever she wants.

I pull out a clock radio.

“Georgie fixed that,” Garage Sale Lady says with a proud smile. She reaches in and pulls out a string of Christmas tree lights. “And these. Whenever I had trouble with the lights, he'd fiddle with them till they were good as new.”

“Did he use aluminum foil?” That's how I fixed our lights last year. Mom was ready to throw them out, but it was just one broken connection, and the metal in the foil fixed it right up.

“Yes!” Garage Sale Lady claps her hands.

I dig deeper into Georgie's toy box. An AM/FM radio. An old phone. A few flashlights. Some whole. Some in pieces.

Gianna looks over my shoulder. The leopard print scarf she's draped around her neck dangles down and tickles my arm.

“Hey!” She reaches into the box and pulls out what looks like a little yellow radio. “It's one of those things Mrs. Loring showed us in science last week.”

“A GPS unit?” I reach out to take it from her. This is incredible. “Does it work?”

“I suppose so. It will need batteries first, I'd imagine,” Garage Sale Lady says. “Georgie loved that thing, but I never quite understood what it did. He said it was for some game.”

“I bet he was going geocaching!” I say.

Gianna snaps her fingers. “Mrs. Loring talked about that. People hide stuff—Tupperware boxes with little toys and things, right?”

“Yep,” I say. “People who play hide caches over the world and enter the latitude and longitude coordinates on this website and then other people use either their smart phones or these—” I hold up the GPS unit. “—to try to find the stuff. This tells you how far away you are and then points you in the right direction.”

“Do you play this game?” Garage Sale lady asks.

“Well, no. My dad's into it though. He said he'd take me sometime, but we haven't gone yet.”

“Huh,” Garage Sale lady says. “So what's this thing called? A Jeeps?”

“No—GPS. It stands for Global Positioning System,” I tell her. “It sends out signals to satellites that are orbiting the earth and uses the position of those satellites to tell your exact longitude and latitude.”

“Which is which again?” Gianna, who had wandered off into the racks of clothes, is back, draped in a fur wrap that still has a fox's head attached to one end. She reaches over and makes the fox sniff my ear. “I always forget.”

I swat the fox nose away and reach for a dusty globe on the table. I run my finger around its circumference.

“You know lines of latitude and longitude are these imaginary lines that go all the way around the earth?” I ask. Gianna nods and reaches over to spin the globe. “Think about the word
long
in longitude. Someone who's tall is very long, so lines of longitude are the long lines that go up and down around the globe. Lateral means sideways. So lines of latitude go sideways around the globe.”

I turn back to Garage Sale Lady. “The GPS unit tells you your exact location on earth by giving you longitude and latitude.”

“We used them to play a game in science,” Gianna jumps in. “Mrs. Loring gave us the latitude and longitude of a location near the school, and we had to enter it into our GPS units. Once you enter a location, your GPS tells you how far you are from that location and then gives you an arrow, like a compass, showing which way you need to go to get there. We used ours to find a monument downtown.”

“Well, how about that.” Garage Sale Lady shakes her head. It
is
pretty amazing that something the size of a walkie-talkie can do all that.

A minivan pulls up, and five old ladies wearing purple dresses and red hats pile out.

“Come on, Agatha!” one of them says over her shoulder as she scurries up the driveway. “This is the one with the fur coat!”

“Oh!” Garage Sale Lady perks up and drops the GPS back in the box. “They must be from the Red Hat Society. It's a group of ladies who get together once a week for lunch and activities. I've been thinking of joining …”

One of the Red Hat ladies shuffles through the jewelry basket while another one whisks through the hangers on the rack.

“Where's the fur?” she calls out to Garage Sale Lady. Then she spots Gianna, still wearing the fox around her neck. “Are you going to buy that?”

“No, I don't think so.” Gee makes the fox sniff my ear once more and hands it over to Agatha, who pets it like it's her lap dog. “You know,” Gianna whispers to her, “the lady running this sale was just talking about joining the Red Hat Society.”

That gets Agatha's attention away from the fox. “We're always looking for new members. I'll ask if she'd like to join us.”

But Garage Sale Lady is busy rummaging through a box in the corner. She's half buried in old sweaters and coats. “Hold on…I have another wrap in a lovely faux rabbit fur.” She starts to show the other ladies, then turns back to me. “You go ahead and take that box, Ziggy. No charge. I'd like someone to appreciate it like Georgie did, and frankly, I can't imagine anyone else wanting it.”

“Here, let me help you with those,” Gianna pulls out a pile of albums from the box Ruby's carrying.

“Thanks,” Ruby says. She wraps her hands underneath the box, where the flaps are starting to sag open. “I can't believe she just gave me all these. Journey. The Rolling Stones.” She peers into the box. “Boston. Electric Light Orchestra.”

“I bet Zig would like that one,” Gianna laughs, but she stops cold as we turn the corner. The ambulance that screamed by is stopped on our block. Gianna gives the albums back to Ruby and takes off. I set my box down in a neighbor's yard and run after her.

Gee's father is standing by the ambulance parked between her house and the house two doors down, where Mom and I rent our apartment.

“Is it Nonna?” Gianna's out of breath and almost crashes into her dad, she's running so fast.

He puts out a hand to catch her shoulder. “Nonna's fine, Gee. She's inside helping Mom with dinner.”

“Mom!” I run for the steps to our apartment. I knew it. She looked wrong this morning. I sprint up the steps, but before I get to the top, the door swings open. Mom steps out and holds the door for the EMT guys. The first one backs out, wheeling one end of a stretcher onto the porch. A white hairdo sticks out from under the blanket.

“It's Mrs. Delfino,” I say when Gianna and Ruby catch up to me. “She lives upstairs.”

One of the attendants holds an oxygen mask over Mrs. Delfino's face as the other one opens the back door of the ambulance. Ruby frowns as they lift the stretcher. “She doesn't look good.”

She doesn't. She looks pale. Paler than usual. And quieter. That's for sure. Normally, Mrs. D. can talk up a storm.

The ambulance attendant slams the door and walks around to get in the front seat. The lights flash red. The siren starts up again, and the ambulance heads down the block.

Mom's frozen in place on the porch, still holding open the screen door. She sees us and finally lets it swing shut. She takes a deep breath and comes down the porch steps to join us. Her dark hair sticks to her temples, and her face is shiny with sweat.

“What happened?” I ask.

Mom reaches out and brushes my hair out of my eyes. “Mrs. Delfino knocked on the door this morning. I suppose it was about the rent, but she never even said anything. Just stepped inside and collapsed. I checked her and couldn't find a pulse, so I called for help and started CPR.” She pauses and blinks away tears. “I never got her pulse back, though.”

“It doesn't always work,” Ruby says. She had watched her mom try to do CPR on her grandmother last fall.

Mom looks at her and smiles. It's a sad smile. “I know.”

 

Later, I sit on my bedroom floor, rummaging through George's box. Time to take inventory.

Two small motors.

I lean over to the tall set of little plastic drawers where I keep my electronics so I can get the new stuff sorted out and put away. Motors are in the third drawer from the top. I can use these for homemade cars and boats.

One roll of wire.