The Exact Location of Home (22 page)

Mom surprises me and flops down on the grass.

Mr. Webster starts to stand up. “You can sit on the towel …”

But Mom waves away his offer. She holds out her hand. “Laurie Zigonski,” she says, and Mr. Webster leans over to shake it.

“It's a pleasure to meet you and your boys,” he says. Mom doesn't bother to correct him, and that makes Scoop grin like crazy. “I'm Robert Webster.” He holds up the GPS unit and shrugs. “Senior Searcher to my friends.”

Mom stares at him. Then she stares at me. Then she leans back and looks up at the water tower, and tears stream down her cheeks. She doesn't bother wiping them away.

The whole thing is so weird. It's not how this was supposed to go. And so we all just sit there.

“Butterscotch?” Mr. Webster holds one out.

Mom takes it. “Thank you.”

“Can I have another one?” Scoop asks. Mr. Webster hands one to him. He curls up in Mom's lap and leans back, too, to watch the clouds.

Now there's one that looks like the state of Oklahoma.

“You want one, too?” Mr. Webster pulls another candy from his pocket. He's like one of those magicians pulling scarves out of a sleeve. How many candies could he possibly have in there?

I take it and look up, right as Oklahoma changes into an alligator in a top hat. I say so. And that makes Scoop laugh. And the candy tastes good.

And for some reason that doesn't make sense, it helps.

 

Surprises always come in bunches, Mom says.

When we get back to the shelter, Aunt Becka's there with a fresh bruise on her cheek and box of our stuff in her arms. My garage sale toaster is balanced on top.

Aunt Becka sets it down in room five, takes Mom's hand, and walks with her to the library. They talk in quiet voices. A lot quieter than last time.

I flop down on the lower bunk, pick up the toaster and loosen the screws that hold the bottom on. It doesn't take much; I didn't tighten them very well last time.

I stare at the connections for less than a minute before I see the problem. It needs to be rewired.

Totally rewired.

With a different kind of circuit. A parallel circuit. And then it should work for years.

How could I have missed it before?

I dig through the box from Aunt Becka's house for some spare wire and get to work.

The great thing about a parallel circuit is how things work out, even when something goes wrong. You can have ten or twelve or even twenty LCD bulbs all strung together, along with an alarm that goes off if a pressure pad gets tripped and makes a connection, and no matter what happens, the electrons manage to make it through. You could have five bulbs burn out and because of the way it's all wired up, there's still a path
for the electrons to travel. They find their way. If there's a roadblock, they find another way.

And things work out.

“We need more of the fruity cans! You there—” A bony finger taps my shoulder.

“It's me, Nonna. Zig.” I put the gravy ladle back in the dish and turn so she can see my face.

She frowns at me for a minute. “What kind of name is Zig?”

I try not to sigh. It used to be our big joke that she's the only person who refused to call me by my nickname. She said it made me sound like a cartoon character and that was no name for such a handsome young man. “It's a nickname. Short for Kirby Zigonski. I like to be called Zig. What was it you needed?”

She looks down at her hands and makes them into the shape they'd be if she were holding a can of food. “Fruity cans. We're out of the fruity cans.”

“Cranberry sauce, Nonna?” Gianna swoops in with a new pan of gravy and waits for me to lift the old one. “I'll get more. It's going fast, huh?”

We've already served a couple dozen people, and there are at least that many more in line. It feels busier than usual at the shelter.

Maybe because it's getting colder out every day.

Maybe because it's Thanksgiving and people came for the turkey.

Or maybe because I'm not used to this mishmash of people at meals any more, even though Mom and I just moved out nine days ago.

“Hey, Zig!” Scoop comes sliding across the polished floor in his new snow boots. There's only a few inches on the ground, but he's excited. “Zig, I've got my speech ready. Wanna hear?”

“It's not really a speech, you know.”

“It kind of is,” he says. “Wanna hear? I been practicing.”

I told him he should get ready to share one thing at Thanksgiving Grace, when everyone goes around the table to say why they're thankful. Instead, he's written a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

I stir the gravy. “Go ahead.”

“I'd like to thank you all for coming today.”

I can't help it. I laugh.

“What?” He looks offended.

“Sorry,” I say. “It's just that you make it sound like they had so many other invitations to choose from.”

I look out over the crowd. Shopping cart lady is carefully wrapping up dinner rolls in her napkin and stashing them under her coat on top of the cart. Kevin Richards walks past her and drops another couple rolls on her plate, and she beams up at him. Partners in crime.

Heather has her arm around someone I haven't met—a woman who looks like she might be from India or Pakistan. She's sitting sideways, trying to eat her turkey around her nursing baby. Heather is talking to her. Rob Thomas is talking to a young guy with a guitar. Brother Vinnie is talking to his squash.

“So … thank you all for coming today.” Scoop looks at me out of the corner of his eye, waiting to see if I laugh again. I don't.

“Thanksgiving can be happy time and a sad time, too, if you think about stuff you don't have. Like a house. Or an apartment. Or a dad.” He glances quickly at me again.
I keep stirring the gravy. “Sometimes, the things you don't have are all you can think about.”

“Know what I don't have, young man?” Brother Vinnie shouts.

“What's that?”

“Gravy! Will ya move it?”

Scoop sidles over to me. I ladle gravy onto Brother Vinnie's mashed potatoes, and he moves on.

“But I'm thankful for what I do have,” Scoop says.

“You realize everyone's going to be finished with their pie before you're done?”

“Shh … I'm almost finished.” He looks down at his paper. I see Heather's light, neat handwriting. He must have had her write it all down. “I'm thankful for this food. I'm thankful for my bed, even though it's not a top bunk, and for
Library Lion
and that we're going to be moving soon.” He gets a big grin on his face and says, “Next week!”

“I know.” I smile right back at him. I felt awful leaving him, so I was psyched when Heather told Mom they'd finally found an apartment they could afford. She got a job with Stop Domestic Violence, working with other women who need help. Heather has her own business cards and everything. Mom took one for Aunt Becka. She'll probably toss it aside, but you never know.

Scoop rattles his paper dramatically. His big finish. “And most of all, I'm thankful for my friends here. Because friends help.”

He puts the paper down.

“That's it?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“It's good. But shouldn't you have a big ending that ties everything together?”

“I do,” he says. He looks at his paper again. “Friends help.” He looks up at me.

“Don't you think that's big?”

“Actually, yeah.” I guess I do.

“I'll second that!” Mr. Webster steps up with a case of cranberry sauce. “Where does this go?”

“Over there.” I point to Gianna's Nonna. “With the other fruity cans.”

Mr. Webster gets it. His wife is down at the end of the buffet table serving dinner rolls with what we call tongs and she calls grabby claws. She reminds me a lot of Gianna's grandmother when she can't remember the names of just ordinary things. She calls our doorbell the “visitor alarm.”

When Mom and I first moved in with the Websters, it was hard to get used to. No matter how many times Mr. Webster told his wife that Mom was a registered nurse and was going to be her caregiver, she'd forget. No matter how many times he told her we'd be staying in the two bedrooms down the hall and helping out, she didn't remember. She'd see Mom coming into the kitchen and holler, “Who are you? I didn't hear the visitor alarm! Robert! Somebody's in the house!”

“Need a break from the gravy train?” Mr. Webster takes the ladle. I fill my plate and find Mom at one of the tables.

She pulls out a chair for me. “Hey, kiddo. Glad you're off duty for a while. Volunteers have to eat, too.”

I switch on and off between eating and handing Scoop napkins to wipe gravy off his chin. I'm just finishing my stuffing when Rob brings out the pies and clinks a spoon against a coffee mug to get everyone's attention.

“Let's have a moment of shared thankfulness.” He nods to Scoop, who must have asked about going first. Good for him.

Scoop delivers his speech just like he practiced and has a dramatic pause right before the end. “And I'm thankful for my friends here. Because friends help.”

He sits down. Nobody laughs. Shopping Cart lady starts clapping and soon everyone else does too. Brother Vinnie stands up on his chair and goes on clapping a good thirty seconds after the rest of us have stopped.

Then Mr. Webster stands. “I'm thankful for this.” He pulls his yellow GPS unit from his jacket pocket. “Because it led a boy to find me sitting under a water tower. I wasn't who he hoped I'd be. But I'm pretty sure I'm who he was supposed to find. Because things have worked out awfully well.” He puts his hand on his wife's shoulder, and she looks up at him and smiles. For right now, at least, she knows whose hand it is.

Other people talk about new jobs and new babies and hopes for a different kind of life. I half listen, but I mostly eat pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I'm scraping the plate when a black journal slides onto the table next to it.

“I think you ought to have this,” Mr. Webster says.

I shake my head and wipe my mouth. “This is yours. It has all your geocaches in it and everything. You should keep it.”

“This isn't my journal.” Mr. Webster flips the journal open to the first page. It's blank. He flips through the rest. They're all that way. “This one's yours. It's time you logged some finds of your own instead of following Senior Searcher all over the place.”

I run my hand over the textured cover. A geocaching journal.

I think about Mr. Webster's entries. Plenty were about hidden Tupperware, but there was more than that. The notes about missing his wife. About dealing with change, Noticing what was around him.

And remembering.

“Thanks,” I say. I'll probably write about some of that stuff, too. And make diagrams for my electrical projects.

Mom stands up and gathers her dishes. “We're going to leave cleanup to the rest of the crew,” she says. “I have a two-hour shift at the diner before we have dinner back at the house.”

“I'll meet you there in a while, okay?”

She nods and goes off the clear her dishes.

I turn to Scoop. “You're excited about the move, huh?”

“Really excited. I can't wait to get out of here,” he says. “I mean, it was okay when you were here, but …”

“Want to read before I go?”

His whole face lights up and he's back at the table with
Library Lion
in a minute flat. “Start at the good part,” he says.

“You don't want to hear the whole thing?”

He shakes his head. “I know all the sad parts. Read the good part.”

So I do. I make Mr. McBee's voice all deep and official when he invites the lion back to the library. Then I turn the page, and the picture shows the lion coming home.

I look up at Scoop. His smile is even bigger than the lion's.

I take the long way home. I'm thinking I'll stop at the diner to say hi to Mom. But when I walk by the park, it pulls me in.

I scuff the pebbles. They make cold, crunchy November sounds under our dusting of snow. Pretty soon they'll be frozen together and the lake will be frozen, too. No more rock skipping till spring.

I look up from the rocks as a great blue heron takes off from the point of beach next to the swing set. It flies into the wind, its legs stretched out long behind it.

I sit down on the bench at the edge of the water and fumble in my backpack for a pen. I take out my geocaching journal.

I'm not geocaching today, so this isn't official or anything. But it's something I need to write.

I thought it was you. I thought you were leaving clues for me. All over the place. It seemed like something you would do
.

But it wasn't. I guess you knew that already
.

You could have called, you know. Or written. It would have been better than just finding out. And I did, you know. I found out. I know
.

You probably realize that, too. But maybe you don't know that I'd still like to talk to you. So write, okay? Or call or something if they let you. I still want to talk to you. That was all I ever really wanted. It would have been enough
.

I can still see the heron, a tiny flutter against the clouds. Would the guy who wanted to kill birds to make room for condos understand any of this? Maybe not. But I sign it anyway.

Circuit Boy

No.

Zig Junior

No.

Just

Zig
.

I'll send it tonight, now that Mom's given me the address for the federal prison.

Maybe he'll answer.

And sometimes maybe has to be enough because it's all you get.

I rip out the page and fold it into the front pocket of my backpack.