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  “Don’t be ratting me out, now, Elliot.”

  “Be good to yourself and I won’t.” He grinned and shook a finger at her.

  They laughed as Mick paid for his food. As soon as he was out the door, Soula tapped her foot out in front of her and asked, “So what do you know, Little Cookie?” She was looking straight at me.

  I gulped. “Uh …well, I know you’re Soula and he’s Elliot.” I offered. “And that was Mick with the burrito. And he’s a smoker. I’m kind of a snoop,” I admitted.

  They laughed hysterically. I looked back and forth between them. Elliot’s head was back, his mouth wide open. He had a golden filling in one tooth and it matched the little hoop earring in his left lobe. His skin was all freckles on freckles, even up into his short red hair. I didn’t think I’d been that funny, but maybe they were just looking for a reason to laugh, the way some people do.

  “And who are you?” he finally asked.

  “Addison Schmeeter,” I said. “Or just Addie.”

  “You like your new place across the way, Addie?” Soula asked.

  I nodded. It was nice to know I’d been noticed. “We were a little surprised,” I said. “The train, I mean.” Again they laughed, and so did I when I realized they’d probably watched us move in. Soula dabbed her eyes and pulled her bright pink lips into an O around her teeth like she was trying to stop laughing. She shook out a few more chuckles in spite of herself. “But I like this corner,” I said. “It’s got just about everything a person needs when ya think about it. I figure this minimart covers everything except the laundry, and the Laundromat’s right next door to me. By the way, do you know why it’s called the Heads and Roses Laundry Stop? What’s with the mannequin heads and the plastic roses in the front window?” I asked.

  “Well . . .” Elliot cocked his head. “The place is owned by the Roses, as in Mr. and Mrs. Rose. As for the mannequin heads . . .” He winked at Soula. “All we can figure is, why not?” For the third time, they burst out laughing, and that made me laugh too.

  Finally, Soula settled down to a giggle. “Don’t mind us, Little Cookie. We just love a good chuckle. And you’re right. This corner does have it covered. And if you need something, all you have to do is ask. Now, pick out a pocket of Welcome Pie,” she told me.

  “Welcome Pie?”

  “That’s right.” Soula pointed to the glass case next to the microwave. “Pick one and give it a spin in the micro-nuker.”

  “Apple’s the best,” Elliot said.

  “I didn’t bring any money,” I said.

  Soula winked at me with her perfectly lined eye. “It’s on us. Welcome to the neighborhood, Cookie.”

  chapter 4

  according to webster’s

  Mommers asked, “So who’s the fat woman?” She’d watched me cross Freeman’s Bridge Road.

  “That’s Soula,” I told her. “I stopped by there today right after school to say hello. She gave me this—for free.” I bit into the apple pie pocket. The filling squeezed out the sides and I wolfed another bite to catch it before it dripped.

  “Disgusting,” Mommers mumbled.

  The warm apple goo ran a trail between my fingers. I licked it.

  Mommers’ bathrobe hung open over a dingy T-shirt. Her hair was pressed flat on one side—sticking straight out on the other. Her mascara was smeared below both eyes and she drummed her fingernails against a can of diet cola. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and she’d just gotten up.

  “Anyway, Soula lives out back of the shop. I saw the place. It’s called the Greenhouse and it looks like one, too. Full of plants. She said welcome to the neighborhood,” I told Mommers.

  “Some neighborhood,” she mumbled.

  “It’s not bad,” I said. “Anyway, what are we having for dinner tonight?”

  “Dinner?” She shrugged. “I just woke up.”

  I watched Mommers sit down in front of the old computer. She lit a cigarette and waited for the online service to connect. “This thing’s a piece of junk.” She tapped her finger hard on the mouse. “Addison, I don’t want you hanging around that stinking gas station like some poor little puppy, hear?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. But already I was thinking that I would anyway. I liked Soula and Elliot, and I liked the apple pie pocket.

  Mommers mumbled something else about fumes and poor health.

  I fanned the cigarette smoke and raised an eyebrow at her—something I do very well.

  She said, “Oh don’t start.” But then she laughed a little and gave me a sideways grin.

  I loved it whenever I could get a laugh like that out of Mommers. In those couple of seconds, our lives seemed normal.

  I sat up in my bunk to write in my vocabulary notebook. Mommers had started me on it after she saw a TV show on helping kids enrich their language skills. See, she had the Love of Learning. I didn’t. She had said my father didn’t have it either, and that’s what had really got between them and wrecked their marriage. I don’t know if she was exactly right about all of that. Like I said, my father didn’t live long enough to leave me with much for memories. But Grandio always said that his son was a genius, especially when it came to machines. My father loved making things go. He died racing cigarette boats out on the Mohawk River—that’s the river that flows beneath Freeman’s Bridge.

  If my daddy was a genius, it didn’t rub off on me. I have a terrible time with school stuff. But Mommers always says that if you just pretend to be smart people will believe that you are. Long after she’d stopped caring about the vocab book, I kept it going because I figured she was right. I liked it best when I could get the definitions from a real person. Webster’s dictionary confused me, and alphabetical order drove me nuts.

  I wrote mortgage first because I’d been meaning to get that one down for a while—ever since we’d moved into the trailer. Dwight had told me what it was. Mortgage is what you pay back to the bank when you have borrowed money from them to buy a house. It’s a deal you make and you have to stick to it. The money to pay the mortgage came from Dwight, and that is the money Mommers used on something that wasn’t the mortgage. (It was kind of the same as what happened to the money for Picker’s Waste Removal.) The bank took back Dwight’s house, which meant the deal was ruined, and that’s why we had to leave. Of course, Dwight had moved out long before that. Mommers asked him for a divorce. He didn’t want that, but he finally gave in. We stayed at his house until Mommers messed up—big time. After all the court stuff, Katie and Brynna moved in with Dwight since he was their natural daddy.

  When the judge decided my sisters should live with Dwight, I knew it was going to change my life. I bet my name never even came up in that courtroom. But the decision meant I’d soon change my address, my school, my friends, and worst of all, the shape of my family. Twist and turn.

  Reprobate is what I wrote next, and of course I knew the definition wasn’t really Dwight like Mommers had said. And here again was the nightmare of Webster’s: Once I finally found reprobate, which happened to be at the very bottom of one page, thank you, I forced my eyes to hang on to the teeny tiny letters. But then I had to look up morally and unprincipled, too. I held a three by five card under the words to keep them still. Putting it all together, I decided a reprobate was a low life loser, a person who didn’t follow the rules, which of course wasn’t the definition of Dwight at all.

  I think Dwight tried the hardest of anybody.

  There’s that saying about someone’s heart being in the right place, and that’s why I couldn’t blame Dwight for moving Mommers and me into the trailer. He only had one heart and it couldn’t be everywhere. He told me, “I can’t fix all of it, Addie, so I’m fixing the part I can.” I knew by the skin around his eyes turning pink that he could have cried.

  “What are you doing tonight, Addie?” Mommers asked suddenly.

  “Two entries for the vocab book,” I said. “Mortgage and reprobate. ”

  She looked up from her keyboard and said, “Hmm
. Two words I could have done without this month.” She sighed. “Can you use ’em in a sentence?”

  I thought for a minute. Anything I came up with was likely to get me in trouble. I wish my mother hadn’t blown the mortgage money. Dwight is the furthest thing from a reprobate that I can imagine. But it wouldn’t have been nice to say those sentences to Mommers. “The mortgage is paid so the bank is happy,” I said. “And …There is a boy in my class at school who is a reprobate.”

  Mommers snorted. “For real? There’s a jerk in your class?”

  I nodded. “He stepped on his ice cream sandwich in the lunchroom. Then he offered it to me as a welcome to your new school present.”

  Mommers leaned closer to her computer screen. “Yep, that’s a reprobate.”

  “I thought it was too bad about the ice cream,” I said. “People shouldn’t wreck perfectly good food.”

  “Hmm. Hey, do you have homework?”

  “First day. There isn’t any.”

  “What about flute?”

  “Yep,” I said. “I’m going to do that now.”

  Funny to stink at something and still love it. If there is one thing worse than rows of letters on a page it has to be rows of musical notes. You can’t steady them with a three by five card when you need all your fingers to key with. Mostly, I played by ear.

  What I really wanted was to play the piccolo. But you have to learn the flute first. So far, I’d stuck with it. Now that we’d moved, I had a new problem; we had basically stolen the flute from my last school. I was assigned a school instrument. I was allowed to keep the flute over the summer so I could practice. But the flute should have gone back to Borden School once we knew we were moving. Now I got a wave of uneasiness every time I looked at the little black case.

  I’d already met the music teacher at my new school. Her name was Ms. Rivera. She said she would be trying out all the new students in the next week or two. Then she’d let us know about our placements for school lessons. I was nervous about that because I knew I’d have to explain to her that I didn’t have the Love of Learning.

  chapter 5

  the over underpass

  I couldn’t decide what to call the thing the train went by on. It was either an overpass or an underpass. Maybe it depended on where you were standing. Even Webster’s couldn’t help me out because Webster’s didn’t have all the details. The overpass part had a purpose; the train was on it. So probably that was the most right word. The underpass part was not used anymore—kind of like the Empty Acre. Soula told me, “That road used to be the main way in to our intersection. Then the city rerouted the traffic. See, the old way skirts a brown field,” she said as she pointed across the road. “That’s a big old polluted spot on the earth, Little Cookie. It happens when an industry leaves and won’t clean up after itself. It stinks.” Soula posted newspaper clippings about that, and other things that had to do with the city—especially the area near our corner—on a board near the entrance to the minimart. I never spent much time reading the postings because newspapers were hard for me to read and I would have felt stupid standing there holding my three by five card underneath every line. But I always looked at the pictures.

  Anyway, even though nothing went under it anymore, I thought it was important to remember the underpass part. You can’t ignore history. I called it the Over Underpass.

  Dwight came on the first Saturday and he brought Brynna and Katie with him. It was raining pretty hard and he rushed them into the trailer. The Littles wiggled like puppies from me to Mommers and back again. If they’d had tails, they’d have wagged them. We just kept hugging one another, which is a good thing for a trailer full of people to do. Mommers kept pulling Katie onto her lap and tucking her nose into her curls. She said, “Go do your errands, Dwight. You can leave the girls with me.”

  “No thanks,” Dwight said.

  Mommers sighed—a crying sort of sigh. “They’re my girls, Dwight! What am I gonna do? Leave town with ’em? I don’t even have a car!”

  “Let’s just stick to the plan,” Dwight said in his quiet way.

  “Let the state decide what we do with our kids?” Mommers complained. She pushed her coffee cup away and balled up her napkin.

  He saw me watching them, listening to them. He pulled in a deep breath and closed his eyes. “That’s enough, Denise. Okay?”

  We ate the doughnuts Dwight had brought. I made microwave cocoas even though the day outdoors was hot and steamy. It stopped raining at about eleven and Dwight said he’d take us all outside.

  “Oh yeah, great idea,” Mommers said. “The yard here is so nice for children.” She switched on her computer.

  Katie and Brynna and I played ghosts in the steam that rose from the broken pavement. I showed them how to pop the tar bubbles with their thumbs. We jumped up and ran from the hot water that squirted out of the rain filled bubbles. Dwight checked a few things that had to do with the trailer—the power hookup, which we got from the Heads and Roses Laundry Stop next door, and the propane tank that fueled our stove. Then he grabbed a coil of rope from his truck. He stood looking at the Over Underpass for a second. “I’ve been thinking …there must be a way to put up a swing here.”

  “Yeah! Yeah!” we cried, and we followed him out to the mouth of the closed off road where the weeds came up through the cracks in the blacktop. We watched Dwight climb up the crisscrossing metal bars into the belly of the Over Underpass. We blinked to keep the rusty chips from falling down into our eyes. He looked like a spider guy all upside down, appearing and disappearing in the shadows. He grunted and threw the looped rope over a steel girder. “How am I doin’, girls?” His voice echoed and we cheered him on. Finally, he shimmied down the rope, grinning and sweaty, one arm stretched way out in celebration.

  At first the swing had problems. The big knot in the bottom wasn’t very comfortable after a few rides, and Katie wasn’t strong enough to grab it with her feet. But the next week, Dwight brought a round of wood—all sanded smooth and with a hole drilled in the center. He threaded the rope and knotted it twice under the new seat.

  “There it is, girls! The best rope swing ever!” he boomed.

  After that, it was the first thing Brynna and Katie wanted to do when they visited. As I pulled Brynna back and let her fly away and return to me for the next several Saturdays, I thought the best part about the swing was the way Dwight had said, “There it is, girls!” He’d made me feel like I was one of his girls too.

  chapter 6

  a renovation

  The hard part came when Dwight got a renovating job up in Lake George. I knew something was changing when he came in looking so serious. He took Mommers outside to talk. I climbed into my bunk and watched and listened at the little square window.

  “You could have given me some warning!” she screamed.

  “I tried to get through for hours. You must have been online, Denise. I’m sorry about this, but I gotta take the job. It’s a chance to catch up on a lot of bad bills. I found good day care for the babies—”

  My heart took a dive. Of course—Brynna and Katie were going away too.

  “They need their mother!” Mommers hollered. “You want to take them away from me! You have always wanted this! You and Jack did this together, didn’t you?”

  She meant Grandio. Mommers was no longer on speaking terms with him, which was actually an improvement in their relationship. All they’d ever done was argue.

  “No, and I don’t want this.” Dwight shook his head. “But it’s the only way, for now. I’ll get here every other week. Sundays probably. I’ll figure it out.”

  “Oh, at least be honest, Dwight. You’re enjoying this!”

  Dwight lost it. “Know what, Denise? I might enjoy it if it weren’t for Addie. I hate splitting the girls up!” Then he swore at Mommers—I’d never heard him do that before.

  She flew at him—fists pounding—and Dwight grabbed her wrists and turned her. He held on to her, close and hard, so she couldn’t hit
anymore. She thrashed like a giant fish. The back of her head smashed his lip. He sucked back the blood. He held on, not speaking. Finally, Mommers went limp in his arms. Dwight whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” They stood there like they were stuck together for a long while. Then Mommers turned and wiped her face on his T-shirt. He handed her his handkerchief and the little black comb from the back pocket of his jeans. She turned her back on him, shook like she was trying to get rid of something, then started pulling the comb through her hair.

  Dwight came inside alone. He told me about the move. I didn’t admit that I already knew—that I’d listened from my bunk.

  He chewed on his fat lip. “I’ll get here as often as I can, Addie. But this renovation is gonna be a lot of work. It’s an old mansion and the owner wants to turn it into an inn. It’s really cool. I want you to see it someday.” He let his eyes twinkle for a second. Dwight loved old houses. “But there’s a time crunch. I’ve gotta be done by April.”

  April! I tried to count the months but I was slow—kind of like the ABC order problem. I just knew it would be most of a year. “I’m not going to see Brynna and Katie. Or you.” I let it slip.

  “I’ll call every week, so we can all talk,” he said. “We’ll come down every chance we get.” He looked as sorry as the time he’d come for Brynna and Katie after the court order.

  I tried to cheer up. I didn’t want to make him feel worse. I squeezed my tears away. I took his arm and hugged it close to me. He cupped his other hand on the back of my head. I curled my hands around his forearm and pressed my face into the blond hairs and tanned skin. I always loved Dwight’s arms—I don’t know why, I just did.

  “I’ll see you when you can get here,” I said, “and Brynna and Katie too.”

  chapter 7

  tryouts and friendships