All the Answers (12 page)

“Has anybody seen my physics textbook?” Marcus said, rummaging through papers on the kitchen counter.

“Check the living room,” Gram told him. “I think I saw it in there.”

“I can't believe we have this yahoo in charge of the country for another four years.” Ava's mom shoved the newspaper across the kitchen table to make room for a plate of toast.

“Four more years … four more years …” Dad walked past, chanting as if he were at one of those post-election victory parties. Mom rolled up the front page and swatted him on the butt. He laughed and pulled her into a hug, and Ava thought that was probably a good sign they wouldn't be at the lawyer's office today either.

“It's not there,” Marcus said. “I need that book.”

“Try the stairs,” Mom told him.

“I've been thinking about giant fruits and vegetables,” Dad said, grabbing an apple from the bowl on the table. “Maybe we could grow a world-famous cucumber or something in that plot out back.”

“Since when are you a gardener?” Mom pulled the orange juice from the fridge. “I couldn't even get you to help weed the tomatoes last summer.”

“Yeah, but if they were
giant
tomatoes, I'd have been all over that.”

“Then we could make a giant pizza!” Emma-My-Name-Is-Electron said.

Marcus stared at her name tag. “Did you take my physics book?”

“Oh! Maybe.” Emma-My-Name-Is-Electron ran upstairs and came down with Marcus's book. There were about a dozen colored slips of paper sticking out among the pages. “Can you leave the sticky notes in there? Your book has good names.”

“We're going to family night at Cedar Bay later, right?” Ava asked, reaching for a banana.

“Ugh, it's Wednesday, isn't it?” Her mom sighed.

“Do you guys know what the entertainment is tonight?” Ava asked. “If it's nothing too long, maybe I could bring my saxophone.” She'd been thinking about what the pencil said … what Grandpa wanted. Mom's forgiveness wasn't something Ava could give him, especially when she didn't know what he needed to be forgiven for. She wasn't about to ask, at least not until her mother
got over being mad about having a yahoo in the White House. And she couldn't bring a dead saxophonist back to life either. But she could remind Grandpa of the music he'd loved. “I've been practicing a song I think Grandpa will like.”

“That would be great,” Dad said.

“Don't take it personally if he's in one of his moods,” Mom added.

“I won't.” Ava thought about her trip to Cedar Bay with Sophie and the list they'd made. “Do we have any old baseballs around?”

“Maybe.” Dad frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “There might be some in the garage from Marcus's Little League days. Over in the corner with those old tennis rackets.”

“I'll check on my way out. Thanks!” Ava threw away her banana peel, grabbed her backpack and saxophone, and headed to the garage. She found half a dozen cobwebby baseballs on a low shelf, brushed off two newish-looking balls and one older one, put them in her backpack, and started down the driveway to meet Sophie.

“
Mehhh!
” Ethel yelled. Ava jumped about a mile and then ran the rest of the way to the sidewalk, even though the goats were fenced in.

“Look what I found for Mrs. Raymond!” Sophie dropped her backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out a black sweatshirt with gray-and-red lettering that said METAL EATERS: MONSTER TRUCK XTREME!! above a picture of a truck with pointy teeth.

“Wow. That's no kitten,” Ava said. “Do you think she'll like it? It's pretty intense.”

“That's the whole point,” Sophie said, stuffing it back into her backpack. “She's tired of snuggly kittens. She wants action!”

Ava and Sophie spent every free moment of the school day making plans for family night at Cedar Bay. Besides Mrs. Raymond's monster truck sweatshirt, Sophie had found a pair of thick woolen socks for Mr. Clemson. “And I brought this for Mrs. Grabowski,” she whispered across the table in study hall, pulling a big flowery tiara from her backpack.

The flowers weren't real—just plastic—but they were pretty, and a bright stream of multicolored ribbons spilled down the back. Ava reached out to touch them. “Did you make this?”

Sophie nodded. “Remember how she said she wanted to go back to Ukraine and dance? I looked up traditional Ukrainian costumes online and found something like this, so Jenna took me to the craft store and I got stuff to put one together. That means we've got everybody covered except Mrs. Yu—”

“All she wants is to sit by Grandpa, so we can totally do that,” Ava said.

“—and your grandpa.” Sophie looked at Ava. “Did you talk to your mom?”

“Not really,” Ava admitted. “But I'm going to play a Johnny Hodges song for him tonight if there's time. I found the sheet music and practiced and everything.”

She'd give Grandpa part of his wish, at least, while she figured out the rest.

Sophie came over to Ava's house after school to make sure they had the nursing home pencil-wishes ready. On the way to Cedar Bay, they huddled in the backseat, going over their plan. Dad kept interrupting to ask for help brainstorming world-famous ways to save the general store. He was really hopeful about vegetables.

“World's largest pumpkin?”

Marcus poked at his phone. “Taken.”

“Potatoes?” Sophie offered up.

“Taken.”

“Watermelon?” Dad said, turning into the driveway of Cedar Bay.

That stole Emma-My-Name-Is-Electron's attention from the bracelet she'd been braiding. “Ooh! Let's grow a giant watermelon!”

“We're too far north to grow really big watermelons,” Mom said.

“We could go for a world-famous whoopee cushion,” Marcus said, getting out of the car. “The world's largest one of those was only about ten feet in diameter.”

“Can you imagine the sound that thing would make if you sat on it?” He stuck out his tongue and made a giant, spitty
Ppphhbbbbt
sound in the parking lot, so loud that Mrs. Grabowski's daughter turned and stared. Then she hurried up the sidewalk into the building.

That cracked Sophie up. “Ha! She's running away before the smell reaches her.”

When they got inside, Emma and Marcus headed straight for the cookie table. Mom and Dad followed them to make sure Emma didn't swipe the whole platter. Grandpa hadn't come down from his room yet, but Mr. Ames was there, sitting by the window alone.

Ava nudged Sophie and pointed. “Let's give him his baseball.” It seemed a good place to start.

“Mr. Ames?” Ava stepped up to his wheelchair, squatted down, and pulled the three baseballs from her backpack. She held them out. “We brought you something.”

His head was a little droopy, and for a second, Ava thought Mr. Ames was just going to doze off and ignore them, but then his eyes opened wider and focused on the baseballs in Ava's hands.

“Do you want one? Or all of them? You can have them all if you want.” She started to hand him the newest, cleanest looking
one, but he reached for the older one instead. It was all scuffed up with dirt and its stitches were fraying, but Mr. Ames pulled it into his lap and looked down at it, just staring.

“Um … do you want these, too?” She held up the other balls, but Mr. Ames didn't answer. He kept staring at that dirty old baseball in his hands, as if there were secrets stitched into the leather, invisible to everyone but him.

“Okay, then.” Ava put the other baseballs back in her backpack, turned to Sophie, and shrugged. “I guess he likes it. You want to find Mrs. Grabowski next? Or Mr. Clemson?”

Sophie looked around the room. Mrs. Grabowski was sitting in her purple pantsuit beside her daughter, waiting for the junior high school quartet to play. Mr. Clemson was by the cookie table, waving away the lemonade Betty was trying to give him, and shouting for his turnout gear. “Let's go see Mrs. Grabowski first,” Sophie decided. “If we try to give Mr. Clemson the socks now, he'll be upset we don't have the helmet and jacket, too.”

Ava started after Sophie. She glanced back at Mr. Ames by the window just as he lifted the baseball to his nose and took a deep, deep breath. The nursing home air reeked of overcooked vegetables and disinfectant, but Mr. Ames looked like he was smelling roses or warm bread from a bakery, like he was sitting in a ballpark breathing in the scent of newly mown grass.
Maybe he was
, Ava thought. She hoped so.

Ava was nervous about approaching Mrs. Grabowski with her daughter right there, but Sophie didn't have any trouble
explaining why she was putting a crazy, multicolored flower-and-ribbon headdress on the old lady's head.

“We heard that she loves Ukrainian music,” Sophie told Mrs. Grabowski's daughter, “and I was doing this project at school about … um … culture. I found out this is what people wore when they danced in Ukraine. So I made one for her.”

Mrs. Grabowski's face lit up when she saw the headdress. She pulled the stream of ribbons forward, so they flowed over the shoulder of her purple jacket.

“Do you want to see yourself?” Sophie asked.

Mrs. Grabowski nodded, so Sophie pulled her cell phone from her jeans pocket, took a photo, and turned it to show her. “You look beautiful.”

Mrs. Grabowski smiled when she first saw the picture, but then her eyes got watery. She blinked, and her mouth twitched, and Ava nudged Sophie to put the camera away.

“Sorry,” Ava told the old woman's daughter. “We didn't mean to upset her.”

“Oh, you didn't upset her. I'm sure she's thinking of old times and perhaps old friends. Right?” She patted her mom's hand.

“Okay.” Ava started to leave because she didn't want to see Mrs. Grabowski sad anymore, but Sophie stopped her.

“You know,” Sophie said, “We were thinking that your mom might be missing her life back in Ukraine. The staff says she likes that music, so we wondered if she ever used to dance with her family in the old country when she was younger. And if she
did, it might be cool if we had a dance for her with costumes and music and stuff, and you could come and any of her other family that's around, and you could dress up, too, and maybe she'd feel like she was there again.” Sophie shrugged as if her crazy, elaborate idea were the sort of thing people did in nursing homes all the time.

Mrs. Grabowski's daughter laughed. “We'll have to talk about that next time you come. I see the music is about to start.” She nodded toward the folding metal chairs up front, where four kids were settling in, and their teacher was tapping a music stand with her conductor's baton.

“Come on, Soph.” Ava tugged Sophie across the room to where the other Andersons were sitting, and they slid into chairs as the orchestra started playing. Grandpa was slouched down in a chair next to Dad, looking as grumpy as ever.
Maybe this pencil-wish project wasn't such a good idea
, Ava thought. Mrs. Grabowski had looked so sad. Maybe she didn't
want
to remember what it was like to be younger and dancing. That had to be hard when you were older and couldn't even walk much or ask for pudding instead of Jell-O.

“You have your saxophone put together already, right?” Sophie whispered when the strings quartet started their next number.

“Yeah. It's over by my case, but …” Ava swallowed hard. “I don't think I'm going to do it.” Because what if she played that song and Grandpa didn't like it at all and he was even grumpier? What if Mrs. Grabowski cried again? What if all the old people
hated Ava's song and they started throwing cookies and cups of warm lemonade at her and then Mr. Clemson declared an emergency and flung a chair through the window to get everyone evacuated—all because of Ava and her dumb saxophone? “Maybe another time,” Ava whispered.

But when the strings quartet finished and the kids started to clear their music stands and chairs, Thomas stood and held up his hands. “Hold on, everyone. Please stay seated. I understand we have one more special musical guest.”