Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Praise for Deb Caletti’s

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

—School Library Journal,
starred review “Caletti writes a compelling, multigenerational story about teens and parents who simultaneously weather heartbreak and find new self-worth, enriching the telling with the Northwest setting, folksy wisdom, and Ruby’s strong, sure voice.”

—Booklist

“Caletti explores the conflicting, complicated impulses of the human heart with polish and penetration. Her portrait of Ruby, aware of her own weakness even as she succumbs to it and hurts those she loves most, is delicate and authentic, conveying a sensitive understanding of character and of our ability to surprise ourselves in ways good as well as bad. . . . This is a stylish and perceptive account of a young woman’s developing perceptions of human frailty and human strength.”

—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“Tender and poetic. . . . Caletti has the gift of voice and tells her story with humor, insight, and compassion.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Caletti is a top-notch writer. . . . Her smart writing packs keen observations on love, boys, and life in general.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub

“Caletti fills the pages with wonderful images, sharp dialogue, and memorable characters.”

—KLIATT

A National Book Award Finalist • A Book Sense Pick
A
School Library Journal
Best Book of the Year
An International Reading Association Children’s Book Award Notable
A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

also by deb caletti

The Queen of Everything
Wild Roses
The Nature of Jade
The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SIMON PULSE

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, new York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2004 by Deb Caletti

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, inc.

Also available in Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

Designed by Ann Sullivan

The text of this book was set in Goudy.

Manufactured in the United States of America

This Simon Pulse edition April 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Caletti, Deb.

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart / by Deb Caletti.—1st ed.
p. cm.

Summary: In the summer of her junior year, sixteen-year-old Ruby McQueen and her mother, both nursing broken hearts, set out on a journey to reunite an elderly woman with her long-lost love and in the process learn many things about “the real ties that bind” people to one another.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86765-1 (hc)
ISBN-10: 0-689-86765-4 (hc)

[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Old age—Fiction. 4. Self perception—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C127437Ho 2004
[Fic]—dc22 2003018331

ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-5783-6 (pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-5783-9 (pbk)
eISBN-13:978-1-4391-1546-6

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

For Sam
&
nick.

You are the joy and the meaning.

Heartfelt thanks to Ben Camardi, as ever,
and to Jen Klonsky, editor and friend.
Appreciation, as well, to the good people of
Simon & Schuster, especially Jennifer Zatorski
and Samantha Schutz. A note of thanks again
to Anne Greenberg for starting the engine, and to
Scholastic Ltd., UK, for their overseas kindness.

And gratitude to the family and friends who are always
there with love, support, and enthusiasm. You continually
make me realize what a lucky woman I am. Evie Caletti,
Paul & Jan Caletti, Sue Rath and Mitch, Tye & Hunter,
Renata Moran & gang, Ann Harder, the Harper family,
Irma Lazzerini, Joanne Wishart, Mary Roukes, and the
memory of Jim Roukes—love to you all.

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

The first thing I learned about Travis Becker was that he
parked his motorcycle on the front lawn. You could see the tracks of it all the way up that rolling hill, cutting deeply into the beautiful, golf course-like grass. That should have told me all I needed to know, right there.

I’m not usually a reckless person. What happened the summer of my junior year was not about recklessness. It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different. I’m sure I made that decision the very moment I saw that metal, the glint of it in the sun, looking hot to the touch, looking like an invitation. Charles Whitney—he too made a decision like that, way back on August 14, 1945, just as he ground a cigarette into the street with the
toe of his shoe, and so did my mother when she decided that we had to steal Lillian.

Reckless
is the last thing you’d call me.
Shy
is the usual word. I’m one of those people doomed to be known by a single, dominant feature. You know the people I mean—the Fat Girl, the Tall Guy, the Brain. I’m The Quiet Girl. I even heard someone say it a few years ago, as I sat in a bathroom stall. “Do you know Ruby McQueen?” someone said. I think it was Wendy Craig, whose ankles I had just whacked with too much pleasure during floor hockey. And then came the answer: “Oh, is she That Quiet Girl?”

I blame my quiet status on two embarrassing incidents, although my mother will say that I’ve always just been a watchful person by nature, doing my own anthropological study of the human race, like Jane Goodall and
The Chimpanzees of Gombe.
She is probably right that personality plays a part. I sometimes feel less hardy and cut out for the world than the people around me, too sensitive, the kind of person whose heart goes out to inanimate objects—the sock without a partner, a field of snow interrupted by footprints, the lone berry on a branch. But it is also true that humiliating experiences can wither your confidence sure as salt on a slug.

I was reasonably outgoing in the fifth grade, before I slipped on some glossy advertising circulars in our garage, broke my tailbone, and had to bring an inflatable doughnut to sit on at school. Before this I would actually raise my hand, stand at the front of a line, not be afraid to be noticed. My stomach seizes up into knots of humiliation
just remembering that doughnut.
It looks like a toilet seat,
Brian Holmes cracked, and the above mentioned Wendy Craig laughed. And he was right; it did—like those puffy ones that you see in tacky, overdecorated bathrooms.

I had begun to put it all behind me, pardon the pun. I’d nearly erased the memory of Mark Cummings and Dede Potter playing Frisbee with the doughnut during lunch, trying instead to remember what my mother told me, that Brian Holmes would no doubt end up prematurely bald and teaching remedial math, and that Mark Cummings was gay, only he didn’t know it yet. Then it happened again: humiliating experience, part two. Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water. This time it was my own fault. I’d placed a pair of minipads in the armpits of my blouse so I wouldn’t soak my underarms with nervous sweat during a science speech, and one sailed out as I motioned to my display board. At home, peeling the paper strips and sticking the pads in my shirt had seemed ingenious. Why had no one thought of this before? But as soon as I started to speak, I could feel the right one loosen and slip with every small gesture. I tried to keep my arm clutched tight to my side, soldier-like.
Just because an organism is one-celled, doesn’t mean it is dull and uninteresting.
Finally, I had no choice but to flip the page of my board, and down the minipad shot like a toboggan on an icy slope, landing on the floor in white, feminine-hygiene victory. The crowds roared.

So I became quiet. This seemed the safe thing to do when embarrassments hunted me like a stalker hunts a
former lover. Again my mother tried her wisdom on me—
Laugh it off,
she said.
Everyone else is too busy trying to forget their own humiliations to remember yours. You’re no different than anyone else. Why do you think that years later we still have dreams that we went to school and forgot to get dressed?
And again, this might be true. Still, it seems to me that if I get a pimple it will be in the middle of my forehead like an Indian bindi, and if the answer is
spermatozoa,
I’m the one that will be called on. I’ve just found that it’s best to lie low.

Quiet People, I can tell you, usually have friends who play the violin way, way too well, and know that continental drift isn’t another way you can get your coffee at Starbucks. My friend Karen Jen won the Youth Math Extravaganza (I noticed that the bold letters on the sweatshirt she got spelled Y ME, but I didn’t mention this to her), and Sarah Elliott and I became friends in P.E. because the V-sit was the highlight of our gymnastics ability. Last winter, Sarah made a wild pass of her basketball and whacked Ms. Thronson of Girl’s State Volleyball Championship fame on the back of the head. One minute there was Ms. Thronson, her shoulders as big as the back of a dump truck, blowing her whistle—
Threeep!
And the next minute,
bam,
she was down on her knees as if praying for forgiveness for making us do that unit on wrestling. Sometimes you don’t know your own strength.