Surviving the Applewhites (14 page)

Chapter One

I
t was a dark and stormy night when Randolph Applewhite arrived home from New York to announce the end of the world. The whole family plus Jake Semple, the extra student at their home school, the Creative Academy, were gathered at the time around the fireplace in the living room of the main house at Wit’s End, while a wind howled and snow swirled against the windows.

Like everyone else, E.D. had at first taken her father’s announcement to be hyperbole—one of her vocabulary words for that week, which meant “deliberate and
obvious exaggeration for effect.” A famous theater director, Randolph Applewhite had a habit of making exactly this announcement whenever something—almost anything—went wrong with a project of his and he felt the need for sympathy. So often had they heard it, in fact, that E.D.’s mother, the even more famous Sybil Jameson, author of the bestselling Petunia Grantham mystery novels, actually said, “That’s nice, dear,” as she struggled to pick up a stitch she had dropped in the scarf she was attempting to knit.

It wasn’t until well into his explanation that she put down her needles and began paying attention. “What do you mean gone?”

“Just what I said! Gone! Embezzled!”

“How much of it?”

“All of it! To the last penny. The Applewhite family is destitute. We shall have to sell Wit’s End and move to a hovel somewhere.”

“What’s a hovel?” asked E.D.’s five-year-old brother, Destiny, who was cheerfully and industriously drawing a bright spring-green pig on a large pad of newsprint.

When the whole story had at last been told—not until long after Destiny had been sent to bed and everyone else had finished a couple of mugs of hot cocoa enhanced with comforting marshmallows or alcohol, depending on their ages—it was clear that while the end of the Applewhites’ world had not yet
arrived, it was looming on the horizon like smoke from a wildfire and heading their way.

E.D. had never really understood—nor felt the need to—the financial structure that formed the foundation of her family’s creative compound. She only knew that the whole, extended Applewhite family had left New York when Destiny was a year old and moved to rural North Carolina, where they had bought an abandoned motor lodge called the Bide-A-Wee. They had renamed it Wit’s End and had lived here since, the adults following their particular creative passions and the children, except for E.D.’s own absolutely noncreative self,
discovering
theirs. All of the adults were famous. Her grandfather and her uncle Archie both designed and created furniture—Zedediah Applewhite’s handcrafted wood furniture and Archie’s “Furniture of the Absurd,” which wasn’t really so much furniture as sculpture and which was regularly exhibited in galleries around the country. Her aunt Lucille was a poet.

What E.D. learned that stormy winter night was that they had come to Wit’s End not just so the family could live together, but so that they could pool their resources in order to continue their work. The vast majority of these resources came from the worldwide sales of the Petunia Grantham mysteries; some came from Zedediah’s beautiful, expensive, and entirely practical furniture; and some came from Randolph’s
work directing plays. Nothing else anyone did brought in much money. All of their resources had been gathered together in a family trust. The manager who had handled that trust, and therefore the future of the entire Applewhite enterprise, had turned out to be a crook.

“He’ll go to jail,” Randolph said after his second cup of bourbon-laced cocoa. “There’s that, at least!”

“And what good will that do
us
?” Archie asked.

“I, for one, will feel better,” Randolph answered. “It will cheer the dark nights in our hovel.”

Zedediah, ever practical, pointed out that the Petunia Grantham mysteries would no doubt continue to sell as they always had, to which Sybil responded that she had only that morning killed Petunia Grantham off. The current novel, which was due to be finished within the week, would be the last in the series. “I killed her because I simply can’t write another one. It would destroy my very soul.”

“Your soul is tougher than that!” Randolph responded. “You can simply resurrect her in the next! They do it all the time in soap operas.”

“My books are not soap operas!”

Only Aunt Lucille had taken the news of their sudden poverty in stride. She breathed a series of long, calming breaths, smiled, and announced that they would get along in some unforeseen way, just as they always had. All they needed to do was trust
their creative energies, and they would surely come up with a way to solve the problem. “One step at a time,” she said. “Out of the darkness, into the light.”

“How long do we have?” Sybil asked then.

“If we gather up everything we have in the bank accounts, plus whatever you’re owed when you turn in the current novel, plus the fees for the two directing gigs I have contracts for—assuming that Zedediah’s furniture continues to sell the way it has—we can probably keep the mortgage paid through June. Maybe July. But after that…”

“We’ll think of something,” Lucille said. “Remember Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’
‘O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’
”

As it turned out, the winter was unusually harsh and unusually long, or at least it felt that way. By the time the Wit’s End daffodils began blooming in March, the family had become obsessed with saving money in every way possible. The children’s allowances had been not just cut, but actually discontinued. E.D.’s older brother, Hal, unable now to order sculpture supplies online for UPS delivery, had taken to going through the trash to find materials for his projects. “If it gets much worse,” he complained, “I’ll have to go back to painting! At least I have plenty of tubes of paint.”

E.D.’s sister, Cordelia, had given up drinking her seaweed-and-protein health drinks. “I can’t even
afford the gas to get to the store, let alone the cost of the supplements! How am I going to maintain the energy to keep up my dancing?”

Winston, their food-loving basset hound, was now living on kibble instead of canned dog food, and liver treats had become a thing of the past. Zedediah’s parrot, Paulie, could no longer count on fresh peanuts, and meat had become an occasional indulgence instead of the centerpiece of most dinners for the humans in the family. Pot roast, everybody’s favorite dinner, had not been seen since the end of the world was announced. E.D. thought she had seen Uncle Archie at the goat pen from time to time, staring longingly at Wolfbane and Witch Hazel, Lucille’s rescue goats.

E.D. herself had begun using the back sides of papers from the recycling box to write her research papers for school. And Zedediah had sped up production of his furniture, appearing in the kitchen late for dinner, still wearing his sawdust-covered work apron, and going right back to the woodshop afterward. So busy was he that Paulie had begun picking his feathers out from loneliness and perches had to be established for him throughout Wit’s End. The last person to leave a room was supposed to take Paulie along so that he wouldn’t be left by himself.

It was an evening in early March when Randolph, having just been paid by the theater in Raleigh where he’d directed a production of the musical
Oliver!
with
Jake, his newly discovered star, playing the role of the Artful Dodger, called a family meeting. He waved his check in the air. “This will cover another mortgage payment,” he said. The Applewhites couldn’t always be counted upon to celebrate one another’s successes, but this time they broke into spontaneous cheers and applause. “Even better, I have a plan to save Wit’s End!”

The cheers and applause died away. No one entirely trusted Randolph’s ideas. “What is it?” E.D.’s mother asked suspiciously. She had steadfastly refused—citing the arrival of her Petunia Grantham royalty check as her fair contribution to the family bank account—to resurrect Petunia or begin another book, as she felt the need to rest her brain. “Your plans have been known to require considerable effort from the rest of us.”

“All for one and one for all,” Randolph said. “Just listen to me, everyone. You’re going to love it!” He turned to Jake, who was sitting on the floor rubbing Winston’s ears. “I owe a part of this idea to Jake. I was sitting in the theater, listening to him sing ‘Consider Yourself at Home,’ when it came to me. The next line of the song invites Oliver Twist into the family, just as we’ve invited Jake into ours. So there I was, looking at this stage full of singing and dancing kids—Fagin’s pickpockets—and it occurred to me that we could create just such a family.”

“A family of pickpockets?” Archie said. “I hardly
think that’s the best way to solve our problem!”

“A family of creative kids! We invited Jake to join the Creative Academy. Why couldn’t we take in a whole lot more? Not all year round—just in the summer. We’ll start a camp for creative kids. I’ve even got a name for it.
Eureka!
” Randolph looked expectantly around the room. “Well? What do you think? People pay big money to send their kids to summer camp. Just regular summer camp. Think what they’d pay to have their kids spend eight weeks with a family of professional artists.
Famous professional artists
!”

“Kids? Living here with us?” Hal said, his face going pale. “How many?”

“I’m thinking just twelve this first year, a pilot group.”

“And what would we do with these twelve kids?” Archie asked.

“Teach them. Encourage them. Share with them our love of art, our own individual creative passions. Set them on the path to becoming creative, productive adults!
Eureka!
would not only bring in big bucks, it would be a humanitarian endeavor—helping to groom the next generation of American artists. It will be a whole family project. There will be something for everyone to do.”

“Me, too?” asked Destiny.

“Of course you, too. You can be the camp mascot!”

E.D. doubted that Destiny knew what a mascot was, but the title was enough to satisfy him.

Randolph turned to his wife. “Now that Petunia Grantham’s dead, you’re going to need something to do! You can’t rest your brain forever!”

“Twelve children? Twelve
other people’s
children?”

“Yes. Think of it. Twelve delightful children into whose meager little lives we will bring the joys of art. We do art—and children—uncommonly well. Just look at our own four, and Jake, too, of course! Who would have thought when Jake first came to us that we could turn him into a musical-theater star in a matter of weeks? We could do that sort of thing with twelve more!”

E.D. suspected that Jake wasn’t willing to give the Applewhite family
all
the credit for his newly discovered talent, but she could see that he was listening carefully as Randolph laid out the details of the camp. Each of them would share with the campers what they liked to do best, Randolph told them—their own creative passion—including Jake. As the only one besides Destiny able to sing at all, he could be the singing coach.

“And what would
I
share with them?” E.D. asked.

“A play needs a stage manager, a camp needs a—a—
an executive assistant
, the person who handles the schedule and the details and makes sure everything runs smoothly. You do that wonderfully
well, E.D—you know you do!”

No one but Destiny had yet accepted the idea. So Randolph went on, refusing to be daunted by their stony faces. “For heaven’s sake, people. We’re talking only eight weeks here! Practically no time at all. If we charge twelve families what I expect to charge them, we could save Wit’s End, bring meat back to the family table, and restart allowances. Would you really rather sell out, leave here, and move to a hovel in Hoboken?”