The Middle of Somewhere (2 page)

No kidding
, thought I as I thanked her and hung up.

Our little town is fifteen miles from the nearest hospital—which never seemed very far before, but try waiting for the ambulance to arrive while keeping your injured mother comfortable and your hyper little brother quiet. Mama got herself under control, but she couldn't help crying because her leg hurt so bad. I couldn't help crying a little, too, and since I hardly ever cry, that got Gee going again. The only thing that cheered him up, finally, was getting an ambulance ride to the hospital. And even then, he kept popping up to rattle equipment and ask ADHD questions—the kind that never wait for answers— until the medic suggested, “Kid, do you want a shot of what we gave your mom?”

After that, our day got long and boring. I won't go into all the details, except that Mama had to have emergency knee surgery and somebody had to figure out who would pay for it and who would take care of us while she was recuperating. That meant a long meeting with a lady with a stack of file folders who met us in one of those tiny offices that hospital architects seem to stick anywhere there's extra space. After some opening chitchat, she asked, “Okay, Ronnie, where's your dad?”

“In heaven,” I said.

The lady put down her pen, heaved a big sigh, and gave
me a sympathetic look, along with a moment of silence. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Sorry he's in heaven?”

“No, I mean—” She raised her voice to carry outside to the lobby, where Gee was amusing himself. “Gerald, honey, please stop playing with the automatic doors.” Back to me: “How long ago was your father—I mean, did he—?”

“Five years. I was seven. I'm twelve now.” That was more about me than him, but I don't like to talk about him much. He was a long-haul truck driver, big and strong and funny. Hugging him was like throwing your arms round a stout oak tree. One icy night in January he stopped on the highway near Chicago to help a lady change a flat tire. While he was wrenching lug nuts off the tire, he got hit by a chicken truck. That may sound funny, getting hit by a chicken truck. Most people think that anything with chickens in it has to be funny. But I don't.

The lady, whose name tag read L. DANIELS, picked up her pen. “So who's the next of kin that lives closest to you?”

“My grandfather, probably. My mother's dad. John Q. Hazeltine.”

“Gerald—don't even
think
about climbing those drapes. And where does he live?”

“On the road.” She looked at me. “No, really, he doesn't settle anyplace. He's got this old camper and lots of business on the road. He stops by every now and then to see us.”

“But isn't there some way you can reach him in emergencies?”

“Emergencies, no. But we send Christmas cards and
changes of address to the Happy Trails Travel Court in Muleshoe, Texas. That's his winter headquarters.”

“But summer just started, so he won't be there?”

“No, ma'am.”

“What about your other grandparents? Gerald! Stop that!”

I gave her the whole family history: how my dad's father had passed away and his mother was a missionary in Warsaw, Poland, and how my grandmother on Mama's side, the one who was no longer married to John Q. Hazeltine, lived in a gated retirement community in Florida that she only left to go on cruises with her second husband. L. Daniels wrote in the folder for a long time, probably about what a hopeless family we were. She froze up when Gee bounced into the office, but all he did was flop down in the chair next to mine, keel over with his head in my lap, and fall asleep. I mean,
fall
asleep, like from the top of a cliff or something.

“He sleeps hard,” I said.

Gee was still zonked out an hour later when the surgeon stopped by to tell me the operation was successful but Mama would have to stay off her feet for at least a month. “You look like you'd be a big help around the house, right?” I just nodded—that's the story of my life so far, though I'm working on Plan B.

“We'll release her tomorrow if there's a responsible adult at home to help you.”

I nodded again, mentally flipping through my short list of responsible adults. We've only lived in Partly, Missouri—seriously, that's the name of the town—since
February and don't have that many friends yet. Lyddie McIntyre was probably the best option. She's an old buddy of Mama's who convinced her to move to Partly because it was cheaper than living in the Kansas City area and the school here needed another cafeteria worker.

When Mama got out of surgery and felt clearheaded enough to make the call, Lyddie agreed to be our responsible adult.

That's how my summer vacation started. If it hadn't been for Kent Clark, I would have been really bummed about it.

He's the author of this paperback book I picked up in the dentist's office last fall:
Seize the Way: Ten Weeks to SuperSize Your Life!
The chapters had titles like “Finding the Silver Lining” and “Row the Flow.” The pages were full of bullet points and checklists and short- and long-term goals. A little voice inside my head whispered,
Seize the book!
Since it didn't seem to belong to anybody, I slipped it in my jacket pocket and read almost all of it that night while the numbness was wearing off my back molars. By bedtime, I'd made my very first list of long-term goals:

1. Buy a car.
   

2. start a business in high school (or sooner), save money.
   

3. After graduation, travel for one year.
   

4. College? (Decide in high school.)
   

5. start using my full name.
   

I like “Veronica” but never liked “Ronnie.” However, as long as you're underage, who's going to call you with four syllables when they can do it with two?

Speaking of names, in the prologue of his book, Kent Clark makes a big deal of his real actual name being Kent Clark—which didn't seem worth making a big deal about until I remembered
Clark Kent.
Aha: SuperMan, SuperSize. Which is pretty lame, but it's a super book— I've learned not only how to Row the Flow, but also how to Game My Goals and Affirmatize My Attitude.

Still, anybody's attitude would take a hit if they had to leave their mother in the hospital and come home to a torn-up house with pancake-batter tracks in the kitchen and a drowned squirrel in the toilet.

Lyddie stuck around for a couple hours to help clean up and stop Gee from denting our car with a shovel while playing Knight's Tale. (This was after she stopped him from digging up Mama's petunia bed to make a grave for Rocky.) “Whew” was her comment after plopping him in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn. “Is he always like this?” All our friends get around to that question sooner or later.

“In a little bit,” she went on, “I have to run down to Springfield for my grandson's birthday party, but I'll check on you when I get back. And of course I'll be here tomorrow morning to take you to the hospital to get your mom. Will you guys be okay?”

“Sure,” I said. Lyddie was playing responsible adult, but the real responsibility around here was mine.

Row the Flow: that is, find the direction your life is
going anyway and figure out how to make it suit your goals. But my life was flowing in a seriously weird direction. How'd I flow into this dinky little town with institutions called Partly School and Partly Baptist Church, etc.? Would that make me partly-Veronica for the rest of my life?

What would it take, I wondered while scrubbing the last of the pancake batter off the kitchen wall, to change direction altogether? That's one reason my first long-term goal was buying a car: to whoosh me somewhere else if I didn't like where I was. But “long-term” meant at least three years in the future. For now I was stuck in the family boat.

Figuring out how to row it was beyond me after an evening of cleanup that took twice as long with Gee “helping.” When my head hit the pillow that night, I sank like a rock.

Unbeknownst to me, though, the poky current of my life was about to hit the rapids!

Kent Clark says that one way to hear destiny knocking is to notice when two unusual events happen
at the same time
. One unusual event, all by itself, can flare up and then just fade away. But when two of them happen together, they can stir up a crazy kind of energy that just keeps popping and fizzing. So the first unusual event of my summer destiny was Mama falling in the bathroom and busting up her knee. The second happened the very next morning.

I was in the middle of a dream where Gee and I were in the freshwater aquarium at Bass Pro Outdoor World. It was feeding time and the usual crowd had gathered to watch the catfish and largemouth bass dart for those lumps of processed food thrown out by the fish feeder. Gee was darting, too, because being with the fish inspired him to act “fishy.” The feeder thought it was funny. He kept throwing nuggets my brother's way and Gee kept diving for them and I was afraid he'd drown. The crowd was laughing—like the kids at school, when Gee does something off the wall and they don't know how to react. “Stop it!” I yelled in my dream. “Don't encourage him!” At the shooting gallery near the aquarium, somebody kept scoring targets with a loud buzz that got on my nerves.

It was one of those dreams that make you wake up exhausted. Especially when you wake up to your little brother bouncing on your stomach, shouting, “Ronnie! There's somebody at the door!”

My alarm clock said seven—way too early to wake up on a Sunday morning. I threw off the covers, and Gee along with them, wrapped myself up in a bathrobe, and shuffled into the living room. Mama has told us over and over not to open the door to strangers, but my brain was still swimming with the fish. I turned the dead bolt and flung the door wide open as if to say, “Welcome! Come in and steal all I have and don't forget to take my little brother for ransom!”

The first thing that caught my squinchy eyes was not the man on the porch but the slick maroon-and-white RV in our driveway. Me and RVs go way back, and this one looked so new I could almost smell it from the porch. Then I noticed gold letters on the cab door:

I'd better explain about John Q. Hazeltine, better known as Jack.

He doesn't really look like a grandpa, and I get the idea he doesn't think of himself as one, either. Nobody calls him “Grandpa,” that's for sure. I think he'd be okay with us
calling him “Jack,” but Mama put her foot down on that. She says anybody can be Jack, but we've only got one grandfather. So we compromised on “Pop.”

He's tallish and thinnish, with crinkly blue eyes like Mama's and the leathery skin of somebody who's outside a lot. He wears a broad-brimmed hat—suede in the winter and straw in the summer—to keep the sun out of his eyes, but also to cover his bald spot. At least, that's Mama's opinion. And he rides a motorcycle, an old Yamaha; I could see the little bike trailer attached to the RV.

What I told L. Daniels was true: he pretty much lived on the road, but not as a drifter. He was a man with a plan. Every time we saw or heard from him, he was working on a new business, usually based on some awesome scientific discovery that took a long time to explain. It was always something “on the cutting edge,” meaning you couldn't just go down to Wal-Mart and buy it.

A couple of years ago, for instance, he was selling electromagnets to farmers, on the principle that reversing the magnetic poles in the field would increase crop yields by at least 50 percent. Before that, it was special drinking glasses and coffee mugs that made the electrons in water spin the opposite direction from what they usually spun. Drinking opposite-spinning electrons was supposed to cure cancer and clear up zits and fix everything in between.

Whatever he sold, he never stayed in the same place for long. Mama explained it this way: “He's got an itchy right foot. It's always feeling for the accelerator.”

Before now, though, the accelerator was attached to a dusty gray pickup with an old camper riding it like a wart
on a toe. Not the bright new RV that had his own name painted on the door. He saw my eyes lingering on its smooth lines and shiny body. “Like my new wheels? Wait'll you hear the story. Where's your mother?”

When I looked back from the vehicle to him, he'd kind of taken on a bright new gleam himself. “Well, that's a story, too. Come on in, Pop.”

Every time he comes in (every time I remember, at least), two things happen—Gee leaps out screaming from behind a door or a piece of furniture and wraps himself around Pop's body. And the man jumps a foot and gives Gee a shake and says, “Don't you
ever
do that again!” Pop hates sudden moves and loud noises. Also surprises, although since this happens every time, it wasn't technically a surprise.

In the usual scenario, Mama comes bustling out of the kitchen with a big smile and a friendly put-down, like, “Look what the cat drug in!” Except that didn't happen this time, of course.