The Wikkeling (26 page)

“What?” she said. “Don't joke, Gary. Of course you can read.”

“I can now,” said Gary, “but not until this year. I used to cheat. But I'm learning—Henrietta and Rose have been helping me.”

“
Henrietta
has been helping
you
?” said Ms. Span, aghast.

Gary insisted on his story, and somehow—through exhaustion, relief, or too much worry in one day—his mother finally believed him. “Beginning tomorrow, you and I are going to have supervised study sessions after dinner,” she said crisply.

“Okay,” said Gary happily, flicking a bit of eggshell from the leg of his pants and onto the pristine car floor.

After Gary and his mother left, a long, awkward silence ensued between Henrietta, her parents, and Al.

“Mom,” said Henrietta. “I'm sorry.”

“Sweetie,” her mother sighed. She looked worn-out and sad. “That was a terrible, dangerous thing to do. I have no idea what you were thinking. But I'm glad you're all right.”

“You're still grounded, though,” said her father. Then he almost smiled. He gathered Henrietta in for a hug, but just as quickly released her, waving a hand in front of his face. “You smell awful,” he said.

Henrietta's mother sniffed the air. “That's coming from you?”

Henrietta shrugged.

Then Al spoke up, looking uncomfortable. “Aline,” he said, “we need to talk.”

Henrietta's mother tensed up. She folded her arms across her chest and looked impatient. “I'm not sure what you mean,” she said.

Al's face clouded with doubt. “Aline,” he said slowly, “you and your parents meant the world to me. They were all I lived for.” He paused, took a deep breath and let it out and then continued. “But that world . . . well, it's passing away. I hope it isn't too late. I want things to change. I want . . .” He struggled for words for a moment. “I want to be your father, Aline. For as long as I have left. If you'll have me.”

Another long silence fell on the room.

Aline looked at her husband, and then at Henrietta. She closed her eyes, and her face relaxed. Then she stood, crossed the room to Al, and hugged him. As her arms closed around his old shoulders, a grieving sob suddenly escaped her. Al's eyes reddened, and his old, wrinkled face grimaced, which is the only expression you can make when you're feeling too many emotions at once.

T
he memorial service for Grandmother Henrie was held at the Sunset Estates community center. Henrietta dressed in her nicest pants and wore her uncomfortable dress shoes.

Al and Henrie's elderly friends were there, and they were all terribly nice, and terribly sad—they were often attending funerals these days. During the service, Al stood next to Henrietta and her parents, and it felt strange and new to all of them to be a family.

After the service, everyone gathered at Al's house. For the first time in Henrietta's memory, she and her parents stayed until the very end. They didn't look for an excuse to leave early, and they didn't stand awkwardly and act like they wanted to be elsewhere. Henrietta's father was unexpectedly charming, and her mother was a whiz at learning people's names.

Near the end of the evening, when the remaining guests were chatting in the living room, Henrietta approached Al in the kitchen.

“Grandpa?” she said. Al turned from the counter and smiled as he saw her.

“It's nice to hear you call me that,” he said.

“I was wondering if you'd start a book club with me. We aren't using books at school anymore, but I thought we could read some, with my friends. When we
aren't grounded anymore.”

“I'd like that very much,” said Al.

Henrietta and her parents were the last guests to depart, and they helped Al clean up. As they said their good-byes on the front porch, Aline and Al hugged silently. Henrietta heard a sound coming from up the street and turned just in time to see the garbage truck pull through the parking lot. She smiled, even though the sight also made her a little nauseous.

On the drive home, they reflected on the responsibilities that awaited them the next morning. Henrietta would return to school, and her father and mother both had work to do. Of course, life wouldn't be quite so regular as it once was. “Henrietta,” said her mother, “there's something I should have mentioned.”

Henrietta was thinking about how wonderful it would be to take off her horrid, too tight shoes when she got home. Her feet throbbed. “What is it?” she asked.

“We found out last week that the city wants us to move. Our house is going to be demolished. It's good news, actually. We can go anywhere. I know you've never liked that old place. It made you sick.”

“It didn't make me sick, actually,” said Henrietta, but she stopped herself quickly from explaining further—the story would be far too strange for her parents to accept.

Her mother continued: “We'll move someplace new. A fancy house like Ms. Span's.”

“I want to stay in our house,” said Henrietta, firmly. “Can we tell them we don't want to leave?”

“I'm afraid their minds are made up, Henrietta,” said her father.

“Could we find another old house, then?” said Henrietta.

Her mother looked over at her father, and they shared a puzzled glance. Their daughter was quite an inexplicable creature. Just then, Henrietta's father's cell phone rang, and he hooked it to his ear by a little ear clip.

“Tom here,” he said. “Yes, I—what? I'm sorry, say that again. Elton, am I hearing you right?” Tom frowned. “Elton, I'm going to have to call you back. I'm spending some time with my family right now.” He disconnected and returned the phone to his pocket.

“What is it, Tom?” said Aline.

“Just work,” said Tom.

“But what?” said Henrietta.

“Tough to explain,” he said. This was what he always said, and Henrietta pushed a little further.

“
Try
,” she said insistently.

“Well, there's a program called the System Manager. It connects other programs together, you could say. It makes them run efficiently. Anyway, it crashed yesterday, and we've been trying to repair it. Now I just heard that apparently it has deleted itself.”

“Deleted?” said Aline.

“That's what I've been told. Needless to say, I'll be going in early tomorrow. But I'm not going to worry about it now.”

Henrietta leaned back in her seat and looked out the window at the other lanes of traffic and the buildings that walled the street, shining in the strong glow of the streetlights. She thought about Al's
How To
book. If she did have to move, she thought, the first thing she'd do in the new house would be to build a beautiful cat hall with a painted lintel that read A
LL
C
ATS
W
ELCOME
across the top.

G
ary and Henrietta were grounded for a week. In Henrietta's case, this involved having no friends over, supervised homework sessions after school, and no personal use of her brand new Skipping-Stone Phone.

It wasn't so bad, though. Henrietta's mother was quite supportive of her efforts to improve her schoolwork, and sitting with her after dinner to complete compositions and math problems was kind of fun. Henrietta hadn't known that her mother was a whiz at math, and she even talked about her own accounting work a little bit, using examples from her job to illustrate some of the problems Henrietta had to work.

But Henrietta immensely missed going into the attic with Gary and Rose. Although they spent time together at school, they couldn't really relax there, Henrietta especially, since she was A
T
R
ISK
.

Henrietta hadn't been back to the attic since the three of them escaped through the cat hall. Now that the BedCam was working again, and her parents were watching her every move, she hadn't had even a second alone—a deplorable situation, since she'd come to depend on the solitude of the attic to give her time to think about things.

When the day finally dawned that signaled the end of Henrietta's punishment,
she awakened not to the sound of her alarm, but to the sound of her phone ringing. She reached out groggily and checked the screen, brightening immediately when she saw the name.

“Grandpa!” she said as she answered.

“Hello, Henrietta,” said Al. “Remember how you said you wanted to start a book club? How about tonight?”

Henrietta beamed. “I want to! But I have to ask—”

“I asked already,” said Al. “In fact, your friend Rose's mother suggested we meet at their house. I've arranged to pick up you and Gary, if you're interested.”

“Yes!” Henrietta shouted.

School was a blur of typing practices and advice about Halloween (a topic that would continue to wax for weeks in anticipation of the dreaded holiday, including cautionary movies about Jack-O'-Lantern disasters, poison candy, and dangerous strangers). Henrietta worried over all of the Practice Tests because the next Competency Exam could spell the end of her scholastic career.

Soon enough though, the day ended, and Henrietta, Gary, and Rose headed home on the bus. Henrietta quizzed Rose about what her house was like, only to find her mysterious, evasive, and more than a little amused. When the bus arrived at Rose's stop, Rose smiled as she disembarked, saying, “See you later!”

Henrietta ate a distracted dinner in front of the TV with her parents, fielding a few questions about school and apologizing for a mistype she'd made on a composition when she had written “affect” instead of “effect.” Nonetheless, her
parents seemed pleased with her progress.

When the evening news began, a knock sounded at the side door. Henrietta jumped up from the couch.

“Have a good time,” said her mother.

“I will!” said Henrietta. She exited to the kitchen, opened the door, and hugged her grandfather.

They walked to the car and Henrietta opened the rear passenger door to find Gary already inside, waggling his eyebrows delightedly.

The car crawled through traffic toward Rose's house, Al following the lead of the car's computer. As they drove, they heard an ad about a kind of ice that stayed cold even in ovens. Imagine: a broiled milkshake.