What Could Go Wrong? (2 page)

“Having a good time?” Mom asked, smiling as I approached.

“Yeah,” I said. And then, all in a rush, I told them about Aunt Molly's invitation and the free plane tickets. They looked at each other.

“Well,” Mom said thoughtfully, “Gracie is eleven. And she's fairly responsible. If we put her on the plane here, and Molly meets the kids at the other end, what could go wrong?”

“With Charlie heading the expedition?” Dad asked, before I could even begin to feel relieved. “Margaret, your innocence never ceases to amaze me.”

He said it jokingly, though, and I began to
seriously hope. “Eddie would be along, too,” I said. Eddie never got into trouble, as far as I knew.

Mom looked at Dad again. “What do you think, honey?”

Dad considered for a minute. Old Jack was leaning into my side, so I could scratch behind his ears, almost pushing me over. I braced my legs and held my breath.

“You really want to go?” Dad asked.

“Oh, yes, Daddy! Please, please!”

“I'll tell you what, Gracie. If you can get through this family reunion without being involved in one of Charlie's disasters—no, let me amend that—if we all get through this reunion without there
being
a Charlie-caused disaster, you can go with him and Eddie to Aunt Molly's in San Francisco.”

“Oh, Daddy, thank you!” I hugged him, and spun around, racing to find Charlie to tell him the good news.

Dad yelled after me. “But if he pulls another one of his birdbrained schemes, I'm not letting my daughter go off with him anywhere, you understand? Do you hear me, Gracie?”

I turned around to wave acceptance of his terms, then sped toward the house.

Two whole weeks at Aunt Molly's, and flying there by ourselves! What fun!

After all, as Mom said, what could go wrong?

Everybody had an opinion about Aunt Molly inviting Charlie and Eddie and me to visit her. Uncle George and Aunt Monica said Eddie could go if I did. I think Aunt Shirley and Uncle Bill were miffed because Wayne wasn't invited first, but everybody else understood
that.
Wayne was always picking on somebody. Just about anybody, except Charlie, who picked on him right back if he started something.

Aunt Joan and Uncle Stan said right off they were glad Cheryl hadn't been invited because they wouldn't have allowed her to go, anyway.

“Why not?” Mom asked when they were all sitting around the big table in the kitchen the next morning, having breakfast. “Just because Molly paints for a living instead of going to an
office doesn't mean there's anything strange about her. Molly's perfectly responsible.”

Dad was sitting with his back to me, and I guess nobody paid any attention that I was there.

“Maybe Molly is,” Uncle Stan said, “but I don't know about Charlie.”

Uncle Jim sipped at his coffee and laughed. Uncle Jim laughed about everything, even when Aunt Lila backed the motor home into Grandpa's old pickup that he'd parked behind it when she didn't notice. Grandpa hadn't laughed, but he admitted it was his own fault, because he knew Aunt Lila had backed into things before. “Charlie's very responsible,” Uncle Jim said. “He's flown several times across the country by himself, with no difficulty whatever. I got him a credit card, and he handles his own cash sensibly. He's very poised, very mature, for thirteen.”

Uncle Bill reached for another doughnut. “Well, I'll tell you, Don,” he said to my dad, “with Charlie's record for catastrophes at these reunions, I wouldn't entrust Gracie to him, if I were you.”

“We're not exactly entrusting Gracie to him,” Mom said. Her face was sideways to me, and I saw that she was a bit annoyed. She had been annoyed with Uncle Bill ever since they were both little kids, because he was always so prissy and so much neater than she was, and she didn't like the comparisons everybody made. “Gracie's mature for an eleven-year-old, too. We trust her to use her common sense, and it only takes a couple of hours to fly from Seattle to San Francisco, for heaven's sake.”

“Besides that,” Dad said, “I've put a condition on this excursion. Gracie can't go with Charlie unless he gets through this entire reunion without one of his catastrophes.” He laughed. “And I'm counting on him not being able to do it.”

I felt the heat rising in my face and I knew it was getting red. What a mean plan, I thought angrily. Dad wasn't usually mean.

“Oh, well,” Uncle Stan said. “You're probably safe, then.”

Uncle Jim shook his head. “Charlie's growing up. You wait and see. He'll be okay this year; no disasters, I can practically promise you.”

I decided I'd lost my appetite for orange juice. I went back to the dining room and found Charlie and my little brother, Max, building a tower out of doughnuts while everybody but Cheryl cheered them on. We all held our breaths while Charlie placed the last doughnut on top of the stack and then everybody scrambled to catch them when they toppled and rolled in every direction.

“Listen, Charlie,” I said, catching one on the edge of the table and biting into it, “you've got to be on your best behavior this whole week.”

Charlie hesitated between a chocolate-covered doughnut and one with colored sprinkles. “Oh? Why?”

“Because my dad says if you screw up and have a catastrophe, I can't go to Aunt Molly's with you. And I want to go.”

Eddie looked alarmed. “If Gracie doesn't go, I can't go, either.”

Charlie chewed thoughtfully. “What, exactly, constitutes a catastrophe?”

“Something like you usually do,” Wayne said. “Falling off a roof, breaking somebody's bones, starting a fire in the hay.”

“I was only six when I started the fire in the hay,” Charlie pointed out. “I was too young to know better.”

“I'm six,” Max said. “I know better than to play with matches.”

“I did, too,” Charlie said, “after Grandpa put out the fire and explained it all to me. Okay, Gracie, no disasters. I'm going to be on my honor not to spoil our trip. Come on, let's go check out the horses.”

Everybody went, except Cheryl, of course. You can't ride horses wearing a skirt and panty hose.

It wasn't easy getting through that week.

Most of the time Charlie really tried. It was just that he forgot once in a while that it was important not to get into trouble.

Even Wayne, who had no stake in the trip, tried to help. He caught the pitcher of lemonade when Charlie hit it with his elbow and nearly knocked it off the porch railing into the lilac bushes. Nobody but me saw it.

When Charlie and Eddie were having a rodeo and Eddie fell off old Dusty (Grandpa hasn't used horses to plow since he got the
tractor, but he keeps a couple for us kids to ride), I could tell his leg really hurt, but he didn't hightail it to the house for help. He sat in the dirt until the worst of the pain had eased off, and then we rolled up his pant leg and looked at where he'd scraped against a nail that was sticking out of the corral fence.

“How long's it been since you had a tetanus shot?” I asked. I knew about those from having stepped on a nail last summer.

Eddie thought about it, his face still sort of puckered up from looking at the gash. “Two years ago, I guess it was. When I stuck the pitchfork through my foot.” He squinted up at me. “Do I have to have another one? I hate shots.”

“Tetanus shots are good for ten years,” Charlie said. He'd dismounted and was holding the reins on Sister, who wasn't Dusty's sister at all but his mother. “So you got eight more years to go. You didn't break the leg, did you?”

“I don't think so.” Eddie looked down, then quickly away from his injury. “It's bleeding.”

“I'll go get some disinfectant and a bandage,” I said. “You stay here, so nobody will see you.”

Charlie gave me a dirty look. “Hey, I didn't throw him off the horse! This isn't part of the catastrophe business, is it?”

“You were playing rodeo with him when he got hurt,” I told him bitterly. “And my dad will probably decide that makes it your fault.” It still made me mad to think of it, how Dad was counting on my not getting to go.

“Okay. Fix him up. I'll turn the horses back into the pasture,” Charlie said. He knew it was my dad I resented, not him.

Luckily the grown-ups weren't around when we went swimming in the river later that day, or Eddie would have had to explain why he had six Band-Aids on his leg. As it was, when his mother asked why he was limping (even though he tried to walk without doing it) he just said he'd bumped his leg, but it was okay. That
was
the truth. Sort of.

It almost spoiled the reunion for me, more or less holding my breath every time Charlie moved for fear something would go wrong. I couldn't figure out what it was, exactly, that
made him a menace. He didn't do mean things on purpose, the way Wayne sometimes did. And he wasn't especially klutzy, either.

It was just that when Charlie was around, exciting things happened. And some of them were more exciting than he'd planned. Like the day he showed us how he'd learned to drive and took us for a ride in Grandpa's old pickup. How did he know the brakes were gone? Nobody'd told us.

The truck was so beat up we decided nobody'd notice a few more dents, and we hardly did any damage to the corner of the pig pen. Wayne and Charlie straightened the fence post and propped it up with some big rocks.

That was probably why the pigs got out later that day, but Grandpa just thought they knocked over the post on their own. It was lucky Cheryl wasn't with us in the truck; she's an awful tattletale.

That was why for once I wasn't sorry when the reunion was over. It was a strain, expecting something to happen that would ruin our plans for the trip.

On the last day Uncle Bill asked Dad if he
was still anticipating a reprieve, which I guess meant that Charlie would still mess up. Dad said, “You know Charlie, he's a ticking time bomb.”

It made me mad all over again, that Dad didn't really think I'd get to go. So when Charlie offered to show us how he could “tightrope walk” on top of the corral fence, I talked him out of it, just in case he slipped and fell off.

That was the end of the week, and it seemed appealing to go home and sleep in my own bed for a few nights.

And get ready to fly to San Francisco. I could hardly wait.

  •  •  •  

I had new jeans and a pink knit shirt for the flight.

Dad had gone around saying, “I don't believe that kid actually made it through a whole week without crippling himself or anyone else,” but otherwise he was a good sport about losing the bet he'd made with himself. He even got me a flight bag to carry some of my stuff in, besides what I was taking in Mom's medium-size suitcase.

“The flight bag's for a change of underwear and your toothbrush and things like that,” Mom said. “Just in case your luggage doesn't match up with you immediately in San Francisco.”

“Why wouldn't it?” I asked. “Don't they put it on the same plane?”

“In theory,” Mom said dryly. “But I remember the night we spent in Indianapolis once, when we had rushed to change planes and our luggage came on the following flight. That plane was struck by lightning and had to turn back, so our suitcases didn't catch up with us until the following day. We didn't have any clean clothes until twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave the hotel the next morning, when your father was scheduled to make a presentation at a convention. All we had with us was a carry-on bag like this, and we were grateful we at least had his shaving gear and our deodorants.” She paused, deciding how many pairs of socks to put into the suitcase. “As I remember it, we really needed the deodorants.”

“Okay. I'll take something to read, too, in the air,” I said, though I thought I'd probably
be too excited about flying to read. I stuck a book into the flight bag, just in case. I knew seasoned travelers
always
carried reading materials.

We met the others at the airport. Eddie had been staying at Uncle Jim and Aunt Lila's instead of going home with his folks after the reunion, and while they were checking in our baggage at the counter, Eddie spoke to me out of the side of his mouth. I thought he'd been watching too many old black-and-white gangster movies.

“It was a close call,” he said.

“What was?”

“Charlie fell off a ladder into those glass things Aunt Lila has for her flowers. He made his folks promise not to mention it to Uncle Don.”

“That wouldn't have counted against the trip!” I protested, understanding why Charlie had a few nearly healed scratches on his arms and face. “Dad said
during
the reunion, not afterward.”

“We weren't taking any chances,” Eddie said. “Come on, are you checking that bag?”

“No, I'm carrying it on board in case the other one gets mislaid. I've got snacks in it, too, for if we get hungry and the stewardess doesn't feed us enough.”

Eddie nodded. He had a flight bag, too, a bright red one. Mine was light blue with a white stripe. He unzipped his and showed me a bunch of Milky Ways and Almond Joys. “I thought of that, too.”

“Listen,” Uncle Jim said, resting a hand on Charlie's shoulder, “Cissy and Dawn are due at a birthday party this afternoon, so if it's okay with you, we're going to go on home and not wait for the plane to take off. You don't need us for anything, do you?”

“No, Dad, don't wait. All we have to do is get on the plane when they tell us.” Charlie wasn't the least bit nervous, the way I was, just a little. But of course he'd flown before, and I never had. Eddie simply looked excited.

“We'll stay until the flight leaves,” Mom said. “We can sit down over there and wait until the plane comes in, all right, kids?”