An Early Winter

Clarion Books • New York

With thanks to Greg Larson, my fishing expert,
and to Ann Goddard for constant support and encouragement
and to my editor, Jim Giblin, for being there still

Clarion Books • a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint • 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, NY 10003 • Copyright © 1999 by Marion
Dane Bauer • All rights reserved. • For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton
Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003. •
Printed in the USA.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bauer, Marion Dane.
An early winter / by Marion Dane Bauer,
p. cm.
Summary: When eleven-year-old Tim's beloved grandfather
develops Alzheimer's disease, Tim tries to restore and save him by
taking him out for a fishing adventure at the pond, but the
outing turns into a disaster.
ISBN 0-395-90372-6
[1. Grandfathers—Fiction. 2. Alzheimer's disease—Fiction.
3. Fishing—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B3262Ear 1999
[Fic]—dc21 98-54975
CIP
AC
BP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For John Bennett Larson

ONE Going Home/
[>]

TWO Waiting for the Leaves to Fall/
[>]

THREE A Plan/
[>]

FOUR Gone Fishin'/
[>]

FIVE Making Change/
[>]

SIX Something to Prove/
[>]

SEVEN Absolutely Useless/
[>]

EIGHT Disaster!/
[>]

NINE No Choice/
[>]

TEN Where Are You?/
[>]

ELEVEN Found/
[>]

TWELVE Home/
[>]

"Home," the car's tires hum against the endless asphalt. "Home!"

Home,
Tim hums to himself, the word reverberating inside his head. He is tucked as far into the corner of the back seat as his seat belt will allow.
I am going home.

Home to the two-story white house with the wraparound porch. Home to his attic room, too hot in the summer, cold in the winter, with a dormer window that opens into the limbs of the old maple. Home to his grandmother's oatmeal-raisin cookies and her lemonade, so sweet and so tart at the same time that it makes your jaws ache.

Home to Granddad. More than anything else, home to Granddad.

The insistent humming inside Tim's head is almost enough to keep the voices in the front seat from penetrating. Almost.

"We've got to face it, Paul. It's Alzheimer's. What else could be causing—"

Alzheimer's.
The word leaps across the space between the front and back seats. The tires pick it up, too, and make it part of their song.
Alzheimer's. Home. Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's. Home.
Tim tugs at the restraining seat belt and twists in his seat.

Alzheimer's!

After a few moments, though, the humming repetition begins to drain the word's terrible power.
Alzheimer's
becomes just another combination of sounds. Like
asparagus.
Like
albatross.
A word that has nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with his grandfather.

This isn't the first time Tim has heard of Alzheimer's. The word had been whispered long before he and his mother ever moved from his grandparents' house in Wisconsin to Paul's apartment in Minneapolis. And his mother and Paul have talked of little else since Grandma's last call with the report from the doctor.
Alzheimer's disease.
The first time he heard his mother say it he thought she'd said
old-timer's disease.
But Granddad is only sixty-three. Everybody agrees that isn't old. Most people haven't even retired at sixty-three.

Besides, it doesn't matter what the doctors say. It doesn't matter how much the grownups complain about Granddad's forgetting, about all the ways they say the illness is affecting his brain. Tim knows what his grandfather's problem is. And he knows what to do about it, too.

He also knows what a dumb little kid he's been. He'd been glad when he'd found out Paul was going to marry his mother. Actually glad. Paul with the barrel chest and the open smile and the endless patience for playing catch and horse and going down when he was tackled as though he'd felt the hit. Paul with the construction job that sent him to live near them in tiny Sheldon, Wisconsin, for a whole year ... and then, when the project he'd been working on was finished, pulled him back to Minneapolis again. And pulled Tim and his mother with him.

Tim had been dumb enough to think that Paul was going to move in with him and his mother after the wedding.
Sure, Mom,
he'd said.
Paul's great. I'd love it if the two of you got married!
It was only later that he'd discovered his mother's marriage to Paul meant moving more than two hundred miles from the home he and his mother had always shared with his grandparents.

His mother's voice intrudes again. "I've been seeing signs. For a couple of years, it's been getting more and more obvious. How Leo would ask a question, tell a story, and five minutes later say it all again." She sighs, gazes out the window at the green countryside sliding past. "And the way he left his veterinary practice, just walking out like that..."

"I know," Paul says, his deep voice vibrating sympathy. "I know."

Leave my grandfather alone!
The words echo in Tim's skull as though someone is inside there shouting them, but no one can hear except him.

His mother certainly doesn't hear. "That time when Sophie called to say he'd gone out into the garden and pulled up all his tomato plants, I knew for sure. He loved his garden so much, tended it so carefully. How could he have done such a thing?"

Paul reaches over to rub the back of Mom's neck. Her neck looks fragile under that big hand, like a twig that could be snapped. But then everything looks small, feels small around Paul.

"What did she do?" Paul asks now, as though he hasn't heard the story before. Maybe Mom's the one with Alzheimer's, repeating herself the way she does.

"Oh, you know Sophie. She gave him a good scolding. As though she could bring him back that way." Mom lets out a small hiccuping laugh, but the sound is closer to tears.

Tim crosses his arms over his chest and glares at the back of his mother's head. What reason does she have to cry? She's the one who chose to go off and leave Granddad. Besides, he isn't her father. Not even her father-in-law anymore.

Years ago, more than eleven years ago, a young man named Franklin brought his pregnant young wife to his parents' home for the first time. Showed up at their door after years of absence, sat at their table, eating, laughing, telling stories. Then he'd stood up, stretched, and said, casually, "I've got a little errand to run." And off he went, leaving Tim's mother behind. Off he went, never to return.

Tim not even born, his mother young and scared. How often she talks about that. How Grandma and Granddad took her in when she was barely more than a girl. A scared girl about to have a baby.

Not just took her in, either, but made a home for her after her own parents had disowned her for marrying Franklin. And then when Tim was born, they'd made a home for him, too. Until Paul came and took them both away.

Now he and his mother are returning, scared in a whole different way. Tim has been begging to come back ever since they left three months ago. He'd begged not to be taken away from Sheldon, too.

"I'll just stay with Granddad for the summer," he'd said. "Then the two of you can get settled." He figured his mother and Paul would get used to not having him around after a while.

They had a million excuses, though. "You've got to get settled into your new home, too," they'd say. "Begin to make friends ... get ready for school." Then they'd smile and add, "Besides, we'd miss you too much. You know that."

Nobody stopped to consider, even for a moment, how much his grandfather might miss him.

"I don't know what I'm going to do without you, Timothy," Granddad had said at least a million times. "I don't know what I'll do."

But no one was listening except Tim. And what could an eleven-year-old kid do?

"Sophie's got some hard decisions coming up," Mom says now. "Really hard. But if she—"

"No!"

Tim's mother turns around from the front seat, her forehead creased beneath her soft, caramel-colored bangs. Brown eyes with golden flecks, but the gold goes into hiding when she's sad. "Tim, you must understand. Your grandfather is—"

"No," he says again. Only that. And he turns his face stubbornly to the window, blocking out the rest of what she says.

Black and white cows munch on green grass. Summer lingers in the bright grass, but the pastures are edged with the vivid red of sumac. The tops of a few of the trees have colored, lit like candles.
Burnt sienna
that color is called in his crayon box.

No,
he says once more, but this time only inside his head. And soon
No,
too, becomes part of the hum of the tires.
No, no, no.

Another pasture. More cows. The cows are Holsteins. Dairy farmers raise cows. Beef farmers raise cattle. He doesn't know why one says "cows," the other says "cattle." Granddad would know. Granddad was a veterinarian, and he knows just about everything. Granddad
is
a veterinarian. He still is, isn't he, even though his clinic has been sold?

Mom goes on talking, talking. Explaining. But Tim doesn't listen. He doesn't need to listen. He knows what he knows.

There is a difference between
sick
and
sad.
His grandfather is sad. First he was sad about Franklin, the son who went away and never came back. Maybe other people didn't know, because he never said it. Nobody in that house ever actually said anything about Franklin. But as long as Tim could remember, he'd seen the Franklin sadness in his grandfather's eyes.

And now Tim has gone away and left him, too.

When Tim was a little baby, Granddad was the one who stayed up with him at night when he had colic. Mom had told him so. "Go to sleep," Granddad would say to Mom. "A new mother needs her sleep." And then he would take Tim downstairs and walk him back and forth, back and forth until Tim slept and finally Granddad could sleep, too.

And wasn't it Granddad who ran alongside Tim's two-wheeler while he wobbled down the middle of the street? Wasn't it Granddad who always knew exactly the right moment to let go?

And Granddad who took him camping, Granddad who taught him about catching fish, cleaning them, frying them in a cast-iron skillet over the camp fire?

Tim loves his mother, of course, and he likes Paul just fine. He's even beginning to think Minneapolis is okay. But his grandfather? He
owes
his grandfather.

And now, it's payback time.

With Tim home, Granddad will get better. Everyone will see how much better he'll be with Tim there.

And then they'll have no choice.

They'll have to agree that Tim must stay.

When they step out of the car, Tim sees Granddad first. He is standing in the front doorway, his face glowing like a friendly jack-o'-lantern.

"Here he is!" Granddad calls. He is looking only at Tim. "Here's my boy!"

Tim runs up the porch steps and throws his arms around his grandfather. Granddad isn't big like Paul, but he is solid. He is there. He has not changed.

"Oh, Leo," Mom says when she arrives, "we missed you. I'm sorry it's been so long. It just seemed to take forever to get settled." She pecks him on the cheek.

It's a lie, of course. They were "settled" within a week. Two at the most.

Tim steps back from his grandfather's embrace, ready to contradict his mother, but Granddad winks at him and draws him close again. Tim lets himself be pulled into the rough wool shirt. The shirt smells of fabric softener, but it also carries the tang of the crisp outdoor air and a faint memory of horses. Tim sighs and wraps his arms around his grandfather once more, squeezing with all his might.

Grandma arrives at the door, too. Her hands fluttering. Her hands are like birds looking for a place to land. "Oh, my," she is saying. "Oh, my. Here you are at last. Such a long trip. You must be exhausted." And then with that mock crossness she always uses to cover strong feelings, "For heaven's sake, Leo! Where are your manners? Invite them in!"

"Come in," Granddad booms obediently. "Come in!" He holds the door open, and they all troop inside.

Once in the living room, they stop, facing one another. Everyone is talking at once. Except Tim. Except Granddad. They just stand there on the edge of the small crowd, smiling at each other.

Granddad runs a hand down Tim's sleeve as though to test if there is truly a boy inside. "How's your new school?" he asks.

Tim shrugs. "It's okay. Not as good as Sheldon Elementary, though. Nothing's as good in Minneapolis as here."

Granddad's smile widens to a grin. That must have been the answer he was hoping for.

The others go on talking, their voices rising, treading on the ends of one another's sentences.

"Coffee!" Grandma cries above the din. "You need coffee." Strong, fragrant coffee is Grandma's answer for every celebration or woe, weddings, funerals, homecomings. She offers it only to the adults, though. Sometimes, when Grandma and Mom weren't around, Granddad used to give Tim a cup of Grandma's coffee, with lots of cream and two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Drinking it was like drinking rich, bitter candy.

Grandma always said coffee would stunt Tim's growth. Granddad just said, "Here, boy. This will grow hair on your chest."

Before he was old enough to understand the joke, Tim used to check his chest afterward to see if he had begun to sprout hair.

The others move toward the kitchen, still talking all at once. They leave Granddad and Tim alone in the suddenly quiet living room, leaning into one another in that comfortable, comforting way.