Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

“Come on, Bren. I’m going to be late,” Mom yelled from the hall.

I was busy researching a question that had come to me during dessert the night before: How do they get the ripple in fudge ripple ice cream?

Here is What I Found Out: They pour fifty gallons of fudge into a two-hundred-gallon vat of vanilla ice cream, and a machine stirs it around with a paddle the size of a Ping-Pong table.

“
Now,
Brendan!”

I grabbed some allowance money from the small tackle box under my bed and hustled to the garage.

I climbed into Mom’s car, a red Kia Sportage. Mom says red is her favorite color because she has red hair, but technically, her hair’s not red. It’s dark orange and it looks lit up from the inside, like this amber I saw in a library book when I was doing a report on rocks for Mr. Hammond’s class. Except the amber in the book had a big cockroach trapped inside it. I drew a picture of it for my report.

Mom backed the car out of the garage.

“Why do we have to go to the mall? I hate the mall.” I pulled the seat belt over my shoulder.

“I’m sure Gladys will make it worth your while. Candy, pop—all the things I won’t buy you.”

Dad is the one who makes most of the rules in our house, except when it comes to food. That’s Mom’s department. Everything’s got to be wheat or wholegrain. Wheat flour, wheat pasta, even wheat pizza crust. One of her favorite sayings is “If it’s not brown, put it down.”

“Gladys will spend the whole time in the water-massage machine, and I’ll just be sitting there waiting for her.”

Mom patted my leg. “Time with her grandson means a lot to her—especially now.”

She meant especially now that Grampa Clem was gone. If this had been the summer before, I’d have been going fishing. Grampa Clem and I would ride the bus to the waterfront and cast our poles into the sound from the pier. We caught an average of 2.82 fish a week. That’s thirty-one fish in eleven weeks. I learned how to do averages in Mr. Hammond’s class.

I looked out the window and thought about one of my Biggest Questions: Where was Grampa Clem now?

A few minutes later, we pulled into Gladys’s parking lot. The sign at the entrance read
BRIGHTON FIELDS: LIFE IN FULL BLOOM
, as if everyone who lived there were a flower. Gladys is not flowery (except sometimes her perfume). She’s more like a rock, which is why I like her. I also like her because she tells the truth. Truth is what scientists are always searching for.

Gladys was waiting for us on a bench in front of her building.

“Be good for Gladys.” Mom kissed me on the cheek. I wondered what kissing
my
cheek felt like. That would be pretty hard to test, but I could probably figure out a way.

Mom called out my window as I got out, “Thanks, Gladys!”

“Am I glad to see you,” Gladys said as soon as I was out of the car. “Bernard knocked on my door this morning at seven-thirty.” She flapped her hand at Mom as the car drove away. “Let’s get this show on the road. I’ve got a hot date with a massage machine.”

We took the bus. Gladys is on a first-name basis with the driver. When she’s not hopping the bus to the Super Mall, she’s riding it to Muckleshoot, the casino down the street from the Super Mall.

As soon as we got inside the building, I saw the sign.
MINERAL AND GEMSTONE EXHIBIT AND SALE. SPONSORED BY THE WASHINGTON AGATE AND MINERAL SOCIETY
.

Rocks!
This was perfect. If the society had meetings, I had seventy-eight days to attend. My summer plan to become a rock collector was about to get under way. “Can I go check that out?” I asked.

“Be my guest. I’ll come get you when I’m done”—she raised one eyebrow and smiled slyly—“and we’ll go over to Kandy Kingdom.”

“Take your time,” I yelled over my shoulder.

I jogged to a group of tables in a circle around the mall’s fountain, inhaling the smell of Super Mall cinnamon rolls. I walked up to a lady’s table first. All her stones had been made into jewelry—rings, bracelets, necklaces.

The lady wore a long, transparent crystal around her neck. The pointy end attached to the chain had been covered in silver so that it looked like it was wearing a hat. A purple stone had been fixed to the front of the crystal. She reached up and touched the necklace. “Do you like it?”

I nodded. “Is it quartz?” Mr. Hammond had taught us about quartz. The most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. It came in many colors, but it was all the same thing.

“You know your stuff,” she said.

“We learned about rocks in school this year—for science. It was pretty interesting.”

“Maybe you’d like to come on a rock dig with us sometime. We go out a lot during the summer months.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Let me introduce you to Ed. He’s our club president.”

Perfect.

The woman led me to a table where a man was bent over, straightening his rows of rocks—dozens and dozens of rocks, in every color imaginable. Each specimen rested on a puff of cotton in its own white box. Blue veins crisscrossed the tops of the man’s hands like Dad’s road map; brown spots made them look kind of dirty.

“Ed, this young man is interested in the rock club.”

The man looked up. His orangish white hair was slicked back from his pink face. His hooked nose reminded me of a parrot’s beak.

“What can I do you for?” he asked. The woman saw she had a customer and hurried to her table.

I turned to the man, not sure what to say.

“Are you interested in minerals?” he asked.

“I’m a scientist. I’m interested in just about everything.”

“A scientist, eh? Important people, those scientists.” He picked up one of his samples and held it out to me. “You might find this one particularly interesting, then.” He set the rectangular crystal in my palm.

“What is it?”

“Calcite.”

“But it’s clear. The calcite I’ve seen was more like the color of your hair.”

“That right?” He ran his hand through the wave above his forehead. “Well, color may be a mineral’s easiest property to identify, but it can also be the most misleading.” He laid a flyer for the mall exhibit on the table. “Set the calcite on one of those words on the paper.”

I put it down. When I looked through the rock, the words split. It was like seeing double.

“Cool. How much is it?”

“Five bucks. It’s pretty common stuff. But that one’s special because of the double refraction. It’ll be a nice addition to your collection.”

I picked it up and looked through it at the man. It didn’t make him split exactly, just made him blurry. “I don’t have a collection—yet.”

“Never too late to start. How old are you—eleven, twelve?”

I lowered the stone. “Ten, but I’ll be eleven in August.”

“Tall for your age, aren’t you?”

“I guess. I take after my dad. Or so people tell me.” I looked down the rows of boxes, taking in all his samples. “You’ve got a lot of rocks.”

“Minerals,” he said. “Been collecting ’em fifty years.”

My eyes opened wide.

“Didn’t start till I was fifteen. So see, if you start now, you’ll have a jump on me.” He turned his back and dug through a box for something.

“If you start what?” Gladys came up. The massage-machine line must have been too long.

“Gladys, look!” I held up the calcite. “I’m going to have my own collection!”

The man turned around with a green paper in his hand. It said
PUYALLUP ROCK CLUB
across the top. “Come to this if you want to meet some other collectors.” He pointed to the bottom of the paper. “My name and number—”

Gladys gasped. Her jaw had gone limp and her tongue was hanging out.

The man looked up. His eyes moved back and forth a couple of times between us.

Gladys grabbed the flyer. She squawked like a startled hen. “Not interested.” She plucked the rock from my hand and dropped it on the table. The piece of green paper fluttered to the ground.

She yanked on my arm, but I broke free and stooped to pick up the flyer. The man stood frozen, staring at us like one of the wax dummies I saw in Hollywood when we visited my cousins in Los Angeles.

Gladys grabbed my arm again and pulled me away. What was she doing?

“Ow. You’re pinching me. What’s going on?”

She kept moving forward, herky-jerky. “Your mama’s gonna have a fit.”

We walked around the fountain. The man was out of sight.

“Why did you say I wasn’t interested? I am!” I wanted to run back and buy my calcite, but Gladys’s grip was firm.

We kept walking, as fast as Gladys could walk, which was pretty fast. She huffed and muttered about how she couldn’t believe it and what were the chances and Katherine was going to be beside herself.

At the next empty bench, Gladys finally stopped and dropped. She held her purse in her lap and pulled me onto the seat beside her. She breathed hard. “Holy Moses.”

I slumped on the bench and looked back at the exhibit. The fountain sounded like static.

“Of course you were going to run into him at some point. But why with me? I’ve tried to stay out of it.” She was still talking to herself.

I stared at her. Who was she talking about? I lifted the flyer and looked for the man’s name.
ED DEBOSE, CLUB PRESIDENT
.

DeBose
. That was Mom’s name before she got married. That was my dead grandmother’s last name.

I started putting it together. Could it really be? Why else would Gladys be acting so weird?

I suddenly felt like I’d swallowed a bunch of rocks.

That man was my grandpa. The grandpa I’d never met. The grandpa who was “gone.”

CHAPTER 3

On Tuesday morning, Dad came into my room early to say goodbye before leaving for work. He said something about my
do bok,
then ruffled my hair and kissed my head. I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I had the Jitters.

The Jitters is what happens before I know something, but after I realize I don’t know it. Gladys says I get ants in my pants. I think of it as an electrical storm going off in my body.

When I get the Jitters, my stomach feels like it’s full of fizzy root beer, and the top of my head and tips of my fingers go all tingly, and my eyes get all blinky, and if I’m eating something, my mouth starts to chew more quickly.

I try to control myself like Tae Kwon Do tenet number four says I should, but I can’t help these things. They just happen. And they don’t totally go away until I find some kind of answer to my question.

My Big Question today: Where had Ed DeBose been all these years? He wasn’t gone at all. He was the president of a
local
rock club. So why had I never met him?

My stomach fizzed. A minitornado swirled inside me. I had spoken to my grandpa for the first time yesterday, and he hadn’t even known who I was. Thinking of that stranger at the mall as Grandpa made my brain feel like it was short-circuiting.

I got out of bed. My
do bok
was lying on the closet floor, where I had thrown it the night before, after practice. I smoothed the pants against my leg, trying to get out the wrinkles. I hung up the jacket and strung my blue belt around the hanger.

Practice had gone only okay—it was a little sloppy because I kept thinking about Ed DeBose. I hadn’t said anything to Khalfani because before class and after, Dad was right there, and when we’re inside the
dojang,
we’re not supposed to talk.

I pulled on a T-shirt and some shorts and went in search of Mom. She only works part-time, and today was one of her at-home days.

She sat at her desk scribbling in the checkbook. When she saw me, she held out an arm and squeezed me around the waist. “I was just thinking about when you were in kindergarten and the teacher said you were going to learn how to write checks. Remember?”

How could I forget? Mom loved bringing up that story—especially when she and Dad had friends over for dinner.

I rubbed my eyes, which were still blinky on account of the Jitters. “I thought it was sort of advanced for our age,” I said, yawning. “But I was ready to try.” Of course, the teacher meant making check
marks,
not filling out actual checks like my parents did. That was a major letdown.

Mom laughed. “What do you want to do today?”

“Can I go to Khalfani’s?”

“Sure, if it’s okay with his mom.”

“It is. She said so last night.” I sat on the spare bed, staring at the back of Mom’s head. Ed’s hair had obviously been orange like Mom’s before it turned almost all white.

She made some more scribbles. My brain pulsed. My fingers tingled. I clasped my hands and took a breath. I felt like a beaker about to boil over. “Does Grandpa DeBose know about me?”

Her pen stopped moving. She sat frozen.

I was asking about the One Thing I knew I wasn’t supposed to.

“He knows.” She started writing again.

“Why don’t you talk to him? What’d he do that’s so bad?”

She put the pen down and twisted in the chair. “Where’s all this coming from?”

I’d promised Gladys I wouldn’t tell Mom about the mall, but nothing had been said about asking questions. I shrugged. “Just curious.” Mom liked my curiosity…usually. “Will you at least tell me something about him?”

Her eyebrows pulled so close together, they almost touched. “You miss Grampa Clem, don’t you?”

I nodded because it was true, even if it wasn’t why I was asking about Grandpa DeBose. “What kind of job did he have?”

Her chest was turning pink. The color crept up around her neck. “He was a soil tester, for the State Department.”

“What do they do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Test soil. Make sure it’s safe for growing crops. Things like that.”

“Are they scientists?”

“I don’t know if they all are. I guess so.” Her whole neck had gone pink. “Does that satisfy your curiosity for now?”

I blinked a few times. I still hadn’t found out what I really wanted to know. Where was Ed DeBose when he wasn’t at the Super Mall? “Can I see a picture of him?”

“Bren, you know my photos are a mess. I couldn’t find one if I tried.”

Mom was always saying she was going to organize her photos, along with categorizing her recipes, clearing closets and planting a vegetable garden out back—one day. But she never got around to it.

My palms itched. My scalp buzzed. I swallowed. Time to get straight to the point. “Where does he live?”

The pink moved all the way to her face. She was like a giant thermometer. A Momometer. She turned away. “I don’t know.”

“Could he still live in the same place where you grew up?”

“I suppose so.” She gripped her pen again. Not like she was going to write. More like she planned to stab something.

“That’s close to here, isn’t it? Why can’t we go see him?” I stood next to the desk.

Her eyes looked serious, but they sort of drooped, too. “He doesn’t want to see us, Bren. He’s made that perfectly clear.”

My forehead tensed. Us? Why wouldn’t he want to see
us
? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I almost dropped the bomb that I
had
seen him, talked to him, even. But a promise was a promise, and I didn’t want to get on Gladys’s bad side.

I went to my room and opened my
Book of Big Questions.
My grandpa had been missing for ten years. My mom didn’t want to talk about him. Now suddenly I’d discovered him, and he was a scientist, just like me. Who else was he? Where had he been? And why couldn’t we talk about him?

I dated my journal and recorded my questions. Now I
had
to find the answers.