Penelope Crumb (9 page)

“You’ve got five seconds to state your business, missy, or I’m hanging up.”

“He called me ‘missy,’” I whisper to Littie.

“I heard that.”

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Are you one of those prank callers?”

“No. This is no prank.”

“Then what are you selling?” he says.

“What am I selling?” I repeat. I cover the phone with my hand and say to Littie, “He thinks I’m selling something.”

She scratches her head. “Tell him you’re selling marshmallows. No, wait. Tell him you’re selling vacuum cleaners.” I shake my head. “No, wait. Life insurance,” she says.

The man on the phone is counting down fast. “Three…two…”

So I blurt out, without really thinking, “Do you have a dead son named Theodore Crumb because if you do, I am your granddaughter. I’m Penelope Rae…”

And before I can even say Crumb, that man, that Grandpa Felix, hangs up on me.

T
hat was him,” I say, after telling Littie all the parts of our conversation that she didn’t hear. “That was Grandpa Felix, or Mortimer, I mean, that I just talked to.” My nose tingles and all of a sudden I feel like my heart doubled in size.

“How do you know for sure?” she says.

“I just do.” Then I put my hands on Littie’s shoulders and look her square in the eyeballs. “I need you to do me a favor and call my school and pretend you’re my mom.”

Littie raises her eyebrows at me and then looks
at the man behind the information desk. After a moment, she whispers, “What do you want me to say?”

I tell her to say that I’m sick with a very scary and contagious flu bug and won’t be coming to school. “It’s not flu season,” she says.

I roll my eyes at her. “Then just say that it’s not the flu but just some terrible disease that only lasts a day.”

“What are your symptoms?” she says. “In case they ask.”

“Nose and eyes that are stuffed full of green snot. A cough. Upchucking. And the runs. Fever of two hundred and five. Red bumps on my arms and cheeks. What’s the thing called when you can’t talk?”

“Laryngitis?”

“Yeah, that. And itching. Lots and lots of itching.”

Littie says, “But I don’t sound anything like your mom.”

And then I come up with the very smart idea
that she should hold her nose while she talks and say that she’s got the flu bug, too.

While Littie calls Portwaller Elementary, I talk to the man at the information desk to get some information. After I show him Grandpa Felix’s address and ask how we can get there, he hands me a map and points to the bus stop in front of the library. “Next bus should be here in about three minutes.”

I turn to Littie, who is still on the phone, holding her nose and saying, “I’m sure Penelope will be feeling much more chipper tomorrow, thank you ever so kindly.” Which is something my mom would never ever say.

I pull at Littie’s arm. “Come on, we have to go.”

Littie hangs up quick, and I pull at her arm until we’re both running out the front door toward the bus stop.

“Where are we going?” asks Littie as we climb into the bus.

I wave the piece of paper with Grandpa Mortimer
Felix’s phone number and address at her. “Grandpa Felix’s house. Where else?”

I find two seats together at the back of the bus and slide into the one by the window. Littie stands in the aisle. “How do you know for sure that man on the phone was your grandpa?” she says. “He hung up on you.”

“So? Aren’t you going to sit down?”

She shakes her head at me. “So, that doesn’t seem like a very grandpa thing to do.”

Even Littie’s worst thinking can’t bother me now. “He probably just doesn’t like to talk on the phone. There are people out there in the world like that, you know.”

Littie says, “Humph,” and then nothing else.

“The bus driver is staring at you like she wants you to sit down.”

Littie finally takes off her backpack and slides into the seat beside me. She looks straight ahead and says, “I’m just saying.”

“What are you saying exactly, Littie Maple?”

“I’m saying that maybe that man on the phone isn’t your grandpa. And even if he is your grandpa, maybe now isn’t the best time for a visit.” She shifts her backpack on her lap. “He sounds kind of mean.”

“I thought you wanted an adventure,” I say. “You’re always saying how you want an adventure and how your momma never lets you do anything. And here’s your chance, Littie Maple. A real adventure is right under your nose!” While Littie thinks this over, I say the one thing that I know will change her mind: “Unless you
want
to turn into your momma.”

W
e take the bus across Portwaller to 609 Antietam Street. Grandpa Felix’s apartment building looks as old as he must be. The window shutters hang all cockeyed and the gray paint is peeling off the bricks in clumps like whiskers. Long ivy vines cling to the sides and front, climbing up, up, up to the rooftop where I imagine they meet and have tea parties with the moon.

“This is it,” I say.

“How do we know which one is his?” asks Littie. “The address we have didn’t list an apartment number.”

I shrug and point to a man walking toward the front door. “Let’s ask.”

I catch the door before it latches shut and swing it back open again, almost knocking off a wreath of plastic yellow flowers. “Excuse me,” I say to the man. “Do you know where Mr. Mortimer Felix Crumb lives?”

The man sticks a key into a mailbox in the wall, peers inside, and then closes the door. He slips the key into his shirt pocket and pats it twice. “You family?” He looks right at me when he says this, wiping his nose with his wrist.

“Yes sir,” I say.

“He’s her long-lost grandpa,” Littie adds.

“Up the stairs. Apartment Three-C.”

Littie thanks him and yanks on my arm in the direction of the stairs. But I plant my feet, wondering about his big nose that doesn’t stop growing. “There isn’t anything, you know, especially strange about him, is there?”

The man’s eyes get big and then he gives me a
look that says, If You Don’t Know, I’m Not Going to Tell You. I go cold all over and Littie has to give my arm another big yank to get me moving.

The door marked 3C is in front of me before I know it. This time Littie does the knocking before I’m even ready. “Wait, Littie!” I turn my back to the door because I haven’t thought of the words that I want to say. But I hear the door open before my brains get awake.

Then I hear Littie gasp.
His nose must be COLOSSAL.
I turn around slowly toward the open door. And when I look up at him, the first words that come out of my mouth are filled with relief. “Oh, it’s not
that
big.”

And to my surprise he says, “Neither is yours.” Which is a funny thing to say to somebody you’ve never met before. And I think he’s talking about my nose, but I’m not 100 percent sure.

I pull the picture of Grandpa Felix from my pocket. The nose on his face doesn’t look any bigger than his nose in the picture. Which means that
either noses grow really, really slow or Terrible is full of lies.

Grandpa Felix clears his throat, and that’s when I notice how different he looks from the picture. His eyes are dark and puffy and he’s got whiskers growing in the cracks on his face. He looks like he’s had a thousand really bad days, one right after the next. And who knows, maybe he has.

I hold the picture out to him because maybe he just needs a reminder of who he used to be. He looks at it and then looks at me like I’m handing him a plate of sausage that’s been sitting in the heat too long. I slide the picture back into my pocket.

“Well?” Grandpa Felix says. He and Littie are looking at me and waiting for somebody to say something. Littie says, “er” and “uh” and “umm,” but she doesn’t seem to know what to do next.

“You’re really not dead at all,” I say.

He straightens his shoulders and says, “Not yet.”

We stare at each other for a while, and then I say, “Can I use your bathroom?” It’s the first thing I can think of. “Please.”

Grandpa Felix looks at me like I just told him half of a joke but forgot the funny part. Then he glances behind him, at the inside of his apartment, and for a minute I think he’s going to say no. “I’ve really got to go,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other.

“It’s not healthy to hold it,” Littie chimes in to help.

He grunts and as soon as he takes a step away from the door, I pull Littie inside. “Whoa, this place is a pigsty,” I say. Piles of newspapers, magazines, and pictures—lots and lots of pictures—are everywhere. I pull a few from the top of a pile next to the couch. Lots of people I don’t know and places I’ve never seen before. Tall buildings, sailboats, cornfields. “My word. What is all this stuff? Are you one of those people who never throw anything away?”

“I thought you needed to use the bathroom,” Grandpa Felix grumbles, taking the pictures from me and placing them back on the pile.

“Oh, right. I do. Where?”

He points to a hallway and Littie grabs my arm and whispers, “Don’t leave me out here with him. He’s kind of scary.” She looks around. “And this place is dirty.”

“It’s not that bad,” I tell her.

“What should I do while you’re in there?” she asks. “What if he wants to talk to me? What do I talk about? Maybe I should just come into the bathroom with you. I’m just saying.”

Then I turn toward Grandpa Felix and say, “Do you have a TV?”

“Over there,” he says, pointing to a corner of a room with a worn leather chair parked in front of it. “But don’t touch anything, and don’t move anything. And don’t
touch
anything.”

“TV?” That perks Littie right up. After stepping over a couple of piles, she sinks into the chair and clicks on the TV, saying, “This is great! A marathon of
Max Adventure
!” And I know she will be fine for as long as I want to stay.

The bathroom is mostly clear of piles, except for a stack of magazines called
Life
on the back of the toilet. I pull Winston’s picture from my pocket. It’s the same kind of paper. “Hey,” I say, marching out of the bathroom and holding up Winston’s page. “Do you take pictures in magazines?”

Grandpa Felix is sitting at a square wooden table, running his finger along the corners of a stack of newspapers. He looks up, hardly interested in what I’m saying. “Humph.”

I pull out the chair beside him and sit down, putting Winston on the table between us. He doesn’t look at me. He just stares at the pile of newspapers the whole time. I don’t know what he might be thinking of, but I’m thinking that Terrible’s alien mind-reading tricks would come in handy right about now. Neither one of us says anything for a long time, and the longer I keep quiet, the harder it is for me to get my mouth to work.

Finally, I tell myself just to say something. “Do you know who I am?”

He looks at me then, right at the heart of me, and his eyes tremble a little. He nods.

“Good,” I say. My mouth is just getting warmed up, so I keep on going. “Did you know this dog?” I point to Winston.

He mumbles, so low that I can barely hear: something, something, photographer.

“So you took this picture?”

He nods.

“I’m going to get a dog like Winston one day,” I say.

Grandpa Felix closes his eyes and tilts his head to the ceiling. I close my eyes and do the same. Only, I peek at him through eye slits. And just when I get to thinking that he’s gone asleep, his eyes pop open and he says, “Elmer.”

“Elmer?” It takes me a while to figure out that he’s talking about that dog in the picture. I look at those eyebrows again. “Nope, he’s definitely a Winston.”

“Let me see that,” he grumbles. I slide the page
to him, and he gives it a close look until he and Winston are almost nose to nose. Then he smiles enough for me to worry that his stone face will crack, like he hadn’t thought about that dog in a long time. “I believe you’re right, Penelope. He does look like a Winston.”

I stop breathing for a second or two because this is the first time Grandpa Felix says my name and it makes me feel so good, like wiggling my toes in the ocean. I watch him close. I think he must like saying my name, too, because his face gets red, especially around his whiskers. “I like his eyebrows,” I say.

“Who wouldn’t?” His mouth seems warmed up now, too. “I bet you’ve never seen a dog with eyebrows like that before.”

“No sir.” I shake my head. “Grandpa Mortimer. Grandpa Felix.”

“Grandpa Felix,” he says.

“Grandpa Felix,” I say, smiling. “I didn’t know that dogs even had eyebrows.”

He jumps a little and shifts forward when I say his name, making me wonder if maybe his toes have gone wiggling like mine. But after a moment, he eases back into his chair and says, “Well, not many do. Not many do.”

W
e make it back to the library just as moms and dads get there to pick up the homeschoolers. As soon as we get inside, I go to the first shelf of books I see and pull one out:
The History of Great Medieval Battles.
I open it in the middle, hold it up to my face, and stare at big words I’ve never seen before and don’t know how to say. “My goodness, this is very interesting.”