Penelope Crumb Never Forgets (9 page)

21.

I
run all the way back to the museum. The air is colder now, and it stings my wet face. People look at me as I run by them, the kind of look that says, What’s Wrong With That Poor Girl? Which makes me cry even harder.

Without my toolbox, I should be able to run faster, but my brains are full of concrete. Even my fingers know that something’s missing. They curl around an invisible handle, pretending that everything is the same as always.

Grandpa Felix was wrong. You should never let go. Because letting go means gone forever and you’ll never get it back. I force my legs to keep going by thinking hard about Patsy Cline’s necklace. And as my feet hit the sidewalk, I try to push away everything else in my brains—my toolbox, my dad, Grandpa Felix, and Alfred. Even Lumberjack Jack and how I’m going to get around him.

I race up the steps to the museum, grab the door handle with both hands, and pull. The door doesn’t open. I run around to the side and try that door, but it’s locked, too. The windows are dark, and I can’t see anybody inside. I run back around to the front and beat my fists against the door. “Hello! Hello! Is anybody in there?” I shout loud enough even for Mangy Teddy to hear.

But no one comes.

22.

W
hen I get to our apartment building, Littie is sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for me. The stuff from my toolbox is in a neat pile beside her. “Did you get it?” she whispers.

I shake my head. “I was too late.”

Littie bites at her thumbnail. “Your mom just came over looking for you, and she looked really mad.”

“Okay.”

I pick up my things, everything that used to live in my toolbox but now has no place at all to live. Littie walks me to the door to our apartment. “I’m sorry about your toolbox,” she says.

“Me too.”

Before I open our door, Littie says, “Wait!” She takes off the alarm from around her neck and puts it in my hand. “For your museum. But somehow I don’t think you’ll need it to remember me. I’m just saying.”

I smile at her. “I don’t think so either, Littie.”

“It’s just a loan, though. I’ll need it back for our next adventure.” And then she skips down the hall and slips into her apartment.

I take a deep breath and open our door. I can barely get a foot inside when I hear Terrible’s voice say, “Mom, she’s here!”

Mom’s footsteps pound the hallway toward me, and before I can even take my coat off, Mom and Terrible are in front of me. “We need to talk,” she says in a tone that I know means trouble.

Terrible has a grin on his face that says, Sit Back and Enjoy the Show. And I have a feeling that I’m the show.

“First of all, where have you been?” Mom says. “Did I not specifically say that your brother was in charge?”

“Yeah, I’m in charge,” says Terrible, jabbing his thumb into his chest.

“You can’t just leave whenever you want and go wherever you want without asking or at least telling someone, missy.”

Good gravy. I’m missy again.

“Yeah. You’re supposed to tell me,” says Terrible, jabbing his chest again. “Because I’m in charge.” Then he must have jabbed too hard, because he winces a little and rubs his chest.

Mom sighs. “Terrence?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Enough.” She looks at me. “And second of all, and this is a big one, you can’t take things from other people, things that don’t belong to you. You’re nine years old, almost ten, and you should know that by now.”

“You’re lucky you’re not in jail,” says Terrible. “For stealing.” He puts his wrists together like he’s been handcuffed and limps around in a circle.

Mom says, “Terrence?”

He stops limping. “Sorry.”

“Stealing?” I say. “I didn’t steal anything. Why does everybody think I’m stealing?”

“Who else thinks that?” says Mom.

“Lumberjack Jack. From the museum.”

“You took something from the museum?” says Mom with a look that says, I’m Really Worried.

Terrible says, “We know what you did. I found your closet, dork.”

My word.

“Terrence,” says Mom, “why don’t you call Grandpa Felix and tell him we found his camera and that she’s okay.”

“Okay,” he says. Then he leans in close to me, so close that his smelly cologne makes me cough. “But if you ever go into my room again, I’ll give you a reason to talk about dead things all the time.”

“We’ll see what NASA has to say about that.” And then I give him a look that says, That’s Right, I Said NASA.

He rolls his eyeballs at me and walks away, but I can tell that he’s worried. If there’s one thing I know about aliens, it’s that they are afraid of NASA.

Mom tells me to come sit next to her on the couch. Terrible is on the phone in the next room with Grandpa Felix, saying, “It’s here. We’ve got it.” And then “Penelope took it.”

“Is Grandpa mad?”

“Do you know that we called the police and accused those painters of taking it?” says Mom.

“Oh.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Do you know what that camera is worth?”

I nod. “It’s Grandpa’s favorite. The first one he ever bought. We named it Alfred.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “That’s a very expensive camera. It’s worth a lot of money.”

“That’s not why I wanted it for my museum. I wanted it so that Grandpa Felix could be remembered. He said that what’s worth something to him won’t be worth anything to anybody else after he’s dead, and I wanted to show him that’s not true.”

“Penelope Rae.” (Stomach ulcer.) “Can we stop with the dead talk, please?”

“Sorry.”

“Grandpa Felix is who you need to say you’re sorry to,” she says. “He’s very upset.”

My stomach sinks. “He is?”

“Well, how would you feel if you lost something that was important to you?” she says. “What if . . . what if . . . I don’t know . . . what if your toolbox was gone?”

And that’s when I start to cry again. Mom hugs me and asks me what this is all about. But I can barely get out the words. Eventually my eyes run out of water, and I catch my breath and tell her about Patsy Cline’s necklace and my drawings and how Dad’s toolbox is gone forever, just like him.

For some reason, Mom cries, too. And I think maybe she hasn’t forgotten about Dad after all.

23.

S
omeone is knocking. “Come on in, Littie,” I say from the middle of the Heap.

Only, it’s not Littie at all. Patsy Cline peeks in and says, “Howdy.” And then she says, “Looks like a pig moved in, had a party, and forgot to tip the maid.”

Patsy Cline sure has a way of putting things. I’m going to miss that about her.

“What are you doing with all of this?” she says.

I point to my closet. “It’s going back in there.”

She peers around the Heap and into my closet. And reads out loud what’s written in ultramarine letters. “Penelope Crumb’s Ultra Museum of Forget-Me-Notters.” Then she looks at me like she’s waiting for me to explain.

I don’t know how to explain my museum without talking about her necklace, and I very much don’t want to talk about her necklace. So I change the subject. “When’s your next singing competition? Do you want to try on some of my shoes? Is it raining outside? Want to see my teeth collection?”

Patsy says, “My mom’s waiting in the car, so I can’t stay. We’re on our way home from voice lessons, and I thought I could stop by and get my necklace. So I don’t have to wait until Monday.”

All of a sudden, I don’t feel so good.

“You don’t look so good,” says Patsy. “Have you got the stomach bug?” She puts her hand over her mouth.

“I don’t think so,” I say, and then I remember how Patsy feels about germs (some of them have tails). “Actually, maybe I do.” I pretend gag at her. “Maybe you should go—so you don’t catch it, I mean.”

Patsy holds her breath and puffs out her cheeks. Then she puts her hand out to me like she wants me to give up the necklace, but I pretend like I don’t know what she wants.

Still holding her breath, Patsy waves her hand back and forth at me.

“Oh,” I say, gagging again. And then I pretend to think that she wants to high-five, so I slap her hand.

She lets out her breath. “Ow!” Then she shakes the germs off her hand so they drip to the floor. “No, Penelope. My necklace.” She looks around my room.

Good gravy. I push the closet door shut, but it gets caught on a pair of sandals.

Patsy pulls the neck of her shirt up over her mouth and then moves past me toward my closet. Under her shirt, she says something. It’s muffled, but it sounds like, “What’s a forget-me-notter, anyway?”

I try to block her, throw hang-up clothes in front of her, shake pretend germs on her, but there’s not much that can sidetrack Patsy Cline when she’s got her brains on something. She gets past me and sticks her head in my closet.

“Popsicle sticks!” she yells. “What is this place?” And then she finds the cards about her hair and necklace and she reads them out loud. With lots of exclamation points. Somehow having her in my museum, reading about her own things, makes me want to bury my head in the Heap and forget everything.

And then Patsy yells, “Yeeeeeaaaak!” Which is when I know she’s found what’s left of her necklace.

“I’m real sorry, Patsy,” I say. “Real, real sorry.”

She holds the chain in one hand and the pile of sand in the other. “What in blazes happened to it?”

“Littie found my museum and saw that I had your necklace, and I told her I was going to give it back to you and then I was taking it from her, and I hardly touched it, but sand dollars break really easy, and that’s what happened.”

Patsy shakes her head. “But something doesn’t figure. Why would you put my necklace in your museum if you were going to give it back to me? And what kind of museum only has a necklace and a hair in it?” She picks up the heart-shaped tin. “And teeth?”

“Oh, no. Your necklace was one of the first things I got. The teeth were just for protection and in case your necklace got a case of the lonelies,” I say. “I had other stuff in there, too. A sketchbook from my mom, drawings from Terrible, an Alfred camera from my grandpa Felix, and a shoehorn from my dad. But I had to give them all back. Well, except for the shoehorn.”

“Wait a second,” Patsy says. “But I thought you just found my necklace yesterday.”

I close my eyes and tell the truth. “I might have found it a couple of days ago.”

Patsy sucks in a bunch of air and it makes a high-pitched screech. But no words come out.

So I fill up the empty space with how sorry I am and that I should have told her sooner that I found it, but truth be told, I wanted to keep the necklace, not for me, but to remember her by because Vera Bogg was taking her away. Then I reach into my pocket and hand her the twenty dollars I got for my toolbox. “Here,” I say. “I was going to buy you a new necklace with this, but the museum was closed.”

Patsy takes the money without even saying thank you. Then she stuffs the silver chain, the sand, and the money into her back pocket. She steps over the clothes from the Heap and heads for the door.

“Wait,” I say, my arms reaching. “Please.”

And to my surprise, she turns around. For a second, I think she is going to hug me and promise me she’ll be back over tomorrow and we can have a staring contest, which she will definitely win. And things will be back to the way they were.

But there are no hugs or promises. Instead, she goes back inside my closet and takes her hair, the last proof that she was my best friend. On her way out of my room, Patsy gives me a look that says, I Won’t Forget About This.

I really hope that she does.

24.

The next morning, just after the sun comes up, Mom drives me to Grandpa Felix’s apartment. I cup Alfred in my hands and tell him he’ll be home soon.

Mom is quiet for most of the way, until we’re almost to Grandpa’s, when she says, “It’s not easy being you, is it?”

I shrug. “I don’t know how to be anybody else.”

She nods and gives me half of a smile. “I guess that’s true.”

“I think Patsy Cline thinks I’m weird,” I say.

“Why do you say that?”

I look at the people on the sidewalk, passing by our car window. People I don’t know and who don’t know me. “Because I’m not Vera Bogg.”

Mom says that she doesn’t know what that means or what a Vera Bogg is. I tell her that Vera Bogg isn’t a what, she’s a who. And Mom says, “The only who you need to worry about being is Penelope Crumb. And that should be good enough for anybody.”

But I don’t think that’s good enough for Patsy Cline.

Mom says, “You made some changes to my sketches. You didn’t think they were good enough?”

“They are good,” I tell her. “But your eyes were closed. I wanted to remember your eyes.”

Mom shakes her head and gives me a look that says, I Don’t Know What I’m Going to Do With You.

“What’s it like being you?” I ask.

She squints her eyes like she’s really giving her brains a workout and takes a while to come up with an answer. When she pulls up to the curb outside of Grandpa’s apartment, she says, “Challenging. Some of the time.” Then she strokes my hair. “But also pretty wonderful.”

“Maybe it’s not easy being anybody. Even dead people have the problem of being forgotten,” I say. “And also the problem of being dead.”

For a second, I think Mom is going to say a word I’m not supposed to hear because there I go again talking about dead things. But instead she just laughs a little and says, “You know what, Penelope? You’re probably right.”

I push open the car door. It’s not going to be easy with Grandpa Felix, that’s for sure.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?” Mom says.

I grip Alfred with both hands and shake my head. “I think I’ll be okay.”

She says, “I think so, too.”

I hug Alfred to my chest with one hand and knock on Grandpa’s door with the other. It takes four more knocks until I can hear his footsteps. Which means he’s been sleeping his life away again.

He opens the door, and I try to look him right in the eye, the way he’s always telling me to do. But it’s hard when you’ve done wrong. Grandpa Felix looks at me and then at Alfred.

He holds out his hand and I put Alfred in it. “You’ve got something to say, then?” he says.

I tell him I’m sorry for taking Alfred, awful sorry, and for getting his painters in trouble with the police.

“Were you aiming to sell it or something?” The lines in his face are deep, like made by a river a long time ago before it dried up and disappeared. “I didn’t think you of all people would ever do something like that, Penelope.”

I just about go dead right then and there. I try to explain about my museum, about holding on, but it doesn’t really matter, I guess, because in the end, I took something that didn’t belong to me.

“You can’t hold on to things that belong to someone else,” he says. “In some way or another, they always end up finding their way back to their owner.”

“Is that so?” I say. Because then maybe someday my toolbox will come back to me.

“I don’t know. It sounds good, doesn’t it?” He tells me to come inside and take a load off. Now that I don’t have my toolbox anymore, I don’t have a load to take off, but I go in anyway.

At first I think I’m in the wrong place. “What happened?” I say. “Your piles are gone!”

Grandpa Felix says, “Coffee?” And then when I say no, he says, “Smart girl.”

“Grandpa, where did everything go?”

He takes a sip from his mug. “I’ll tell you something. You might have done me a favor by taking Alfred, in a way. I tore up this place looking for it, and while I was doing that, I got to looking at all of my pictures. And I decided it was time to do something with them.” He goes over to his bookshelf and pulls out a stack of books. He brings them over to the table and opens the one on top.

“You put them in albums,” I say, turning the pages.

He says, “Now they have a proper place to live.”

“Forever.” The pictures are three to a page, and some I don’t remember seeing before. Most are of people I don’t know, or birds, or lizards, or flowers so close up, you can almost smell them.

There’s one picture that stands out from the others, and not because it’s prettier or anything like that. But because it’s different. This picture is of a tree. One that is brown, all the leaves gone. Its empty branches needle the sky as if to say, Doesn’t Anybody Care About Me?

“What’s this dead tree for?” I ask.

Grandpa leans in close and looks at the picture. He chews on his lip for a while, and finally when one of his brain wrinkles finds the answer, he says, “That tree isn’t dead, Penelope. Why do you always think everything is dead?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Sometimes they just are.”

“This tree is in a winter slumber.”

“Slumber?”

“It’s asleep,” he explains.

“Oh.”

He stares at the picture for a long time. “This was the tree in our backyard. I grew up with it. Used to climb to the top to hide from everyone. I’d spend hours up there reading comic books and taking pictures. It’s a strange thing to miss a tree.”

“But now you can look at it anytime you want,” I say.

He smiles, and the lines in his face aren’t so deep. “And I can remember.”

“Mayor Luckett’s eyeglasses!” I say, smacking my hand down on the album.

“What?”

“This! Your pictures!” I say.

“What about them?”

“They are just like Maynard C. Portwaller’s gray hair, and just like Mangy Teddy, and even the wedding pictures you take. They help you always remember, so you never forget.”

“Maybe so,” he says, rubbing the whiskers on his chin.

“It’s like your very own museum!” I say. Right then, I wish I had a picture of my toolbox. I tell Grandpa Felix this, but just when he says, “What happened to your toolbox?” I say, “Quick! Can I have a piece of paper and a pencil?”

While Grandpa looks for them, I close my eyes and picture my toolbox, its creaky handle and rusty corners. He takes forever to find some. I can hear him shuffling around the room and saying, “Paper. Hmmm. Paper. Envelopes? Nope. Paper. Hmmm. Paper. Where would I have some paper?” After a long time, he says, “There you are.” And I open my eyes.

I take the picture of my toolbox that I have in my brain and draw it on the paper, remembering all the chipped red paint parts. It may not be the same as having the toolbox in my hands, but at least now I know I won’t forget about it.

Mister Leonardo da Vinci would surely approve.

I show the picture to Grandpa Felix and explain about selling my dad’s toolbox. Before the toolbox was my dad’s, though, it belonged to Grandpa Felix, and I worry that he’s going to miss it as much as me. But all he says is “humph” and nothing else. Then he gets up from the table, pulls another album from his bookshelf, and drops it in my lap.

I turn to the first page, but it’s blank. No pictures.

“For you,” he says, tapping the album with his knuckles. “Your own museum.”

I throw my arms around his neck. His whiskers scrape my cheek. I whisper in his ear, “Thank you, Grandpa.”

He pats me on the back and clears his throat. “Now you can go ahead and put your toolbox drawing in there. And anything else you want to remember, I guess.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the picture of my dad that was taped inside my toolbox. I slide it into the album and say, “Here’s a nice new home for you, Daddy.”

My brain wrinkles are busy thinking about what pictures and drawings I can put in my new museum. So I’ll always remember and never forget. And one brain wrinkle must shout out, “Patsy Cline,” because right away I think of her and how she took herself out of my museum.

And then I get another piece of paper from Grandpa and start a new drawing. So I can put her back.