The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. (10 page)

“Is that a journal?” I ask her.

“It’s just stuff I write. Poems and stuff.” I want to ask more, but her hair falls over her eyes like a curtain over a window and she doesn’t look back at me. She reaches the end of a line in the notebook and twirls her pencil in her fingers.

“I guess you’ve already spent a lot of time at the casket, huh?” Ellen says.

Ruby looks up from her notebook with shiny eyes and shakes her head.

“I can’t,” she says, looking down and flipping through the pages. They’re almost all full. “I keep remembering her at lunch yesterday, standing up with her bowl and then dropping it and falling on the floor. It was so loud and awful. I see it over and over in my head. Mom on top of her doing CPR and those rescue guys with the shock paddles.” She closes her notebook. “I don’t want to see any more.”

I take her hand because that’s what Nonna always does, and I think about the woman I just saw, laid out in the casket. There’s nothing chaotic or scary about her. She’s wearing her blue-and-white daisy dress with her gold hoop earrings. Her eyes are closed, and her face is relaxed and peaceful. Her cheeks are rosy, and it doesn’t look like strawberry bronze shimmer blush. It looks like she had a good life, and she’s off somewhere, dreaming about it now.

And then I know what to say.

“Ruby, your grandma wouldn’t want you to remember yesterday morning. That’s not what she was all about.” She sniffles and nods, so I keep going. “You and your mom are hurting right now, but she’s not. She’s someplace else— someplace good and quiet and peaceful. You should—I mean—I think you need to—I think it might help you to see her now.”

“I don’t know.” She bends down to pick up Warren’s dump truck and spins the front wheels.

“My dad made her look really pretty, just like in the picture at our fifth-grade graduation.”

“You saw that?” Ruby looks up at me. I nod. “That was one of my favorite days with her ever. She told me how proud she was, and we went for chocolate chip ice cream at Nelligan’s Dairy.”

“She’d be proud of you today too,” Ellen says quietly.

Ruby glances over at the casket, puts down her notebook, and takes a deep breath. “Will you come with me?”

I take one of Ruby’s hands. Ellen takes the other, and we walk to the casket. At first, Ruby just stares at her grandmother in the big oak box, and I think I might have made a mistake. But then she kneels down. I start to kneel too, but she puts up her hand. Ellen and I step back.

Across the room, Ellen’s mom says something that makes Ruby’s mom laugh a little. Nonna offers Mrs. Kinsella a cookie. She takes it.

Behind me, I hear Ruby’s voice.

“Hi, Grandma . . . It’s me.”

CHAPTER 11

M
om’s waiting at the counter with her purse over her shoulder when Nonna and I come back upstairs with our empty cookie plate.

“Where have you been?”

“We were downstairs,” I start to explain.

“I know where you were.”

Then why did she ask? I start to argue, but Nonna pokes a pointy, eighty-three-year-old elbow into my ribs, so I shut up. Mom sighs.

“I told you we were going to go to Crafty Cats to get supplies for your leaf project this afternoon. I only have an hour now because I need to be back to help Dad wrap things up downstairs, and we can’t go tomorrow because I have a Junior League meeting, so after school, you and Dad need to run Nonna to the doctor for her
checkup
.” She emphasizes the word “checkup,” daring us to suggest it’s anything else.

“Tomorrow already?” Nonna puts down the cookie platter. Ian swoops into the room and licks his finger to pick up the crumbs left on the plate.

“Yes, well, he had a cancellation and I figured the sooner the better.” Mom fishes car keys out of her purse. “Let’s go.”

“Just let me change.” I pull my arms out of her sweater and drape it over the railing on my way upstairs. Two minutes later, I’m in jeans and my Picasso T-shirt. It’s a little wrinkled from being scrunched up on my closet floor, but it’s still clean. Mom frowns at it.

“Why can’t you wear something where the people’s noses are in the right place?”

I look at Nonna for help. She raises her eyebrows and looks up at the ceiling. I grab my backpack and follow Mom and Ian to the car.

“Hold this, please. I’ll tell jokes on the way.” Ian hands me
The Giant Book of Riddles
while he gets buckled in. Ian is a spiny cocklebur plant—the kind with the seeds that grab you with those sharp little barbs and never give up. Thank God it’s only a ten-minute ride.

“Now,” Mom says, twisting around to look behind her as she backs out of the driveway, “I found your leaf collection planning worksheet in the Garbage Pit when I was picking up your room. You got glue all over it so it was stuck to your math quiz.”

“Did you sign the math quiz?”

“No. Why would I sign the math quiz?”

“I was supposed to have you sign it last week.”

“What did the boy ghost say to the girl ghost?” Ian starts laughing before I can guess.

“I don’t know, what?”

“You’re BOO-tiful.”

“I’ll sign it when we get home. It’s stacked on your desk now with your other school papers. I threw out those shredded-up magazines.”

“You threw out my collage stuff?”

“And what is all that paint splattered on the wall?”

“What wall?”

“The wall behind the mountain of stuffed animals.”

“Oh . . . they were sort of supposed to stay there.”

“Gianna, you need to take some responsibility. Life isn’t a big joke.”

“Okay, here’s one,” Ian says. “Why can’t you go hungry at the beach?”

“Ian, please.” Mom flips on her turn signal. “Gianna, that leaf collection planning worksheet—you’ve read it, right?”

“Because of all the sand which is there!” Ian laughs hysterically.

“I think I read it.”

“Get it? All the sand which is there?”

“Ian, please.” He closes his book and looks out the window.

“I collected leaves this morning,” I offer.

“How many?”

“Four more. I’m up to seventeen now.”

“How many brave guys named Ian does it take to change a lightbulb?” Ian asks.

“I don’t know, one?”

“Gianna, we’re having a conversation about your leaf project here. You’re way behind.”

“I have leaves. I just need to find a few more and get them all together.”

“Nope, that’s not the answer. Guess again.” Ian ignores Mom’s warning look in the mirror and reaches across the backseat to poke my arm. “Come on, Gee. How many brave guys named Ian does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Ian, please.”

“None! Because brave guys like me aren’t afraid of the dark!”

I groan.

“Enough!”
Mom’s glare is about to burn a hole in the rearview mirror.

“I made that one up, you know,” Ian says quietly, and opens his book again.

“So, Gianna, you know you need to have twenty-five leaves for Thursday?”

“Yes.”

“And you know they all have to be different kinds?”

“Yeah. Mom, for once, I’m on track with this. Let it go, would you?”

“And you know they all have to be identified with annotated note cards, sources, and information about geographic distribution of the species?”

Say what?

The shell-shocked look on my face tells Mom-in-the-mirror two things. One: I didn’t know that, thanks very much. And two: the leaves are not identified, much less annotated or notated or any other kind of tated. I always miss the fine print.

“Gianna.” She sighs and zips into a parking spot close to the door of Crafty Cats. “You really need to get yourself organized. It’s so easy to make lists and keep things sorted out.”

Easy for you
, I think as the automatic doors slide open. The potpourri section is right by the door, so coming in here is like walking into a giant flower garden. Mom’s eyes are watering. She hates it, but I love it. I bought a big bag of potpourri once and used all the dried petals and buds to make a mosaic of a little girl in a garden. Nonna has it on her closet door because it makes her clothes smell good.

I stop to smell a bag of potpourri and have to run to catch Mom, who has taken a cart, loaded Ian into it so he won’t grab everything, and hustled past needlepoint and embroidery by the time I catch up. She pauses next to the scrap-booking aisle.

“This may have what we need.”

What “we” need turns out to be a sturdy binder with acid-free paper, plastic sleeves to protect the acid-free paper, little stickers to decorate the pages, index cards for labeling, and an assortment of cut-out leaves and tree stencils for decorating the cover. Mom’s excited.

“It’s going to look so neat and polished!” She grabs another pack of leaf stickers for good measure. Ian snatches some Star Wars stickers and slips them into the cart while she’s not looking.

We hustle past bags of Halloween cobwebs, Thanksgiving turkey decorations, and in the next aisle, artificial Christmas trees waiting for their turn in the front of the store.

I want to check out the good paintbrushes because I’d love to get a fan brush for my acrylics, but Mom keeps looking at her watch, so I don’t bother asking. I help her unload the cart. The cashier scans our binder and stickers and sleeves, beeping and beeping, and filling the bags. I laugh, remembering what Mrs. Loring said about the leaf project when she first assigned it.

“This doesn’t need to be a fancy or expensive project. Leaves, after all, are free!”

The last set of leaf stickers goes through, and the register beeps out a grand total.

Here’s a riddle for you. How much does a free leaf project cost when Mom decides to take charge?

Forty-eight dollars and nineteen cents.

CHAPTER 12

N
ow that I’m well supplied, I might as well get started.

I toss the Crafty Cats bag onto my desk and start picking up sweatshirts and wind pants off my bedroom floor so I can find my bag of leaves. It was under here somewhere.

Except it’s not.

I move Miranda and the other animals to a new corner, in case they were all ganged up, sitting on my leaves. They weren’t.

“Hey, Nonna?” I call.

“What is it?” she hollers up from the kitchen.

“Have you seen my bag of leaves?”

“What?”

“Have you seen my bag of leaves?” I shout.

“Your gasoline?”

“Bag of leaves!”

“Oh.” Long pause. “I think there are some in the living room.”

The living room? I don’t remember putting them there, but okay. Nonna pads up the stairs in her slippers.

“Here you go.” She drops an armload of
Good Housekeeping
s on my desk. Magazines.

No bag of leaves.

“Thanks, Nonna.” I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s the wrong thing, so I tuck them into a drawer for a collage later on, and I head downstairs.

“Mom?”

“Mmm?” She doesn’t look up from her Sudoku. Dad’s leaning over her shoulder, pointing to one of her little number boxes.

“Have you seen a bag of leaves around?” I ask.

“No!”

“You haven’t?”

“The nine can’t go there! There’s already a nine in this column, and I can’t move it because of this four.” She looks up at me. “What did you say?”

I might as well move on to Dad. “Have you seen my bag of leaves?”

“Leaves?”

Is there something strange about the way I say “leaves”?

“Yes, leaves.”

“Were they in a ShopRite bag?”

“Yes!” Finally, a spark of light.

“One of the medium-sized plastic ones?”

“Yes, where are they?”

“Well, we found them in the back of the hearse when we were unloading Mr. Disilvio.” He looks up from his paper. “They were moldy, and I figured they were just extras. Did you need them?”

“Yes, I need them! Where
are
they?”

“I threw them in the garbage.”

I run out to the garage in my socks, pull the garbage bag out of the can, and tear it open. I yank out two empty cereal boxes, a bunch of funeral home junk mail, casket brochures and ads for hearse replacement parts, cucumber and carrot peels, toss it all behind me, and paw through what’s left in the bag.

No leaf bag.