The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. (8 page)

CHAPTER 8

T
he front door slams shut as I’m walking downstairs, and the door to Dad’s prep room is open again so I step inside.

“Gianna?” He raises his eyebrows and looks up at me, still in my track clothes. I usually go right up to change and do homework, so I don’t see him until dinner.

“I really need to talk to you.” I follow him into the room where he does the embalming. He stops and turns to face me, arms crossed over his chest. There’s a body under a sheet on the table behind him. Dad doesn’t like anyone in the room when he’s working, except Roger, who works for us and helps him sometimes.

“It’s important.” I cross my arms too. “It’s Nonna.”

Dad’s hands drop to his side like he’s deflating. He nods, and right away I can tell that he knows. “I do need to keep working,” he says, lifting a makeup case from the shelf, “but you can stay. Talk to me while I work.” He folds back the top of the sheet, and I see a chubby-faced woman with white hair, each of her eyes held closed with an eye cap so they don’t pop open when her relatives come to see her tomorrow. I can tell she was pretty, even though Dad hasn’t put any makeup on her yet.

“I’m not embalming her because the calling hours are happening so soon—tomorrow,” he says, opening a jar of moisturizer and dabbing some on her cheeks. It makes it easier for him to put on makeup. “So you don’t need to worry about the chemicals.”

The embalming chemicals make my eyes sting. The makeup, though, is just like regular makeup, except it’s a special kind, made for dead people.

“Find me a darker one of these.” Dad holds up a small bottle of foundation.

“I guess you didn’t hear the smoke detector go off today.” I hand him a jar that’s a little darker, but he shakes his head. I look for more. “Nonna was making cookies.”

“For Mrs. Kinsella’s family?” He nods at the woman on the table.

Mrs. Kinsella. Ruby Kinsella’s grandmother. She looks like the kind of woman who was probably baking cookies this morning, too. Things sure can change fast.

“So she burned them?” Dad takes the case from me, since I’m not offering much help. He chooses a darker jar of foundation and rubs some on Mrs. Kinsella’s chin.

“She didn’t just burn them. She
burned
them. Then she left them in the oven, and when the smoke detector went off, she got mad that it wouldn’t stop and took out the batteries.”

Dad twists the cap onto the foundation and turns to me. “She took out the batteries?”

“Yes.”

“And then got the cookies out of the oven?”

“No.”

He sighs. “You found them after school?”

“I walked into this huge smoke cloud, Dad. Worse than the day you started that fire in the fireplace without opening the thing that lets the smoke out the chimney.”

“The flue,” says Mom. She’s been standing in the doorway for a while. I can tell because she has the same serious expression as Dad.

Mom’s heels click across the floor as she walks over to the prep table. She picks a dark pink shade of blush from the makeup case. “Try this one.”

“It’s kind of dark,” Dad says.

“Look at the picture.” Mom hands Dad a photograph of Ruby standing next to her grandmother at our fifth-grade graduation two years ago. Her grandmother has on as much makeup as a movie star.

“Strawberry bronze shimmer it is,” says Dad.

“Gianna, I know Nonna’s been acting differently lately. I see it too.” Mom starts poking through the lipsticks, taking off the caps and holding them up to the light. “But you have to realize that misplacing things and forgetting things are part of getting older. Just the other day, I left my laptop in the kitchen and looked everywhere before I remembered.”

I stare at Mom while she checks out another lipstick shade. Is she kidding? A laptop in the kitchen is a thousand miles from dentures in the apple drawer. And a million miles from ignoring an oven full of cookies practically on fire and turning off the smoke detector. Dad knows. He stops working on Mrs. Kinsella, takes the lipstick from Mom, and puts his arm around her shoulders.

“Angela, you have to admit your mother has been more distant lately. Gianna says she really was lost at the market. Maybe it’s worth a trip to the doctor, just to run some tests and make sure everything’s okay. He might even be able to give her something to help.”

Mom wiggles away. She’s never been very cuddly. She purses her lips. “I think a checkup is always a good idea, so of course, I’ll schedule one. But I’m sure it’s nothing.” She clicks across the room, out the door, and up the stairs, where the kitchen door thumps shut like a period at the end of a sentence.

CHAPTER 9

T
uesdays are always crummy days. They’re too close to Monday and nothing good ever happens. There’s no school today because of a teacher workshop, but it’s still a Tuesday.

When I climb down the ladder from my loft, I step on the to-do list I taped on the ladder last night. Part of Mom’s time management lessons. She says I waste too much time. Here’s what’s on my list:

1. Get up.

2. Brush teeth.

3. Eat Cheerios.

4. Help Nonna make more cookies.

5. Find twelve more leaves.

6. Write “Birches” poetry response journal entry.

7. Run.

8. Shower.

9. Ruby’s grandmother’s wake.

That last one isn’t on my list because I’m likely to forget. I was up half the night thinking about it. It’s there because I feel like I need time to get myself ready.

It’s weird. I’m in a funeral home all the time. I live upstairs. I go with Nonna to wakes. Heck, I eat wedding cookies with dead people almost every weekend.

But this is different. Ruby will be there with her mom. I know how important her grandmother was to her. I know how important mine is to me, and I can’t stop imagining what it will be like to lose her.

Nonna is singing “That’s Amore” in the kitchen already, and her mixing bowls and cookie tins are clunking and clanging. Looks like I’m going to have to skip straight to number four.

“Morning.” I yawn and shuffle down the stairs. I’ve pulled on some old jeans, and I’m still wearing the shirt I slept in— an oversize tee from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a Jackson Pollock painting on the front. Modern art is perfect for baking. No matter how much batter drips on it, no one notices.

“Shall we bake?” Nonna looks a million times better. I can tell she slept well. Her eyes sparkle and her cheeks are pink. She’s even wearing a little lipstick. I try not to think of Ruby’s grandma and her lipstick downstairs.

Nonna has already sifted the flour, which is fine with me because I can’t do it without making a huge mess, and Mom goes crazy when I track flour all over the house on my socks. Ian has plastic baggies over both hands, getting ready to grease the cookie sheets. He’s wiggling his loose front tooth with his tongue while he rubs a pat of butter between his hands.

“Hey, Gianna! Wanna hear a riddle?”

“No.” I pick up a measuring cup and start packing in butter with a rubber spatula.

“Okay, ready? What did the tooth fairy say when she had to testify in court?”

“I don’t know.” I pack in some more butter. “What?”

“She promised to tell the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth!”

Nonna laughs. “Clever boy.” She kisses him on top of his head.

“So, Gianna . . . you’re going to the wake today,” Nonna says, turning to me. I can’t tell if it’s an invitation or an order. She puts a warm hand on my elbow and moves me aside so she can preheat the oven.

“Yeah, I’m going to stop in.” I try to sound casual. Maybe it won’t feel like such a big deal then. The cup’s full, so I scoop out the butter with the spatula. It lands in the bowl with a plop and makes a little poof of flour.

“Cool!” Ian grabs another full stick of butter from the counter and drops it from way overhead so a giant white cloud flies up from the bowl.

“Okay, that’s enough help from my big boy.” Nonna sends Ian off with another kiss.

“Your friend is going to need you at that wake today.” She uses a fork to fish the extra butter out of the mixing bowl. “It’s going to be a tough day for her.”

“She’s not really that close a friend.” I start to tell Nonna that I really just know Ruby from science class, but she fixes me with a glare that shuts my mouth before anything else gets out.

“Gianna Zales. Growing up in this house, you’ve seen enough of life and death to know that everyone needs a friend on a day like Ruby is about to have. You be that friend today. And tomorrow, too.”

She stirs the cookie dough more briskly than she really needs to. I’ve upset her.

Part of me just wants to breeze downstairs later, drop off the cookies, and keep walking right out the front door. But I won’t. Because Nonna’s right.

I put on a mitt and open the oven door so Nonna can slide in the cookie sheet. A blast of heat hits me in the face and makes my eyes tear up.

When the cookies are safely out of the oven and sprinkled with powdered sugar, my favorite ingredient, Mom comes to help clean up, and I decide it’s okay for me to go out to pick up leaves. Nonna hunches over the kitchen sink, scrubbing the mixing bowl and lecturing Mom about a better way to store her bakeware. If Nonna went away from earth a while, like it said in that poem, she sure is back now.

I step outside but need to go back for a sweatshirt. The air has that chilly, damp, going-to-rain-any-minute feel to it. The leaves in the neighbors’ yards are whipping around in the wind. I better collect fast.

I dip down to pick up a leaf blowing by, but it’s another oak. I shove it in my pocket anyway, along with a sugar maple that scratches across the sidewalk. How come the guy who planned this neighborhood didn’t include a better variety of trees? Everybody has a maple and a few little shrubs in the front yard and oaks and cedars in back. I’ll never get twenty-five at this rate.

I pause at a crosswalk, and a Green Mountain Leaf Peepers tour bus stops to let me cross the street. A row of people Nonna’s age smile down at me from the tinted windows, and a couple wave. I wave back, but I bet they wouldn’t be so happy about Vermont leaves if they had to collect, identify, and label every single one they saw.

I wander down the street to the neighborhood with all the big new houses along the river. Maybe they have different trees. Mr. Randolph, our school principal, lives there, and in his backyard, I finally spot a tree that’s different from the ones I already have. It’s a squatty little thing with funny, fan-shaped leaves. It will be easy to identify since it’s so unusual.

I look around. It’s too windy for anyone else to be out walking. The fence isn’t very tall. It’s not the kind of fence you build if you’re serious about keeping people out, I decide. In fact, it’s the kind of fence you put up to make your yard look pretty and inviting, when you actually don’t mind if people come in at all.

But Mr. Randolph isn’t exactly a friendly neighbor. He has the meanest face I’ve ever seen, like he just ate something rotten and can’t get it out of his teeth. He’s so tall he has to duck down when he walks through the doorway to his office at school, and then he looks all hunched over at his desk. Kids leave that office crying all the time.

Those fan-shaped leaves are calling me, though.

I check the driveway. No cars. And no lights on in the house. I find a foothold and pull myself up to sit on the fence. I perch there for a minute, waiting for the dog. I don’t actually know if he has a dog, but it’s been my experience that if a vicious dog is going to show up, it shows up when you’re trapped somewhere, like inside a fence you’ve just jumped. There’s no barking, so I drop to the other side.

It’s the coolest backyard I’ve ever seen, and not just because of the funky fan-leafed tree. Exotic-looking shrubs decorate all the corners, and some bright fuchsia flowers are still blooming next to the pumpkin vines along the fence, even though we’ve had three nights of frost.

I grab a few leaves from the short tree—it’s nice to be able to reach them, for once—and then notice another tree whose leaves I don’t have yet. This one towers over the yard—a Mr. Randolph tree. It has feathery leaves with a whole bunch on each stem. I think Mrs. Loring’s leaf key calls it a compound leaf. Whatever it is, it would look great in my collection.

There’s just one problem. The lowest branch is at least eight feet off the ground. On my very tallest day, I’m five four. I look around to see if there’s anything I can stand on. There’s a little rocking chair out on the patio. It’s not very big, but it would probably give me enough of a boost that I could grab onto the branch and pull myself up.

I jog over, pick up the rocking chair, and settle it under the lowest part of the tree. Carefully, I step up and wait to catch my balance. I can’t quite reach, but I decide it’s jumpable. I bend my knees, shaking when the chair wobbles, and spring up into the air.

I grab onto the branch and dig my fingertips into the scratchy bark on top. My body is sort of swaying back and forth from my jump, and my sneakers are dangling above the seat of the rocking chair. It occurs to me that jumping back onto a rocking chair will be a lot harder than jumping off it. Why do I always think of these things too late?