The Center of Everything (4 page)

The car with Uncle David and the town manager is followed by Grannies for Groceries, who have joined the Soup's On Food Co-op in their shopping cart brigade. The third cart on the left is being pushed by Mitzie Oliver, who is wondering why it is—even in a parade—that she always chooses a cart with a back wheel that won't turn.

Behind them is a trailer on which are seated the seventeen members of Bunning's Sweet Adelines. They are singing “Blackbird,” a song by the Beatles, which Ruby knows because Gigi was a Sweet Adeline and Ruby used to go with her to some of the practices. Because of the Adelines, Ruby knows a lot of songs that most kids her age don't, like “Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” and this “Blackbird” song, which the ladies call one of their modern numbers even though it is older than Ruby by about thirty years.

At the back of the trailer stands Mrs. Halloway, who volunteers in the hospital gift shop. She braces her broad belly against a safety rail at the edge of the trailer so that as she sings, she is free to form the words with her hands, making signs she taught herself using the YouSign website. Ruby has watched Mrs. Halloway practice this song so many times that she could sign it too, if she wanted. She could make the sign for
g
and put it by her mouth, opening and closing her fingers like a beak. That's
bird.
Or arc one hand down over the other. That's
night.

Ruby's favorite part is when the Adelines sing about the bird flying away. Mrs. Halloway makes the love sign with her right hand and then pushes it up and away into the air, sort of like an airplane.

Sometimes, when Ruby went to visit Gigi in the hospital, she would see Mrs. Halloway at the gift shop. The adults would want to talk about something private, and they'd send Ruby down to the shop with a ten-dollar bill and a list of sodas to buy. Ruby would look around the shop at the get-well-soon stuffed animals and the racks of crossword puzzles and magazines. Because it was December, there were lots of Santas and snowmen and plush red Christmas stockings, too, and a huge box of candy canes marked fifty percent off. There was a wind-up penguin that waddled in a circle, and every time she visited the shop, Ruby wound him up and watched him waddle until he fell over. Then she'd get the sodas and take them to the register.

The Pepperdines didn't want anyone but family seeing Gigi the way she was. Not friends, not co-workers, not even Lucy. So on the days Mrs. Halloway was at the gift shop, she would ask about Gigi, and Ruby would say what she knew she was supposed to say: that Gigi was having a good day or a bad day. That was all.

Ruby did not say that Gigi sometimes woke up with her eyes wild, demanding a pencil, babbling about how she understood and get the pencil get the pencil get the pencil NOW. How once she had the pencil, she would tell everyone to shut up and she would scribble out the shapes that made no sense to anyone else and say, “Don't you see? Don't you see?” And how Ruby would want to see, but how Mom or Uncle David or someone would say, “It's okay, Gigi. It's the medicine you're on. It's just the medicine messing with your head,” while someone else would dash to the nurses' station, and pretty soon a nurse would come and give Gigi something that would make her sleep again.

Ruby knew she wasn't supposed to say that. Good day. Bad day. That was all.

Once, on a bad day, Mrs. Halloway had come around from behind the counter to give Ruby a hug. She had a rolling sort of walk that was a lot like the wind-up penguin's, except slower, and each step seemed to take a great deal of planning as well as effort. But today, standing on the back of the Adelines' trailer, Mrs. Halloway looks nothing like a penguin. She stands solid and steady and graceful.

A good day for Mrs. Halloway.

Ruby waves as the Adelines pass, but Mrs. Halloway doesn't seem to recognize her outside the hospital or without Gigi beside her. Her hands are too busy to wave back, anyway. They are making that love sign again. They are pushing away from Mrs. Halloway's chest. They are aiming up toward the sky.

“May I have your attention, please?” Lucy calls as she steps up onto the lunchroom seat next to Ruby's. She pulls a shiny red kazoo from her pocket and blows a loud, buzzy fanfare. The noisy lunchroom is suddenly quiet.

“Today, May twenty-first,” Lucy says in her best stage voice, “is the twelfth birthday of my best friend, Ruby G. Pepperdine.” With a flourish, McKenzie Monk pulls a candle from her lunch bag and pushes it deep into Ruby's grilled cheese sandwich. A lunch monitor appears with a book of matches to light it.

Ruby is amazed. “You're crazy,” she says to Lucy. For Lucy's birthday last summer, Gigi had taken them both to the movies. There is no way Ruby would have stood up in the theater and kazooed about it.

Lucy grins, then puts on an old-time schoolmarm voice and shushes Ruby with convincing seriousness.

“If you would all please join me in singing ‘Happy Birthday'!” She kazoos another note, and just like that, the entire lunchroom is singing—even the cool kids, even the fourth grade boys, even Nero and the kids who don't know Ruby well—all of them are singing “Happy Birthday” and calling her Dear Ruby, and for as long as the song takes, Ruby and Lucy are the center of attention. Then the song ends and Lucy hops down off the seat and the rest of the school goes back to eating or talking or whatever it was they were doing before.

“Ta-daaaaaa!” Lucy sings.

Ruby laughs and blows out her birthday candle. “That was brilliant,” she says. “We're going to have to add ‘Master Kazoodler' to your résumé before your next audition.”

“Do not mock my talent,” says Lucy, tucking the kazoo back into her pocket.

“I'm your future agent. I would never mock you.”

“Good. Now the important stuff.” Lucy leans in conspiratorially. “What did you wish for?”

Oh, no. She forgot to wish. “All the singing and kazooing and the surprise.” Ruby shakes her head. “I can't believe I missed my wish.”

Lucy plucks the candle from Ruby's sandwich and licks the melted cheese off it. “It's okay, Rube. You can wish on your birthday cake tonight, right?”

“My dad has a big sales meeting,” Ruby says. “We celebrated this morning with birthday donuts.”

It had been nice, the three of them sitting down to breakfast together. They had all turned off their phones and eaten donuts, and her parents had kissed her and given her a Katherine Paterson book as a gift. They had said happy birthday and even driven her to school instead of making her wait at the bus stop. But there had not been any candles on her donuts, and she had not made a wish.

And this year, for the first time in twelve years, Ruby had something really important to wish for. Not that her hair would turn curly or that she'd get a new bike or that she'd be better at soccer, but something really, truly important. Something she hasn't stopped thinking about since she saw Nero's color wheel last week. And now she has missed her chance.

“There's always Captain Bunning,” says a voice from another table. It is Nero DeNiro.

“Geez, Nero. Eavesdrop much?” Lucy rolls her eyes.

“Once a person kazoos in the lunchroom, she's lost her right to privacy,” Nero says. “It's the fate of all celebrities.”

Ruby can tell that Lucy would like to stay irritated at him, but she's too flattered by being called a celebrity.

“You
could
try Captain Bunning,” Lucy whispers, once Nero turns back to talking with the boys at his table.

Lucy means the statue in town. She means Ruby can try tossing a quarter and wishing, like that old town legend says. But after school Ruby is supposed to go to Okeda Martial Arts to help Lucy dust and vacuum the lobby (Mr. Fisch has promised to give them five dollars for their trouble), and after that she has to go straight home for dinner with her mom. Besides, she doesn't have a quarter.

Six hours later, however, when Mr. Fisch compliments her dusting and pays Ruby two crisp dollar bills and two round quarters, Lucy cannot help but see that one of those quarters is from their birth year.

“It's fate,” Lucy says, hand to her heart. “You are destined to have your wish!”

“You are destined to be a goofball,” jokes Ruby, but when she gets a text from her mom saying,
Pick u up?
she texts back,
Walking home.
The statue of Captain Bunning is not exactly on the way, but it isn't too far out of the way either.

Ruby walks fast.

She holds the quarter in her hand.

She whispers her wish.

She whispers her wish ninety times—exactly like she is supposed to.

Ruby doesn't have a ton of regrets. Most of the ones she does have are pretty standard fare. She regrets calling Lucy a turnip once when they were joking around. Some of the other girls overheard and started calling her “Turnip” too. Lucy had gotten crazy mad and didn't talk to Ruby for three days. When she finally cooled down, they both said they were sorry and that was that, but Ruby still regrets saying it in the first place.

What Ruby Pepperdine most regrets, though, is something she cannot say sorry about.

What Ruby Pepperdine most regrets is that she didn't listen.

She didn't listen to Gigi.

Gigi, who would pause a movie right in the middle to explain about history or geography or old-time sayings so that Ruby wouldn't miss anything. Who had taken her to sing with the Adelines and meet with the city council and stare at the stars with the Night Owls. Who had taught her about zoning laws and four-part harmony and the orbit of the planets. Ruby had listened to everything Gigi had ever said to her—even about black holes and dark matter and things so big she could not understand them.

But on that one day, Ruby did not listen.

Gigi had two weeks, the doctor had said. Two months if they were lucky. There was nothing more the hospital could do. So Gigi came to Ruby's house to die.

Dad put a hospital bed in the living room for her, but Gigi wouldn't lie down in it so they wheeled an oxygen tank over to the recliner. They let her stay in the chair, let her doze as she wanted, while the aunts and uncles took turns watching her.

 

Aunt Lois had taken the overnight shift and gone home. Dad had kissed Gigi on the cheek and took off for Pepperdine Motors—“Somebody's got to hold down the fort.” It was Mom's turn to be with Gigi. “I'm just going to jump in the shower, Ruby,” she said. “I'll be out in five minutes and then you can go to the bus stop.”

Ruby had looked over at her grandmother. She was asleep in her chair, her oxygen tank humming beside her. “Okay,” Ruby said.

For a minute or two she sat at the kitchen table and looked at the person in the chair. The person was Gigi, but that was almost as hard to believe as it was to believe in dark matter. Gigi had hair long enough to braid and strong hands that always seemed to be holding something—a wrench or a pencil or a telescope or Ruby's hand.

This person in the chair wore a knit cap over a bald, veined head. Her hands were open and empty, one on the arm of the chair, the other turned up in her lap, like she was waiting for something to drop into it.

Ruby pulled
Concepts in Mathematics
out of her backpack and opened it to last night's homework. Circumference: the distance around. Diameter: cutting across. Radius: the halfway point, poking from the center to the edge.

“Listen.”

The person in the chair—Gigi—was awake. Her hand was extended, her eyes wild. “Listen,” she said.

Ruby didn't move. “Mom will be right back. She's taking a—”

Gigi pushed against the arms of the chair, struggled to stand up.

“No.” Ruby rushed over just like she had seen her mom and dad and aunts and uncles do. Gigi was trying to say something wild and confusing, like at the hospital. “It's the medicine,” Ruby said, just like she had heard her parents say. Just like she was supposed to say. “It gives you the dreams. It makes you—”

The bony hand smacked the arm of the chair once. Twice. “Listen.” The voice was wilder, louder. “It's all coming together.” In between the words there was a gasping sound —“It's all (
gasp
) coming (
gasp
)—”

Ruby kept saying the things that she had heard her family say. “It's the medicine. It's not real. It's nothing to worry about. It's not—”

“Listen,” gasped the voice.

And then Mom was there, stepping in front of Ruby and kneeling at Gigi's feet, holding her hand.

“No,” Ruby said again. That's when Mom turned to her. “Ruby, go to your bus stop. Go to school. I'll take care of this.”

Ruby remembers walking backwards to the kitchen. Seeing Gigi slump back in her chair. Her eyes were still open, but they had lost their wild look. They just looked tired now. Right away Ruby knew something was wrong—that she had done the wrong thing. She remembers wanting to go back to the recliner, to apologize, to listen to whatever it was that Gigi had wanted to tell her.

But Mom had said to go to the bus stop, and so Ruby did. She gathered her homework and put it in her backpack. She put on her boots and her coat and her mittens and her hat, and she went to the bus stop, just like she was supposed to do. She went to school, and she did what she was supposed to do there, too, though all the while she could not help thinking that when she got home she'd try again. She'd ask Gigi what it was she wanted to say. She would listen.

 

They could have called her at school to tell her, but they didn't. They let her come home on the bus. All those cars in the driveway.
PEPPERDINE MOTORS, PEPPERDINE MOTORS, PEPPERDINE MOTORS
on every plate. Nobody had to tell her what had happened. Ruby figured it out.