The Schwa was Here (25 page)

Then the Schwa goes into his room, closes the door, and goes through the letters one by one. Some have return addresses, some don’t, but it doesn’t matter because the return address is never the same. It’s the postmark that tells the best story. Fifty letters at least . . . and almost every postmark is from a different state
.

The Schwa came to school on Monday with the shoe box of letters. He showed it to me as I stood at my locker before class, but I couldn’t read his emotions. He seemed changed in a basic way. You know—it’s like how when an egg is boiled it looks the same on the outside, but it’s different on the inside. I didn’t know what I was looking at now—Schwa, or hard-boiled Schwa.

“Can I read the letters?” I asked.

He held them back. “They were written to me.”

“Well, will you at least tell me what she said?”

He thought about the question and shrugged, without looking at me. “Mostly she writes about the places she’s been. ‘Wish you were here’ kind of stuff.”

“But . . . did she say why she did it? Why she left?”

The Schwa did that weird not-looking-at-me shrug again. “She talked about it in her early letters. Said she was sorry a lot, and that it had nothing to do with me.” But he didn’t explain
any further. Then he held out an envelope. “This is the most recent one. It’s about six months old.” I looked at it. The envelope had no return address. “It’s from Key West, Florida—see the postmark?”

I tried to peek at the letter, but he pulled it away from me. “I’m going to write back.”

“How can you without an address?”

The Schwa shrugged yet again. “Key West isn’t all that big. Maybe the post office knows her. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll find her some other way.”

I could have argued how unlikely that was, but who was I to shoot down his dream? If he was able to get himself a paper clip from the
Titanic
, and get his face slapped up on a billboard, maybe he could find his mother. The Schwa was tenacious—a word that I, for once, got right on my vocabulary test.

He took a long look at the handwriting on the letter. “Someday I want to tell her to her face what a lousy thing she did. And I want her to tell me to
my
face that she’s sorry.”

I closed my locker and spun the lock. “Good luck, Schwa. I really hope you find her.” But when I looked at where he was standing, he had already vanished.

When I got home that afternoon, the house was empty. Or so I thought. I passed by my father twice in the living room without even noticing he was there. On the third pass, I noticed him sitting in an armchair, blending into the shadows of the room, staring kind of blankly into space.

“Dad?”

“Hi, Antsy,” he said quietly.

“You’re home early.”

He didn’t answer for a while. “Yeah, well, thought I’d take some time off.”

There was something off about this. “Work okay?” I asked. “Are you building a better Bullpucky? Manny, I mean.”

“Work couldn’t be better,” he said. “I got fired today.”

I chuckled at first, thinking he was making some kind of joke, but he didn’t laugh.

“What? You can’t be serious!”

“They called it an ‘executive offload.’”

“They fired a bunch of you?” I still couldn’t believe it. Dad had worked for Pisher since before I could remember.

He shook his head. “Just me.”

“Those creeps.”

He raised his eyebrows. “They gave me a nice parachute, though.”

“Huh?”

“Severance package. Money enough to hold me until I get another job. If I get one.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“No!” he said sharply. “And you don’t tell her either. I’ll tell her when I’m good and ready.”

I was going to ask him why he told me, but stopped myself. I decided just to feel grateful that he did.

I sat down on the couch, feeling awkward about the whole thing, but still not wanting to leave. I offered to get him a beer, but he said no, that he just wanted to sit there for a while getting used to the feeling of being jobless. Like maybe the air might be thinner for the unemployed.

“So what’s new with you?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” I told him. “Remember my friend? The one who’s invisible-ish?”

“Vaguely,” he said, which was better than “not at all.”

I told him the whole story. Everything—from the butcher to the billboard to the box of letters.

“Ran away with the butcher!” Dad said. “Ya gotta love that.”

“So, was letting him know the right thing to do?”

He thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “Did you do it because you wanted to tell him, or because he needed to hear it?”

I didn’t even have to think about the answer to that one. “He needed to hear it. Definitely.”

“So your intentions were good. That’s what matters.”

“But isn’t, like, the road to hell paved with good intentions?”

“Yeah, well, so’s the road to heaven. And if you spend too much time thinking about where those good intentions are taking you, you know where you end up?”

“Jersey?”

“I was thinking ‘nowhere,’ but you get the point.” The expression on his face darkened again. I could tell he was thinking about work.

“I’m really sorry about your job,” I told him.

“I was just fired from a company whose biggest contribution to civilization is a urinal strainer,” he said. “That’s nothing to feel sorry about.” He smiled as he thought about it, then shook his head. “Although sometimes I wonder if ‘the Man Upstairs’ is working me over for something I did.”

The Man Upstairs
, I thought, and something began to trouble me. Because I knew a man upstairs, too.

“Uh . . . Dad. What reason did they give for firing you?”

“It was the weirdest thing. They gave me this story about
someone making a massive investment in our product development, but only if they fired
me
.”

I suddenly felt my skin begin to pull tight, like shrink-wrap on the Night Butcher’s steaks.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why would anyone do that?”

Someone gave a ton of money . . . but only if my dad was fired. There was only one person I knew twisted enough to do something like that. Someone who had made a threat to get my dad fired once before.

When I got to Crawley’s place, the old man didn’t seem surprised to see me. That was my first clue that my suspicions were right on target.

“I need someone to walk my dogs,” he said as he opened the door.

“I couldn’t care less,” I told him. “You got my dad fired, didn’t you, you twisted old—”

“Careful, Mr. Bonano. I don’t take kindly to crude insults.”

I paced away from him, my fists clenched. Controlling your temper isn’t easy when you really don’t want to control it. If I blew a gasket now, though, I knew it could be a whole lot worse. This guy could end up punishing my whole family for the things I did.

“You’re a monster,” I told him. “My father worked nine years for that company, and now what is he going to do?”

He calmly returned to his place on the living-room sofa. “Why is that my problem?”

I felt like charging at him, but instead let loose a scream of
pure rage that got all the dogs barking. And when the dogs quieted down, Crawley said, “Perhaps I can offer him some menial position.” He gave me the nastiest of smirks. “Floor scrubber . . . janitor . . . dog walker.”

I was about to tell him exactly what he could do with his menial position, but then he said, “Of course there is that new restaurant I recently acquired . . .” He looked off, scratching his temple like this was something that just occurred to him, when clearly it wasn’t.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve decided one restaurant isn’t enough, so I bought a second one a few miles away. An Italian place.”

“My father is not sweeping your floors!”

“No, I don’t expect he would.” Crawley looked at me, dragging this out like a sick kid pulling the wings off a fly. “What I really need is a business partner for the new restaurant. Someone who can run it. Someone who knows Italian cooking.”

I tried to speak, but all that came out was a stuttering, “Duh . . . duh . . . duh.”

“Do you know of anyone in need of employment who might fit those qualifications?”

“H-h-how much does it pay?”

Crawley grinned like the Grinch. “Certainly more than Pisher Plastics.”

How was I supposed to respond to this? Did Crawley get my father fired just so he could offer him what he always wanted? How twisted is that? It’s like the guy who throws somebody overboard just so he can rescue him and be the big hero. Crawley was so good at pulling strings, and at underhanded manipulation. Did I want my father under Crawley’s thumb? And
then I realized with a little bit of relief that it wasn’t my decision to make. It was my father’s.

“Tell him to pay me a visit,” Crawley said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure.” I turned to go, in a bit of a daze. All that was left of my anger was a whole lot of smoke for me to choke on. But before I escaped, Crawley stopped me.

“One more thing. I have a job for you, too.”

“Walking dogs?”

‘No.’ He grabbed his cane, stood up, and crossed the room toward me. “I understand that you are no longer dating my granddaughter.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I would like you to pretend that you are when her parents return from Europe.”

“Excuse me?”

“You see, her parents absolutely despise you, so that makes you my best friend.”

“How can they despise me? They’ve never even met me!”

“They despise the
concept
of you.”

There are a whole lot of things about rich people I don’t think I’ll ever understand. But somehow I think it’s better that way. “I don’t want to be paid to date Lexie, so keep your money in your grubby little hands where it belongs.”

“That’s not the job I’m talking about.” He took another step closer, and for the first time, I sensed in him just a little bit of uncertainty. He squinted, like he was examining me, but I could tell he was deciding whether or not to offer me this “job” at all.

“For the monthly stipend of one hundred dollars, plus expenses, I would like you and my granddaughter to kidnap me once each month.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he snapped. “You are to kidnap me. You are to catch me by surprise. You are to plan some creative and adventurous event. And if I don’t threaten to have you jailed at least once during the day, then you shall be fired.”

Then he turned around and went back to the sofa, refusing to look at me again.

“Kidnap you, huh? I woulda done that for free.”

“Telling me that is bad business,” he grunted. “Now leave.”

Even before I mentioned it to my father, I called the Schwa. He knew Crawley—he’d be able to commiserate. But when I dial his number, I get this recording. The number’s been disconnected. At first I thought it must be a mistake, so I dialed again, and got the same thing. There was no forwarding number.

The feeling I had deep down in my gut was even worse than what I felt when my dad told me how he got fired. It was sundown now. Flurries were falling, and the wind had gotten blizzard cold. Still, I got on my bike and rode at full speed to the Schwa’s house.