The Schwa was Here (27 page)

“I’m afraid he isn’t here. I could take a message, though.”

“Well, could you tell me why he moved like that? And why you’re selling his house?”

I heard Aunt Peggy sigh. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I suppose it’s common knowledge by now. They were having trouble with finances,” she told me. “And Calvin’s father, well, he doesn’t handle this sort of thing well. I put the house up for sale for him, and he moved in with me.”

“Will Calvin be back later tonight? I really need to talk to him.”

“Oh, he didn’t come here with his father,” Aunt Peggy said. “He stayed with a friend in Brooklyn so he could finish out the school year.”

“Great—could you give me the number?”

“Of course. His name is Anthony Bonano. If you hold on, I’ll get the number.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear, and looked at it like it had suddenly turned into a banana.

“Hello?” said Aunt Peggy. “Are you still there? Do you want that number?”

“Uh . . . That’s okay,” I said. “Never mind.” I hung up and stared at the phone for a full minute. It was then that I finally decided to just let this be. So, the Schwa had disappeared, but like his mother, it was completely of his own doing. It might have been misguided like so many things he did, but I had to respect his decision, and although I had a sneaking suspicion what he was up to, I wasn’t about to hunt him down. I had already done my penance.

The Schwa never came back to Brooklyn, and life went on without him. Lexie’s parents returned from their European spree, and just as Crawley said, they hated my guts, which really wasn’t a problem, since I’m fairly used to people hating my guts.

“They’re convinced anyone with the last name Bonano has to have Mafia ties,” Lexie told me, which is like saying anyone named Simpson is either related to Homer or O.J.

“Let ’em think that,” I told her. “They’ll be afraid to piss me off.” Which I think is why they don’t say boo when I’m around. It turns out that fake-dating Lexie felt a lot like the real thing, without all that boyfriend-girlfriend pressure.

As for Crawley, he did find himself another pair of dog walkers: Howie and Ira—who I think keep hoping another couple of granddaughters will turn up.

“You’ll like Howie,” I told Crawley. “He’s like a Rubik’s Cube with every side the same color.”

When they first showed up, Howie begins this discussion with Crawley about the dog’s names. “They’re named after the seven deadly sins and seven virtues,” Crawley tells him.

Howie considers this deeply, then says, “Why not the four freedoms?”

“That,” says Crawley, “would leave ten dogs unnamed.”

Howie raises his eyebrows. “Not if you named the rest after the Bill of Rights.”

Crawley goes red in the face with anger, Ira gets it on film, and their relationship is off to a flying start.

My father was too proud to call Crawley right away. He looked for work for about six weeks, then finally made the phone call and took a meeting with Old Man Crawley. He returned from Crawley’s in shell shock, but with a job. Well, more than just a job. The old hermit crab made my father a partner in his new restaurant. He let my dad turn it into whatever he wanted, and in true Crawley fashion, he threatened my father with everything short of eternal damnation if the restaurant ever failed. Dad, in his wisdom, decided to get Mom into it, too, turning it into a combination Italian-French place. They named it Paris,
capisce?
and so far, so good.

There are schwas drawn in the restaurant’s bathrooms that I didn’t put there.

In fact, there are schwas everywhere now. I got a call from Ira during spring break. He was on vacation in Hawaii, and he called to tell me he saw one scribbled across a
DANGER
,
HOT LAVA
sign. They’ve got them clear across the country—maybe clear around the world. There’s got to be hundreds of people doing it. No one knows who draws them, or why, but now they’re a
they’re a permanent part of the landscape. Howie has a theory that involves aliens and cosmic string theory, but trust me, you don’t want to hear it.

The Schwa Was Here
. Just a few of us know what it really means, and nobody believes me when I tell them that I started it. But that’s okay. I can handle being anonymous.

As for the Schwa himself, I never saw him again—but I did get a letter. It came in August, more than six months after he pulled his disappearing act.

Clipped to the letter was a photo of the Schwa and his mom on a tropical beach. She didn’t look like the unhappy woman the
Night Butcher had described. The Schwa almost had a tan in the picture, if you can believe that, and he had a smile on his face as wide as the one on his billboard.

I had to smile, too. The postmark was from Puerto Rico, but the paper clip had been to the moon.

Thə End

• Antsy understands how the Schwa can feel invisible because he often feels that way himself. What makes them feel this way? Do the people around them realize how they contribute to the invisibility?
  
• Why is Lexie’s friendship so important to the Schwa? In what ways is she blind to the Schwa? How does her blindness affect the way she interacts with him?
  
• Does Crawley live up to his reputation as a mean man? How does Antsy feel about him? How does Crawley feel about Antsy? Does this change over the course of the book?
  
• Why is his mother’s story so important to the Schwa? Is Antsy right to make him hear the truth? Does this information help or hurt the Schwa?
  
• Is Antsy a good friend to the Schwa? Does he help him or exploit him? Are there times when Antsy could have done more to help the Schwa?
  
• In what ways is Manny Bullpucky different from the Schwa, and in what ways are they similar? How does the trip to the elevated subway affect each of them?
  

Keep reading for a preview of

SHIP OUT OF LUCK,

a companion novel to

THE SCHWA WAS HERE.

MERMAID SUSHI, EXPLOSIVE RAINBOWS,
WORLD POLITICS, AND OTHER THINGS
THAT GIVE ME GAS

DON’T ASK ME BECAUSE I DON’T GOT AN OPINION.

I’m not red, I’m not blue; I’m not an elephant or donkey; I’m not left or right; and I ain’t center either. I’m not even in the ballpark. If it’s a ballpark, then I’m playin’ hockey.

The way I see it, politics is like a broken thermostat: all hot air, all the time, no matter how sweltering it is, and don’t even get me started on the humidity.

Bottom line: I don’t believe anyone who says they got the answers to society’s ills because society’s ills mutate faster than the flu, and no amount of Purell is gonna protect you from that juicy sneeze. So I don’t make my decisions based on what some whining loudmouth with an ax to grind says. I go by my guts, when I got enough of ’em. I guess that makes me independent.

You want to talk “public policy,” then talk to my mother, because she’s got policies enough to sink any peacetime economy. The “No Shoes in the Living Room” policy. The “No Un-showered Friends in My House” policy. The “Get Up and Get Your Own Freakin’ Drink” policy.

Put all these policies together and you got yourself a platform. The “WOULD IT KILL YOU TO SHOW A LITTLE COMMON COURTESY?” platform—which, if you ask me, oughta be how we run the country.

What happened on the boat—excuse me, I mean “ship”—had nothing to do with making a political statement, and if I had known I was gonna be thrust onto the national stage like a piñata in headlights, I woulda stayed home.

It all started, as so many things seem to start, with Old Man Crawley . . .

“You will take this invitation to your parents and get an immediate RSVP,” Mr. Crawley said. He handed me an envelope, but when I tried to take it from him, he wouldn’t let go. It stuck tightly between his fingers, kinda the way money usually does.

“Your parents’ answer,” Mr. Crawley said, “shall be ‘yes.’”

I tugged harder on the invitation until I finally pulled it out of his vise-grip claw. “If their answer has to be yes,” I said, “then it’s not an invitation, is it?”

Mr. Crawley’s response was a scowl that made the wrinkles on his face become deeper, which I didn’t even think was possible. Old Man Crawley is kinda like a living legend in Brooklyn, although I use the word “living” loosely. He’s the reclusive owner of Crawley’s Lobster House and lives above the restaurant with fourteen dogs. Fifteen if you include the guide dog. That’s not for him, it’s for his granddaughter, Lexie. Trust me, Old Man Crawley doesn’t need a guide dog; he has perfect vision. He’s got eyes in the back of his head, and maybe in some other people’s heads, too, because I swear he can see everything.