Chapter 1
Boston Herald American, July 15, 1974 Moocher Missing Again
I sat at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper waiting for Dad to get home from work. Someone had stolen Moocher, the parrot, from the Stoneham Zoo again. I liked the look of him on the front page with his head tipped a little, staring at the camera in a friendly way.
Teddy, my six-year-old brother, sat next to me with his most precious possession—a sixty-four-color box of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener.
“Moocher got stolen again,” I said.
We’d worried a lot about Moocher last year when he went missing the first time. Minnie, his mate for life, had been getting ready to lay some eggs, and she’d only take food from him. The first thief must have read about poor starving Minnie in the paper like we did. He must have felt rotten about what he’d done, since he turned Moocher over to a priest who gave him back to the zoo.
Teddy looked up from his Batman coloring book. “Is Minnie okay?”
“She’s got two little chicks this time.”
“How big are they?”
“Don’t know, but they need Moocher to feed them.”
Teddy’s got a sad kind of face to begin with, but the hungry baby birds made it way worse.
“They’ll find him,” I said, and he got back to filling in Batman’s cape.
Teddy believed I could fix any problem, like I was some superhero who could make everything okay. I was only thirteen years old with no superpowers and there wasn’t much I could do about finding a stolen parrot. But I wasn’t going to tell him that since he had enough to worry about.
The article in the paper said Moocher was really friendly. People could walk around the bird aviary, hold out handfuls of peanuts, and he’d land right on their arms for a snack. He was a super-rare kind of parrot, too, from some island in the Pacific Ocean—worth a thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money for a bird. But even so, crooks should stick to stealing cash and gold and diamonds and keep their hands off live animals. Especially friendly parrots with baby chicks counting on them.
I moved my chair a little so I’d get the air from the fan full blast and stared at the Mt. Rushmore salt-and-pepper shakers sitting next to the napkin holder in the middle of the table. The presidents’ faces on the shakers were kind of lumpy and pasty white. Salt came out of the top of the heads of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were stuck together. The pepper came out of the Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln heads. Jefferson’s chin had a few chips where the two shakers fit together like puzzle pieces.
I should have been on Mt. Rushmore but I wasn’t. They’re all men up there carved into that mountainside in South Dakota. Dad was counting on the orderly arrival, from left to right, of a baby George, a baby Thomas, a baby Teddy, and finally a baby Abe. But after George showed up I was born. A girl.
So I ended up being named after a near miss: Susan B. Anthony. She almost made it up on that mountain but Congress wouldn’t spend the extra money. I think the money was a big fat excuse. Susan B. Anthony fought her whole life for a woman’s right to vote, and Congress didn’t want her up there giving the stink eye to those four presidents who got elected by a bunch of men.
Mom resisted the unlucky name of Susan since she had a cousin with that name who drowned in Boston Harbor on New Year’s Eve after she fell off a ferry at age seven. They never found the body. The B in Susan B. Anthony stands for Brownell, so everyone just called me Nell or Nellie. Not very presidential.
Teddy knelt on his chair, bent over his coloring book, a tight grip on his black crayon. He only had a stub left since he’d been working his way through the Batman coloring book for a week and it took a lot of black.
“It’s two o’clock already,” I said. “Eat your sandwich.”
Teddy ignored me and kept coloring. He didn’t like to stop in the middle of a section and he hardly ever colored outside the lines. If he slipped up, if Batman’s mask or the skyscrapers of Gotham City didn’t have crisp edges, he’d turn the page and start on a new picture.
“Eat your sandwich.”
I reached over and made a grab for his box of crayons.
“Hey,” he said, and gave me a look.
“Eat your sandwich.”
“Okay.”
Teddy closed his coloring book and slid the black crayon stub into its slot in the box. I pushed his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich over in front of him on a paper napkin. He started eating—one bite, chew, one swig of milk, swallow, repeat. It used to drive Mom crazy. “How about dripping some jelly on your shirt like a normal kid?” she’d say. He’d smile up at her like she’d paid him a compliment.
Dad gave me ten bucks a week to make sure Teddy ate something besides Popsicles, didn’t stay in his pj’s all day or get run over by a bus. Lousy pay, considering I had to take him with me everywhere I went all summer. But I didn’t mind. I liked Teddy. And even if I didn’t like him, no one else would hire me since I was too young. I guess if Mom hadn’t run off I wouldn’t have a job at all. A whole ton of stuff would be different if Mom hadn’t run off.
Chapter 2
Like always, there was a headline on the front page that was going to upset Dad, who was a big fan of President Nixon—More Impeachment Evidence Due. The whole Watergate mess had been going on for years and it was getting worse and worse for the president. I started out reading the paper every day so I’d know in advance when Dad was gonna lose it. But now I was reading up on the hearings and trials of all of Nixon’s aides because I’d gotten hooked on the whole story.
My habit of following the news about Watergate and the president was kind of like Mrs. O’Neill two houses down who was hooked on soap operas on TV. She watched what she called her “stories” every afternoon no matter what. One time last winter Mr. O’Neill came back from Manny’s convenience store with a half gallon of milk and he’d forgotten his keys. Mrs. O’Neill didn’t answer the door since One Life to Live was on and she thought it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses or something and nothing got in the way of her stories. Mr. O’Neill banged on the door for a while, gave up, and came over to our house to get warm since it had started to snow. He could have frozen to death.
I knew all the names of the politicians and aides and prosecutors just like Mrs. O’Neill knew the names and histories of her soap opera characters. Except my people were real—Richard Nixon, John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, John Dean, Leon Jaworski, Sam Ervin, all of them. No one knew how it was going to end, just like on The Guiding Light.
I was reading the comics in the paper and Teddy was starting in on the second half of his sandwich when Dad came in the back door to the kitchen. He was tall but his shoulders sloped down, which made him look tired all the time, and most of the hair was gone on the top of his head.
“Hey, Nell. Hey, Teddy boy,” he said.
He took off his work shoes, set them on the mat, put a paper sack in the fridge, and headed up the stairs. Right off, I could hear the shower going. Dad finished his shift as a short-order cook covered in a layer of grease—bacon grease, burger grease, fryer grease. Even though the exhaust fan in the kitchen at the Far Reach Diner could suck a pigeon out of midair, the grease still stuck. His hair, his skin, his clothes all stunk of it. When he got home and bent in for a kiss, Mom would push him away with both hands. She’d make a face like he was some kind of slimy creature who had crawled up out of the Charles River. And he’d smile at her anyway, just like Teddy. Every time.
Teddy was still eating. I read my horoscope for the day:
Taurus: Some complex situations indicated but none you cannot solve in your usual efficient manner. Don’t be distracted by the frivolities of others.
I had no idea what frivolities were so I wasn’t going to get distracted by any of them.
Mom’s horoscope was pretty good but she would have laughed at it anyway. She was the one who got me started on them. Every morning, while I ate my cereal, she’d sit at the kitchen table, smoke a cigarette, drink her coffee, and in a fake-serious voice read our horoscopes out loud. Even though she made fun of it, I think she believed in them a little, like me.
Aries: You can mold this day as you choose. Others may inject their opinions with some force, but this need not affect your steady aim and direct approach to success—and with good will.
I had my doubts about her success since she wasn’t ever big on good will. I had no idea where she was or what she was doing, so reading her horoscope was kind of like spying on her. I knew it was crazy since the horoscope was a bunch of hogwash, but if it was just a tiny bit true I had a peephole I could use to watch her from a distance.
Teddy was back to his coloring book and I was reading the details on page nine about Moocher when Dad stomped down the stairs in his boxers and T-shirt. He dumped his work clothes in the pile by the washing machine next to the back door.
“Hot one today, kids.” He opened the freezer compartment of the fridge and glanced over his shoulder at the sink. “One of you didn’t fill up the ice cube trays again. They’re sitting in the sink.”
“Sorry, Dad.” It was probably Tom or George as usual so I don’t know why I said sorry but I did.
He had both hands in the freezer. There was only one ice cube tray left for him to be tugging on. I’d seen it buried in the slow-moving glacier way in the back. No one had cooked the pork chops or defrosted the freezer since Mom left five months ago.
He stuck his head partway in.
“Damn it!”
Teddy looked up from his coloring book.
“What the hell?” Dad’s voice was muffled by the frozen peas and pork chops.
“What?” asked Teddy.
I shook my head at him to keep him quiet. He put his black crayon in the box again and shut the lid. He was going to keep his crayons safe no matter what.
Dad gave a final tug and stepped back holding the ice cube tray. He threw it underhanded into the sink and it exploded. Ice cubes flew everywhere like a freak hailstorm happening right there in our kitchen.
“It’s gone!” Dad yelled.
He pulled open the top drawer next to the fridge and lifted out a big, pointy knife. Holding on to it with a grip a psycho uses in a horror movie, he started to chip away at the ice in the freezer. Every time he stabbed at the glacier the screeching, twisty, thunk made me cringe. Teddy and I stayed real still in our seats. Ice chips, like shards of glass, covered the floor around us.
Dad set the knife on the counter and stuck both his hands in the freezer. He yanked out a blue Maxwell House coffee can, held it upside down, and shook it. The duct tape that had sealed it shut was slit open and the plastic lid flapped up and down. He slammed the freezer door shut, turned, and threw the coffee can against the wall.
“Damn her.” He didn’t yell it but there was a shudder in his voice that made my stomach clutch.
I squeezed up against the back of my chair, tried to keep clear. Teddy scrambled to his feet and moved close to me, our shoulders touching. I put my arm around him, could feel him trembling. I wasn’t scared of my dad but he was taking up a lot of space.
He stormed out of the kitchen, fists clenched, mumbling, “Damn her,” over and over. We followed him at a distance and stopped by the stairs. Teddy held on to my shirt like he used to do when he was really little.
Dad threw the front door open and stood on the stoop in his boxers and white T-shirt. “Where the hell is it, Connie?” he hollered. “Running off wasn’t bad enough? You had to steal Mt. Rushmore?”
Through the front window, across the street, I could see Mrs. Longmire pull her curtains back. Nosy old witch ought to mind her own business.
Dad stood on the stoop in his bare feet, the varicose veins in his legs bulging and purple from standing all day in the kitchen at the Far Reach for years and years. After a minute, he just standing there, his shoulders and head sagged like someone had popped him with a pin. All the anger drained out of him and floated down the street.
I bit my lower lip. I knew what was going to happen next and my horoscope got it all wrong. I wasn’t going to be able to solve this complex situation in my usual efficient manner. I’d need a miracle and maybe some frivolities once I found out what the heck they were.
Copyright © 2020 by Daphne Kalmar
