Remember Dippy Read online

  I must’ve let out a groan or something, because the next thing I knew, Aunt Collette was saying, “You okay, Johnny?”

  “Yeah, fine. I’m just beat all of a sudden. Mind if we go in?”

  “Not a bit,” she said, standing up and heading inside. “If I knew what was good for me, I’d be in bed already myself.”

  Thank goodness she went straight upstairs and closed the bedroom door behind her. My innards were going to crawl out through my pores if I didn’t do something. I had to fix this mess—or at least try to, and right away. After all, Dirk could tell his father about me at any moment—assuming he hadn’t already spilled. My mind raced. I needed a plan. But I didn’t have one.

  Frantically, I slipped into the kitchen for a pen and paper, started writing, then tiptoed outside and stuck the note in Dirk’s mailbox. It said: “TRUCE?” That’s all. A peace offering. A gesture of goodwill. Tomorrow maybe I could think of something nice to do for him. I had no idea what that would be though, and my stomach hurt as I shot back to the house.

  Chapter 9

  I didn’t sleep very well that night, and when Aunt Collette woke me the next morning, I felt like I’d only just drifted off. This must be how Niko felt all the time: stressed, guilty, pressured—and exhausted. Aunt Collette, on the other hand, acted as chipper as if she’d slept till noon. It was funny to see Cinderella back in her 7-11 shirt and cap after her princess look last night. But she didn’t seem to mind the tumble down the fashion ladder; in fact, she was downright cheery.

  “Let’s go, sweetie, I’m on the fly,” she sang. “It’s a beautiful day—enjoy it.” And then she practically skipped out of the room.

  Usually I pop up as soon as she calls me, but this time I stayed in bed a while, wondering if I’d ruined things for her and TJ. Enjoy the day? How could I, knowing I might have wrecked everyone’s dreams? No golf course for TJ (or Mo), no boyfriend for Aunt Collette, no victory over the evil Dirk for me. Could it get any worse? Aunt Collette must’ve sensed that I was dawdling because she honked her horn right under my window as she pulled out. “All right, all right,” I muttered and dragged my sorry self out of bed.

  When I got downstairs I didn’t see Mem—the TV wasn’t even on—but the front door was open. Glancing out, I could see the back of a man sitting on the steps talking with Mem. I pushed the screen, and they both turned around to face me.

  “Mr. Boots?” What was my cranky neighbor doing here?

  “That’s right,” he answered, and in a minute his dog, Millie, came barreling from the backyard barking wildly at me, as usual.

  “I told you Chip comes to see me,” Mem beamed. He reached out his hand for Millie, and she obediently sat at his feet without making a peep.

  “I didn’t know your name was Chip,” I confessed to Mr. Boots.

  “My parents named me Chetwin,” he chuckled. “With a name like that, you pick up a nickname pretty quick.” I’d never heard him laugh before. I’d never even seen him smile, come to think of it. He looked different now, less wrinkled up. I didn’t get it.

  “Ma almost ran over Millie,” Mem said. “Did you hear her blast her horn?”

  “Oh, that’s why she honked.” I looked to the street for Mr. Boots’ car, but it wasn’t there. “Did you walk all the way over here?”

  “Of course. Millie and me, we walk everywhere—when we’re both having a good day, right girl? Hey Remember, you got any Twinkies?”

  “I’ll get them,” I said. “I’m kind of in the mood, myself.” I found an almost full box in the pantry and brought them out to the porch. I ate mine whole, but Mem and Mr. Boots sucked out the cream and fed the rest to Millie.

  “Hey Johnny, guess where Chip was born,” Mem said.

  “Hull?” Mr. Boots—Chip—has always lived next to me, so I figured he was from here.

  “Nope—Paris.”

  I stopped my Twinkie in mid-air. “Paris? You left Paris for Hull?”

  “Not that Paris,” Mr. Boots said. “My Pariss—two s’s—is a resort town in Western Florida, right on the Gulf Coast.”

  “Still sounds better than Hull,” I shrugged. “How’d you end up here?”

  “You really want to know?” He sounded surprised.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too!” said Mem. “You really want to know? To know?”

  “All right then,” he said, feeding his second Twinkie shell to Millie. “First off, you should know what my family did for a living. We ran a little bed-and-breakfast called the Pariss Inn right on the beach, hardly a stone’s throw from the water. We always made sure our guests had a pleasant stay—good food, comfortable beds, and free rides on our sailboat. That was my job when I got old enough—taking folks up and down the inlet in our day sailer.”

  “Sweet,” I said.

  “One day, a family on vacation from Hull, Vermont, asked me to take them around.” He smiled up at the sky. “It was a hot, breezy day, perfect for a long leisurely ride. By afternoon’s end, I was hopelessly in love with the older daughter.”

  Wow, so Mr. Boots hadn’t always been an old hermit. He was actually young once, sailing boats and flirting with tourist girls. “Wait,” I said. “You aren’t gonna tell us you gave up ocean sailing and warm winters to follow a girl you only just met?”

  “Not immediately, but eventually, yes. Her father was ailing, see, and she wouldn’t leave him. So after we got married, I moved up here and got a job driving the ferry back and forth across Lake Champlain. Did it for almost thirty years.”

  “What was her name?” Mem asked, his face dotted with Twinkie cream.

  “Imogene.”

  “Imogene,” Mem said thoughtfully. “Like the park—Imogene Park—where we had the strawberry shortcut?”

  “The very same,” Mr. Boots said. “They named the park for her. She’s the one who convinced the town to put a park there in the first place. She deserved to have her name on it.”

  “Did you and Imogene have kids?” I asked.

  Now Mr. Boots fixed his eyes on his worn shoes. He lifted one foot to make room for an ant that was scurrying along. Then he drew a slow breath and said, “We wanted them, but it didn’t happen. So we had dogs instead, sometimes two or three at a shot. Now Millie here, she’s the best of the bunch.” Millie thumped her tail happily against the step, keeping her post by Mem’s side.

  “Millie doesn’t like me,” I said.

  “Well, of course she doesn’t. You’ve never once talked to her or rubbed her belly or even smiled at her. Why should she like you?” And he winked at Mem.

  “It’s just that I—”

  “No excuses,” Mr. Boots interrupted. “Actions.”

  Talk about putting me on the spot. Mr. Boots was daring me to touch the beast whose favorite activity was growling and baring its teeth at me. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less, but a dare’s a dare. So I reached over Mem’s lap and put my hand up to Millie’s nose, hoping she wouldn’t bite. To my amazement, she sniffed my fingers—and licked them! I scratched her between the ears—Mem showed me her favorite spot—and she started wagging her tail. I could hardly believe it.

  “She’s as true a friend as you’ll ever find,” Mr. Boots said. “And we all need friends.”

  “Yup,” agreed Mem. “Millie’s my best friend. No, no, you are, Chip. Millie’s my second best friend. Where does Imogene live now? Can I meet her?”

  Mr. Boots rubbed the back of his neck and looked off at nothing. “The thing is, Remember, she was feeling a little dizzy one day—not terrible, but I took her to the hospital just to be safe. The next thing I know, they’re putting her in a nursing home. Just temporary, they say, while she gets better. She was gone within the week.”

  “Gone where?” asked Mem.

  “Heaven, I hope,” he said.

  “But I thought you said she was gonna get better,” Mem said.

  “I think the nursing home—being in the nursing home—did her in. Some people just aren’t cut out for
those places. She was one of them, and I think I am too. I’d die just as sure as my Imogene did.”

  Mem and I looked at each other and then at our Twinkies.

  “Anyways, enough of that. I’d best be off if I’m going to get my errands done,” Mr. Boots said, pushing himself up off the steps. “Millie, you come with me. Remember, you take care. And Johnny,” he tilted his head toward the Dempster’s mailbox, “you keep in mind what I said. We all need friends.”

  I could feel my face turning crimson. “Bye,” I said, but I couldn’t look him in the eye. I could only hope that Dirk would get my note and take it the right way. Lucky for me, the phone started ringing so I had an excuse to escape.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  “Is Remember there?” It was a girl’s voice.

  “Um, who’s this?”

  “Leesha.”

  Weird—why was she calling for Mem? Why was she calling at all? “Hold on,” I said. “He’s just saying good-bye to a neighbor.” Hearing the screen door squeak open and slam shut, I called, “Phone’s for you.”

  Mem came running into the kitchen, wide-eyed. I wondered if he’d ever gotten a phone call before.

  “It’s Leesha,” I said, handing him the phone.

  Grinning so wide it must have hurt, he grabbed the receiver. “Leesha? Hi, Leesha!” He turned his back to me and started talking in a hush-hush voice, like he was discussing some top-secret project. After a lot of “yups” and laughing snorts, he turned around and said, “Leesha wants to know if I can meet her at Niko’s for lunch today. Is that okay, Johnny? Can I?”

  A puff of hairspray would’ve knocked me over. A girl, asking Mem out? I didn’t know what to say. What would Aunt Collette say? She wouldn’t let him go by himself, that’s for certain, but would she let him go even with a chaperone? Was this a date? And while we’re at it, how come Mem was the one getting calls from girls?

  By now, Mem was bouncing up and down and waving the phone at me. I had to make a decision. “Tell her it’s okay, but I’m coming too,” I said. Mem nodded and turned his back to me again.

  “Noon,” he crowed once he’d hung up. “Noon, okay? Noon. Noon!”

  Mem and I beat Leesha to Niko’s, so we were already settled at our regular table by the window when she got there. She’d taken her braids out, and her black, green and red hair hung in wild locks down her back. She was wearing funeral colors again: a long black skirt with fringe on the bottom, a black tank top, a black choker, and black nail polish. My mom always says black is slimming, but that wasn’t working here.

  “Hey,” she sighed in a dreary voice and plopped into the seat next to Mem.

  “Hi, Leesha!” Mem shouted and then flashed that silly grin of his—apparently, that’s his M.O. around girls.

  “Hey,” she said again, propping her chin on her hands and studying some mozzarella crumbs on the table.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Mem. Funny, she seemed like her normal self to me.

  “What makes you think something’s wrong?” she asked.

  “We learned it in group. At school. If the ends of someone’s mouth are turned down, that means something’s wrong.”

  “Oh.” She sat back and drew her knees up to her chest. “I might have to go back home to Chicago soon. I hate that place.”

  “But you told me you were gonna be here all summer,” Mem whimpered. “I thought…”

  “I thought I was gonna work for my Aunt Holly,” she said. “But she says business is slow right now and she can’t afford to pay me. I’ve tried to get other work, but no one’s hiring—except the 7-11, but I’m not old enough. And the deal with my dad is, I can only spend the summer here if I have a job. Damn, I don’t want to go back.”

  “What’s so bad about Chicago?” I asked. Chicago is a megacity. It’s got two baseball teams. The Great Lakes. Places to explore. Things to do. I’d spend my summer there in a heartbeat.

  “What’s so bad,” she bristled, sitting up, “is that my parents live there, and if they’re not yelling at each other, they’re yelling at me. They hate me.”

  “No they don’t,” I said, figuring she was just being melodramatic.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You so don’t get it.”

  “Then explain.”

  “Fine.” She leaned forward. “They hate me because I survived the car crash and my brother didn’t, okay? Before that, before the accident, they treated us both all right. Now that I’m alive and he isn’t, they only care about him.” She gasped a little then, as if she’d never said those words out loud, as if she’d startled even herself at the sound of them.

  As for me, I wanted to slide under the table and crawl away. I mean, what do you say to someone you hardly know when they tell you their darkest secret? Do you try to cheer them up? Do you act all sad and concerned? “Uh…” I started.

  “My father doesn’t think I see the empty beer bottles he hides in the car trunk. And my mother, well, she hasn’t gotten out of her pajamas since it all happened.” She brushed the mozzarella crumbs to the floor. “P.S., my friends don’t come over anymore. We end up cutting school to spend time together.”

  “Cut school?” I said. “Can’t you just—”

  “Yeah, but it’s more fun this way.”

  “Don’t you get in trouble?”

  “Not if you know how to manage the system. I’m an expert at that these days.”

  Whoa, no wonder Leesha never smiled. In Chicago, she was living the kind of misery I thought only existed on TV shows. And if she couldn’t get a job here in Hull, she was going straight back there. I thought about TJ’s golf course and all the summer jobs the construction would have created—including maybe one for Leesha—and I felt horrible. The damage from my stupid mailbox stunts was snowballing. No golf course, no more romance for Aunt Collette, no summer job for Leesha—what next?

  “Are you mad or sad?” Mem asked Leesha. “If your mouth is turned down, maybe you’re mad and maybe you’re sad. That’s what we learned. Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” she said, trying to turn up the corners of her mouth. “I’m mad at the world, but not you.”

  That seemed to make him feel better. “Let’s get mushrooms this time. Do you like mushrooms on your pizza?”

  “Hmm? Oh right, pizza. Yeah, sure. That okay with you, Johnny?”

  “That okay with you, Johnny?” Mem said. “That okay with you, Johnny?”

  So we ordered a large mushroom pie, and while we ate, we talked about how summers should be.

  “Summertime should be all about the ocean,” Leesha said.

  “You go much?” I asked.

  “Never been. But I know I’d love it—the water and the sand. First, I’d swim in the waves all morning, then I’d lie on the beach all afternoon and see what the salt and sun would do to my hair color.” She sighed longingly and took a bite of pizza. “It would be perfect, wouldn’t it, being away from everything, everyone?”

  “Not for me,” I said. “I’d want to go to a city, where there’s stuff to do all day and all night, and you couldn’t get bored if you tried. New York, Boston, LA—heck, I’d take Burlington.”

  “What about you, Mem?” Leesha asked.

  “Me?” he said, sounding surprised that anyone cared what he thought.

  “Yeah, what would your dream summer be?”

  He licked a string of cheese off his lips. “I like it exactly the way it is.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said.

  “Yup. Hey, what’s that?” he asked, pointing at the half-eaten slice of pizza on her paper plate.

  “What’s what?”

  “What’s what?” He pointed closer. “It looks like a paper clip.”

  “That?” she said, sticking her fingers into the cheese. “I think it’s just a mushroom…hey, it’s a thumbtack.” She held it up and declared, “There’s a thumbtack in my pizza!” Mem joined in, only louder and longer. “Dumbtack!” he shouted. “There’s a du
mbtack. Leesha has a dumbtack!”

  Poor Niko, I thought. He must really be losing it. It’s bad enough when he lets an occasional anchovy fall into a pizza, but a thumbtack? Ouch!

  Niko came running out, his baseball cap falling off his head, his face white as flour. “I am sorry, very sorry,” he said in a hushed voice and scooped up what was left of our pizza. “I make you a fresh pie—no, two fresh ones.”

  “Niko, it’s all right,” I said. “We were almost done, anyway. Don’t sweat it.”

  He looked at Leesha, who only shrugged and pushed her plate away. “No charge, then,” he said. “No charge next time, either.”

  I felt a little bit bad about this, knowing he was saving up for a ring and all. “Really, Niko, it’s okay.”

  “He said no charge,” Leesha scowled.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s just go then.”

  “Fine,” she said. “C’mon, Mem.”

  Mem shoved a last bite of pizza into his mouth and followed us out.

  Leesha had calmed down by the time we reached the sidewalk. “You know what?” she said. “Niko said he wasn’t hiring, but maybe he’ll change his mind now. Maybe he’ll see how he could really use an assistant. To make sure all the sharp objects stay out of the food.”

  “Forget it, Leesha,” I told her. “Niko’s not going to be putting anyone on the payroll anytime soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me, I know. He’s going through a hard time.”

  “Aren’t we all?” She flipped her striped hair over her shoulder and stuck her hands into the pockets of her black skirt. “Anyways, I’m gonna go keep Aunt Holly company at the shop. See you guys.”

  “See you,” I said.

  “Bye, Leesha,” Mem said. “Wishing you blue skies. Blue skies.”

  She just waved and walked away.

  • • •

  By the time we got home I felt drained, but the day’s surprises weren’t over. Dirk the Jerk had answered my note while we were out. That rat, he’d messed with our mailbox in broad daylight. He’d removed the TRY SC from TRY SCOPE—leaving the discarded letters crumpled on the ground—and added an N, so now it read NOPE. Nope to TJ getting a zoning change, nope to Aunt Collette keeping her boyfriend, nope to Mo playing his favorite sport, nope to Leesha getting a job.