Bigger than a Bread Box Read online

  OTHER NOVELS BY LAUREL SNYDER

  Penny Dreadful

  Any Which Wall

  Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Laurel Snyder

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Steve James

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Grubman Indursky & Shire, P.C.: Excerpt from “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen, copyright © 1980 by Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Grubman Indursky & Shire, P.C.

  Northwestern University Press and William Meredith: “The Illiterate” by William Meredith, copyright © 1997 by William Meredith. Originally published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Northwestern University Press and William Meredith.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Snyder, Laurel.

  Bigger than a bread box / by Laurel Snyder. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Devastated when her parents separate, twelve-year-old Rebecca must move with her mother from Baltimore to Gran’s house in Atlanta, where Rebecca discovers an old bread box with the power to grant any wish—so long as the wished-for thing fits in the bread box.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89998-0

  [1. Wishes—Fiction. 2. Divorce—Fiction. 3. Moving, Household—Fiction.

  4. Homesickness—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S6851764Bi 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010047307

  Random House Children’s Books supports

  the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Mom, Dad, and Baltimore.

  My homes.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BEFORE

  I remember this one time: Mary Kate and I were at the playground, sitting in the swings, waiting for Mr. Softee to make his way down the hill to us. We could hear the tinkling music from his truck, and I had a sweaty five-dollar bill crumpled in my fist. My feet were dirty in their yellow flip-flops. It was summer.

  Then, right in front of our faces, a seagull swooped down out of nowhere and landed a few feet away, by the rusty slide. The bird wasn’t scared of us at all. It had half a ham sandwich in its mouth.

  Mary Kate kicked in the direction of the gull and said, “Ugh, seagulls. They’re so gross.”

  The bird didn’t move.

  I kicked too. “Yeah, gross.”

  Mary Kate was right. Seagulls are gross. They scream at you and poop on your head. They eat garbage. They have ugly feet and angry eyes. They like meat and they’re always hungry. Only people who don’t know seagulls think they’re perfect and pretty—all white and soaring and dipping and everything.

  But I was kind of impressed with this seagull. He didn’t care that we were bigger than him. He didn’t care that we were kicking at him. He didn’t even move when we got up and ran right past him to buy our ice cream. That seagull had a sandwich and he was going to eat it. It was his playground and he wasn’t going anywhere.

  I never forgot that dumb bird.

  CHAPTER 1

  I was in the dining room part of the kitchen doing my math homework at the table when the lights suddenly blinked off. Everything else in the house stopped working too. The numbers on the microwave’s clock disappeared. The fridge stopped making the wheezy noise it usually makes.

  Then my mom, over in the living room, started picking on my dad for no good reason. As far as I could tell, he was just sitting on the couch, drinking a beer and watching TV, like he usually does after dinner. “Winding down,” he calls it. Ever since he wrecked his cab, he’s been winding down a lot. But the accident wasn’t his fault, and he’ll get another job soon. He always does. He’s just taking a break for a little while.

  Anyway, I couldn’t see either of them because of the lights being off, but I could hear everything they said. There weren’t doors or walls between the downstairs rooms in our row house. The flooring just changed color every ten feet or so. You knew you were out of the kitchen/dining room and into the living room when the fake-brick linoleum stopped and the pale blue carpet started. Then you were out of the living room and into the front room when the blue carpet changed to brown. That was how a lot of row houses were in Baltimore, like tunnels.

  So, really, we were all in one long, dark room together when Mom snapped, “Jim! You didn’t pay the power bill again?”

  Dad didn’t answer her. He does that sometimes, tunes out, though I can never tell if he’s daydreaming or just pretending not to hear her. She kept going on about how she was “sick of it all.” She said she was too tired to even talk about it anymore, but then she kept talking. She called him selfish. She said he was a child. She went on and on, and none of it made much sense to me. It was just a big list of angry. Her voice got madder and louder until at last she was yelling when she said, “If you can’t handle the bills right now, could you maybe at least handle the dishes?”

  Even though it was pitch-black in the room, I squeezed my eyes shut. I laid my head on the table, on my math book.

  She stopped yelling and got quiet. Everything was dark and quiet when she said, in a smaller voice, “I’m sorry, Jim,” and “I hate this,” and “I love you, but …”

  I squeezed my eyes tighter.

  Then Mom started crying.

  I just sat in the dark dining area with my head on my book. Partly because I absolutely didn’t want to go in there, but also partly because it was so dark I was afraid I’d trip over a chair or something. I just sat, hunched over. I smelled the musty paper of the math book and listened to Mom cry. It was hardly the first time they’d had a fight in front of me, but things didn’t usually get so bad.

  After a while, Mom stopped and kind of whispered, “You know, Jim? I could do this … just as easily … without you.”

  There was a pause after that; then Dad said, really, really softly, “Oh … could you?”

  Mom sucked in a quick breath, like it hurt her, and she said, “Yeah. Easier even.”

  Dad sat there, I guess, doing nothing. That was what it sounded like. It sounded like nothing.

  Mom took another breath, a
slow one this time, and asked, “Did you hear what I said? Did you hear me? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  I opened my eyes. She sounded calm, too calm. Something was really wrong.

  Dad, not yelling or crying—because he pretty much never yells or cries—said, “What do you want me to say, Annie?” He sounded grim. He was talking through his teeth. I heard him take a big wet sip of his beer before he said, “You think I like the way things are any better than you?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  I couldn’t stand it after that. It was totally dark and quiet. I’d never been anywhere so still as that room. It was like I was waiting in the back of a closet, sitting on lumpy shoes. Only there was no door to open, nothing I could do to get out. I’d never listened so carefully to something I didn’t want to hear.

  Then two things happened at the same exact time.

  The lights came back on.

  And upstairs, in his room, my little brother, Lew, started crying.

  “Mama?” he was saying. “Daddy?”

  I looked over into the living room. With the lights back on, I could see everything clearly again. My parents were just frozen there, like statues. Lew kept crying.

  I stood up. I made myself walk. I kept my eyes on my feet. Even so, out of the corner of my eye I could see Mom leaning against the side of the recliner, still wearing her blue scrubs from work, her arms limp and her face all wet. Dad was sitting on the couch, staring past her at the blank TV. He looked sad too, but also, weirdly, he looked a little like he wanted to smile. I guess maybe that was because now everyone knew he had paid the power bill.

  I didn’t say anything to either of them, and they didn’t say anything to me. I walked as fast as I could through the living room and headed up the stairs to Lew. Poor kid. He wasn’t even three years old yet. He had no idea what was going on.

  When I got upstairs, Lew was in his crib, holding the bars really tight. His face was red, but when he saw me, he stopped crying. I lifted him out. He can climb out himself, but he doesn’t usually do it. We sat on the floor, and I held him and rocked while he sucked his thumb. He smelled like dirty hair and peanut butter. I thought about singing a song but didn’t. Eventually, he fell back asleep in my lap, and I laid him on the floor, because I knew I’d wake him up putting him into his crib. My arms aren’t long enough, so I always have to drop him the last foot, deadweight, and he wakes up. Instead I just covered him with a blanket.

  That was near the end of October.

  CHAPTER 2

  On Halloween, for the first time ever, Dad and I stayed home with the bowl of candy on the porch, eating all the peanut butter cups ourselves, while Mom took Lew trick-or-treating. Lew dressed up as a last-minute ghost, even though he’d asked to be a pirate. I watched him walk off down the street, a little blob of white holding Mom’s hand and a plastic orange pumpkin. It felt weird, lonely, watching the two of them walk off down the hill without us.

  But, for the most part, I couldn’t see that anything had really changed after the fight, except that Dad slept on the couch. Mom had asked him to go and stay somewhere else for a while, but he said it was his house too, and he wasn’t going to be put out of it.

  What I hated most was having to say good night twice. First to Dad on the couch, in the dark with the TV turned down low, then to Mom in her bed with a book in her hand. During the day, there was a big pile of blankets that stayed on the couch, and that was pretty fun. When I came home from school in the afternoons, Mary Kate and I would make a big nest out of the blankets and watch TV and eat ramen with extra soy sauce. We would practice using chopsticks, and we’d eat and spill and watch shows we weren’t supposed to watch. I hoped that when Mom decided to stop being mad, and she and Dad worked things out, we could keep the pile of blankets downstairs.

  I was beginning to think that everything was about to blow over. Then, one cold Wednesday morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and found that Mom had all our mismatched suitcases laid out on the floor in the living room.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her.

  “We’re going on a trip,” she said.

  “What about school?” I asked. “It’s Wednesday.”

  “You can miss some school this once,” she said, pulling an old sock from the bottom of a backpack. I wondered how long the sock had been in there. We didn’t take trips very often. Almost never.

  “Okay … I guess,” I said. “Only where are we going?”

  “Home,” she answered softly. “We’re going home.”

  “Oh.”

  I knew that by “home” she meant Atlanta, and Gran. That was the only place besides Baltimore she could possibly mean when she said “home.” It was where Mom was from, where she’d grown up. Gran usually flew up to see us for Christmas, though Dad made a point of calling those visits “Hanukkah vacation.” He wasn’t very Jewish, my dad, but Christmas always made him grumpy.

  We hadn’t been to Atlanta to see Gran in years. Mom was always saying we’d go next year, but when “next year” came, she never seemed to have the time off for a vacation. I tried to remember Gran’s house, but all I could picture was a lot of dark wood trim, purple curtains, and a yard full of flowers.

  “Dad too?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “When will we come back?” I asked after a minute.

  She fidgeted with a broken zipper on a green duffel bag. “As soon as I feel like it makes sense to.”

  I went to get some breakfast, like any other day.

  Lew was at the table, putting dry Cheerios into a spoon with his fingers. He usually eats like that, fills his fork or his spoon with his fingers. He drops a lot on the floor, so it takes a while. When he has the spoon full, he puts it in his mouth.

  I could see Dad through the cutout window separating the eating part of the kitchen from the cooking part. The window is there because once upon a time, before we lived there, the cooking part of the room was the back porch. Now we don’t have a back porch, just three steps that drop down into our skinny little backyard.

  Dad was standing at the sink with a coffee filter over one hand, staring off into space. He was like a statue of a guy making coffee, except that his hands were shaking. His mouth was a thin straight line, tight, like someone had sewn it shut.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, walking around to him and taking a banana from the bowl beside him on the counter. It didn’t feel like the right thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Hi, Becks.” His voice sounded like he had a sore throat.

  I went back to the table and sat down next to Lew. Dad didn’t follow me; he just stood beside the sink, looking at me and Lew. Then he stared past us, at Mom and the suitcases, two rooms away.

  I willed him to say something else, to stop what was happening. I tried to send him a psychic message. I peeled my banana very carefully and ate it as slowly as I could, to give him a chance to step in and fix things, but I guess he didn’t get the message.

  I don’t know what happened after I went to the bus stop, but when I got home from school that day, the car was packed. I didn’t get to pick out my own stuff. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Mary Kate, who had stayed home from school because she was sick. I didn’t even get to tell her we were leaving.

  Mom was waiting on the porch with Lew. Dad was standing down in the street, by our old green car, looking like he might throw up. His hand was on the roof of the car. I went over and stood beside him.

  Mom started down the steps, dragging Lew along with her. When she got to the sidewalk, she let go of his hand and took out her keys. She seemed to be in a big hurry.

  “Annie, don’t,” Dad said to her. He scraped a fingernail across the flaking paint on top of the car. Then he put his hands in his pockets. “Please, don’t.”

  I thought maybe he would try grabbing her or hugging her or kneeling or something, like in a movie. He didn’t.


  Mom lifted Lew into his car seat in the back. She snapped him in and shut the door. “Get in, Rebecca!” she said, opening her own door and motioning to the passenger seat beside her. She slid in and stuck the key into the ignition.

  I stood there on the sidewalk, looking back and forth from my mom in the car to my dad beside me on the pavement. I remember it was really windy. Cold for fall. The sky was pale gray, almost white, like it is sometimes over the harbor. A gull screamed.

  “Say goodbye, Rebecca,” said my mom.

  “But—”

  “It’s time to go,” she snapped. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She let it out. “Don’t worry, you’ll see your father again. This isn’t the end of the world.”

  She was wrong. It was the end of the world. Everything felt wrong, lopsided. I knew from the weird fuzzy humming inside my head.

  Lew smiled and waved. “Bye, Daddy.” He thought we were running errands or something—going to the Safeway maybe.

  My dad opened his mouth, but no words came out. His hands were in his jeans pockets. His shoulders were hunched, but he still wasn’t saying or doing anything.

  I looked at him and I looked at him, and he looked different than he’d ever looked to me before. Thinner. He wasn’t wearing a coat. I memorized him. My heart felt cold in my chest, but I didn’t know what to say or do either.

  At last I kind of fell into him. I rubbed my face against his soft flannel shirt. A button scraped my cheek.

  Then he took his hands out of his pockets and bent over me, to hug me. I put my arms around his chest. He didn’t make a sound, and there were no tears, but his body was shaking all around me, like a silent movie of someone crying. Or maybe he was just shivering in the wind. He smelled a little like cigarette smoke and a lot like sweat. My dad. My dad. My dad was so strong. He never cried. “I don’t know …,” he whispered to me. Answering a question I hadn’t asked.

  I felt frozen. Stuck to him, stuck with him in a bubble, in that hug so tight it was bruising my arms. We were going to leave him—my dad—and there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t possible. It was too fast. I just hugged and hugged and hugged.