Bigger than a Bread Box Read online

  Lay down your money and you play your part.

  Everybody’s got a hu-u-ungry heart …

  I could only think how weird it was that my mom wasn’t crying. All my life she’d been crying, and now, here we’d had this scary, confusing thing happen, and she hadn’t shed a tear. She was as still and stonelike as Dad.

  Then the song was over. I knew I didn’t want this time, this honest, hard, strange time, to be over without asking what I needed to know. So I leaned forward between my parents, straining against my seat belt, and asked, “Will we … will we still be a family when we get home?”

  It was Dad who answered for once. “We will always be a family, Becks. No matter what. No matter what anyone does.”

  There was a pause then, a long one.

  It was a good answer. It was a nice answer, but it wasn’t enough.

  “But will we ever live together again? Like a real family?” I asked, this time a little louder. “Like before?”

  Neither of them said a word.

  “Dad?” I said. “Mom?”

  And then I heard a sound. A sound I’d never heard before in my entire life. The hardest sound, the softest sound, the most awful sound I had ever wanted to hear. I heard quiet sobbing. Tears and shaking breath and then, louder, up-from-the-gut sounds like an animal makes when it’s in pain. My dad was crying, out loud. He cried like Lew when he’s having a meltdown. I wanted to climb up front and hug him. I reached out to touch the back of his head, and it only made him cry harder.

  There was nothing for me to do.

  When he was done crying, my dad laughed. A tiny laugh. “You know what’s funny?” he said.

  “No,” said Mom. “I don’t. Nothing feels funny tonight.”

  “Just,” he said, “just that … I haven’t listened to that song since you all left.”

  “Really?” I asked. I had a feeling I knew what was coming.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I lost my iPod … somewhere.”

  Lew was waiting for me when we got home. We all fell through the door, worn out from everything that had happened. Gran had fallen asleep in her rocker, but Lew was sitting on the living room floor, under his blanket, in his pajamas. I crawled under it with him, the part of me I could fit. It wasn’t a very big blanket.

  “Hi,” I said. I kissed his head.

  “Hi, Babecka,” he said. He grabbed the crook of my elbow with his soft little hand and just held it. He leaned against me. We sat like that for a minute.

  Then he said, “Daddy.”

  Just like that.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Daddy.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The next morning, Gran took Lew out for a last special date at the coffee shop and the playground, while Mom and I moved around the house, packing and shoving things into suitcases and trash bags. Meanwhile, Dad lugged all our things out to the car, then played luggage geometry like he usually does before a trip. There was a lot to pack. It seemed like we were leaving with more than we’d brought.

  As I folded shirts and fitted toothbrushes into plastic Baggies, I thought about how I hadn’t known we were leaving Atlanta, so I hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. We were leaving Atlanta the same way we’d left Baltimore, and that bothered me, because it made me realize that in a way, we were running away again. I knew I didn’t have a lot of people who’d miss me in Atlanta, but there were people I’d kind of miss.

  I wished I had a chance to tell Mr. Cook I’d liked his poems. I wished I could show Mrs. Hamill that I really did know all about mass and matter. I wished I could tell Megan that I thought she had pretty hair. I knew I’d miss Megan, and I thought maybe someday I’d come back to visit Gran, and we’d see each other again. Maybe I’d even email her from Baltimore. She could tell me if Coleman really did end up boycotting the holiday show.

  Most of all, I’d miss Gran. I’d miss her a lot.

  Later, when we were done packing, once everything was in the car, while Mom and Dad were out front staring at a map and arguing about whether to take I-81 or I-85, I went to the room that was finally beginning to feel like mine and stared at the bread box.

  I picked it up. Then I walked through the empty house. I stopped to get a hammer from underneath the sink before heading down the steps and into the backyard.

  In the middle of the lawn, I set the bread box down.

  I raised the hammer above my head, pointed it at the gray sky, and kept it there a minute like that. My arm began to get tired. I felt the heaviness of that hammer in my hand, felt the weight of it in my arm, my shoulder. Gravity was ready to bring it crashing down on the thin metal box.

  But I lowered my arm. I uncurled my fingers and dropped the hammer gently onto the grass at my feet. Instead of tearing that box apart, beating it to pieces, I sat down beside it, crisscross-applesauce, like a little kid, on the damp ground. I closed the door of the bread box, thought for a minute, and made a silent wish.

  When I opened the door, there was a seagull!

  I smiled, let the gull out, and closed the box again.

  I made another wish and opened the door, then let that gull out into the yard. It joined the first.

  I wished and wished and opened and closed the door, and gull after gull joined me in the yard. Some of them sat and some of them flew, and some of them found a place in the trees above my head, the trees that stretched out their bare branches into the wintry sky. I wished for a hundred gulls, or more. I lost count. I’m not even sure why I did it, but soon the air was full of skrreeee! Then I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was already home, but the air smelled like Georgia and the dirt felt like clay. That was fine now. I stood up and walked back inside, through the kitchen, and straight to the car with my bread box.

  Maybe if this were another story, I’d have put the box back where I found it in the attic. Put it back where it belonged. Or maybe I would have had the courage to rip it apart with that hammer in the yard—either because it was capable of doing bad things or because I thought I’d already gotten what I needed from it. I think I took that hammer into the yard with me because I figured that was how the story should end—with me giving up the magic.

  But the thing is, this is my story, and I couldn’t stand to leave it behind. Because there are still going to be times when I want to find something—something I’ve lost. Something that belongs to me. Maybe even something that’s been mine all along.

  So instead I left the seagulls behind me, and I left something else too, especially for Gran. A present. Because I knew she’d be sad when we left. I knew she’d miss me even more than I was going to miss her, and I didn’t want her to think I was running away.

  Right where the bread box had sat all those weeks on the desk, I left my locket, the locket Dad had given me. It was mine to give and I didn’t need it anymore. Inside it I left a tiny note, a scrap of paper for only Gran to read. It just said “To Gran. From Rebecca. With love.”

  Somehow, leaving something behind made me feel better about taking the bread box home with me to Baltimore. Where I knew I belonged. In my old room. In my little row house. In my real life. Whatever that was going to be from here on out.

  I know there are lots of things the bread box won’t ever be able to do for me. I get that. Magic can’t always fix things for you. Because some people do leave. Some people let go and forget. Some people rip things apart.

  But you know what? Some people don’t.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Bigger than a Bread Box isn’t autobiographical. My mother did not toss me in a car, and my dad was never unemployed. Also, sadly, I never found a magical bread box in an attic. But I did harvest a lot of childhood memories to write this book, and that process tore me up. I cried a lot. I dripped on my keyboard.

  So to begin with I owe this book to my mom and dad. They were generous in allowing me to misremember their divorce for my own selfish purposes, and I can’t thank them enough. Their permission was something I needed to have before I could dive into my own past, b
ecause it is nearly impossible, in a family, to tell where one person’s story stops and another person’s begins.

  I owe a great debt, too, to my husband, who watched me wrestle with this book. He was supportive and patient, even as I was baring my teeth and trying to understand how a woman might reach the end of her rope. I’ll say no more about that, except that I’m lucky to be married to such a man.

  As well, I owe this book (as I owe all my books) to my agent, Tina Wexler, and my editor, Mallory Loehr, who did not laugh at me when I told them I was writing a “middle-grade book about Bruce Springsteen songs and seagulls and divorce and a magical bread box.” Their encouragement of my insanity is remarkable.

  I owe much to Ellice Lee, Kate Klimo, Chelsea Eberly, Naomi Kleinberg, Jason Gots, Alison Kolani, Elizabeth Zajac, Lisa Nadel, Nic Dufort, Sarah Nasif, and everyone else I work with at Random House. I owe a debt to the booksellers and librarians and teachers who do so much to get books into the hands of curious kids.

  And I want to mention that a great number of people helped me by reading early drafts, or listening to me whine, or sharing their own stories. I fear I will miss someone if I try to name them all. But I must say that this would have been a different book if not for the friendship of Rachel Zucker, Natalie Blitt, Gwenda Bond, Emma Snyder, Marc Fitten, Patrick Brickell, Robyn Morgan, Kurtis Scaletta, Julianna Baggott, Kris Willing, Linda Parks, Paula Willey, Jennifer Laughran, Sonya Naumann, Pieta Brown, Terra McVoy, Deborah Wiles, Laurie Watel, and Alan Gratz.

  Last, but not least, I owe this book to Baltimore—which will always be my home. It is the most beautiful city in the world to me, and I will never shake the seagulls from my hair. But I also owe this book to the ever-changing landscape of Atlanta—because although it will never be the city that shaped me, it’s the city that’s shaping my children … and that makes it home to me.

  It’s eerie how much LAUREL SNYDER has in common with Rebecca Shapiro. Both of them grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen. Both of them have separated parents. Both of them have a Jewish dad who used to drive a taxi. And both of them have lived in Baltimore and Atlanta. There are a few differences, though. For one thing, there was no such thing as an iPod when Laurel was twelve. And while Rebecca hasn’t yet decided what she wants to do when she grows up, Laurel has definitely decided to be a writer. In fact, she has written several books, including Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, Any Which Wall, and Penny Dreadful.