Bigger than a Bread Box Read online

  I did call Mary Kate a few times too, but it was weird. One time she said I sounded funny and asked if I was okay, and I didn’t know how to answer her. I really wasn’t okay, but at the same time, I was okay. I didn’t know how to explain that. She was so far away, and it’s hard to tell someone about something they can’t even begin to imagine. Even when they’re supposed to be your best friend.

  Mary Kate was at home, in our home. She was seeing my dad. She was sitting at the same desk in the same school in the same city as always. And I … wasn’t. So I could say “I’m lonely” or “It’s fun here,” but she wouldn’t know what I meant, not really … especially when both statements felt completely true and totally inadequate. I didn’t understand it myself, and I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me. It was too hard. I stopped returning her calls.

  Mostly from then on I got email forwards from her on the computer in Gran’s office, about cute kittens and bad luck. I couldn’t help thinking they were dumb, though thinking that made me feel bad. She was still my best friend, after all. Occasionally she would send a picture of my house from her phone with a text that read “Miss ya!” or “See ya soon!” or something else like that. In one picture I could see my dad on the porch, sweeping. After that I stopped looking at the pictures. It was like I put Mary Kate in a box and set her on a shelf in my head or something.

  In fact, it was a little like everything was a box. Gran’s house was a box, school was a box, Dad was a box, Mom was a box, and the magic was a box. None of them seemed to know each other or to be part of each other anymore. My life was all in these little boxes, and I’d open one up and then close it again. Mary Kate’s box felt smaller, like it had gotten shoved behind the other, bigger boxes. She was far away, something I didn’t have to deal with, so I decided not to.

  For sure I was homesick, but when things got really bad, I would go in my room and shut the door and wish. For books and lip gloss, but most often for food. Food made me feel better. I couldn’t see the harbor, or the gulls, or my dad. But if I wanted to, I could taste home. Utz crab chips and Berger Cookies. Butterscotch Krimpets. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. When I felt sad and bored and alone, I’d just pig out on junk food. I stashed the wrappers under my bed and waited to get fat.

  CHAPTER 10

  Then one afternoon—a few days after Thanksgiving, which we ate at a restaurant because Mom had had a late shift the night before and Gran said she didn’t like touching dead birds—I came home from school to find Lew asleep on the couch, Mom gone, and Gran out in the backyard, digging in a dead flower bed. I could see her through the kitchen window. The house was cold.

  So I turned on the TV in my room, patted the bread box gently, and made a wish. I’d gotten in the habit of patting the box each time I made a wish. It felt like a way of saying please, and maybe also thank you.

  “I wish for some gravy fries from Jimmy’s Diner,” I said.

  Instantly the room filled with a thick, comforting smell. Gravy fries are exactly what they sound like—French fries drowned in gravy, and they are, without a doubt, the best comfort food of all time, except for maybe macaroni and cheese. Sometimes when it was rainy and chilly, Dad and I went out on special gravy-fry dates. The fries need to be crispy enough not to get soggy, and the gravy has to be good, homemade stuff. You sprinkle a little pepper on them and yum! I never even knew that gravy fries were a Baltimore thing until I got to Atlanta, but you definitely can’t get them in Georgia, not even in places that sell both fries and gravy. People just stare at you like you’re nuts if you ask for them.

  There I was, sitting in my room on the rug with a hot china bowl warming my lap, watching TV and licking brown gravy from my fingers, when Gran knocked on the door and shouted, “What are you eating in there? It smells incredible!”

  I looked down at the white china bowl and then over at the plastic salt and pepper shakers beside it. I stared at the metal fork. It was all so obviously from a diner, and there was no diner nearby. I hadn’t even thought to wish for takeout so I could pretend to have gotten it somewhere near school. There was simply no way I could explain how I happened to have a china bowl of hot fries and a metal fork from a diner. I hadn’t thought of how the fries would smell! I didn’t have any idea what to do, so I pushed it all under the bed as the door opened, nearly sloshing gravy on the rug. Then I turned around and looked up at her.

  “Rebecca?” Gran’s face appeared around the edge of the door. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not eating anything. Just watching TV.” I licked the salty corner of my mouth.

  Gran eyed me suspiciously. “That so?” I nodded.

  “Nice TV,” she said.

  “Um … thanks,” I said. I figured the less I said, the less likely I was to screw up.

  “You’re welcome,” she said back.

  Then, I guess because Gran is the best grandmother in the universe, she turned and left. I knew I hadn’t fooled her, but she decided to leave me be, which gave me a little time to gobble the fries up as fast as I could. Then I didn’t know what to do with the sticky china bowl. It seemed gross to leave it under the bed. Wrappers were bad enough, but gravy would mean roaches. I knew that from the time Mary Kate and I accidentally left half an egg roll under the couch back home.

  When I heard Gran running a bubble bath about an hour later, I decided it was time to clean up my mess. I snuck out to the kitchen to get a big trash bag. Running back to my room, I dumped the bowl and napkins and fork and stuff into the bag. Then I got down on my knees and started pulling out all the old snack wrappers from my bed.

  I was working fast, with my back to the door, so I didn’t notice when the door opened. I turned around only when I heard a loud squeal. A Lew squeal.

  Behind me, Lew was shaking from excitement. “Tandy Tates!” he yelled, running toward me. He grabbed at the wrapper in my hand. When he saw that it was empty, he looked up at me. His top lip disappeared into his lower lip, which pushed out and started to tremble.

  “No more?” he said to me, about to cry. “No Tandy Tates?”

  I shook my head and pulled the Kandy Kakes wrapper out of his hand. “All gone,” I explained.

  Then—it was the weirdest thing—instead of howling and yelling for a treat, he put his head against my neck, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and said, “Lew want doh home.”

  If he’d been yelling and pitching a fit, I could have ignored him. I would have bagged up the trash and taken it out to the can right away. But he wasn’t being bratty; he was sad. He was homesick, like me. He just wanted to feel better too. He wasn’t even three, and he felt exactly like I did. I realized I hadn’t figured out anything he hadn’t figured out. From the moment the lights had gone out in our row house to right now, the only real difference between us was that he had a blanket.

  And I had a bread box.

  I looked at him, and he looked up at me. I gave him a big hug and said, “Hang on.”

  As he watched me, I put the rest of the wrappers in the bag. After that I went over to the bread box, which was open. I closed the lid and whispered, “Kandy Kakes, please?”

  I opened the box. When Lew saw what was in it, his eyes got big and his thumb fell out of his mouth. I couldn’t tell if it was because he understood about the magic or simply because there were Kandy Kakes in his immediate future. Either way, it felt really nice to make someone so happy. It felt wide open and good. In that room, with Lew, for a minute, everyone had everything they wanted. He didn’t even seem to mind that the Kandy Kakes were chocolate and not peanut butter. He just laughed, dropped his blanket, and reached out his fat little hand.

  I sat there on the floor with my brother and laughed out loud. We munched those Kandy Kakes, and then we wished for more and we munched those too. Like we were Cookie Monsters or something. Munch munch munch. His face was a revolting, chocolaty, happy-making sight.

  After he swallowed the last bite, he licked his hands and then looked up at me. “Fank you, B
abecka,” he said with a tiny bob of his head.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “More?” he asked. Not demanding, just curious.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But only if you don’t ever ever ever tell anyone about the box. Only if you keep this a secret with me, okay?”

  He nodded. His eyes were huge. He didn’t take them off the box, not even to look at me when he said, “Yup!”

  I wished for a third package of Kandy Kakes, and asked myself whether Lew could really keep the secret.

  Then I decided not to worry about it, and I wished for a Clifford stuffed doll. I wished for a new pack of crayons. I wished for a huge roll of paper like we had back at home. I wished until I thought Lew had everything he could possibly want in the world.

  That was how I let Lew in on the magic.

  When Gran got out of the bath, Lew and I were back in the kitchen, with the roll of paper spread out, drawing a picture of a lion together. I drew the outlines and Lew colored everything in. He drew a big purple scribble next to the lion. It looked like a ball of yarn.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “The lion’s daddy,” said Lew, as though the answer were obvious. As though I should have known. He changed colors and gave the daddy an orange scribble on top of what I guessed was the dad lion’s head.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Lew stared at it for a minute. “Dunno,” he said, and went back to scribbling.

  Watching Lew, I got to thinking about all the little things I’d been wishing for. Was there anything else I could get for him that would make him feel better? I hadn’t really thought at all about Lew being homesick too. I’d been thinking about myself. He was so little. I’d just thought he was having fun with Gran.

  But now I knew he wasn’t. Now it felt like we were alone in a bubble together, in the same small room. Suddenly I felt less alone, but I was also mad at myself—for using the bread box to wish for all these dumb little things for all the strangers at school I didn’t care about, when my baby brother was feeling sad.

  I decided I wasn’t going to wish for pointless things anymore. It seemed wasteful to me now. It was one thing to wish for a homesickness treat once in a while, when I really needed it, to make me feel better. But lip gloss? Pens dried out and candy got eaten. Even the diamond—what could I do with a diamond? I had all this magic, this actual magic, and what was I doing with it? What was I really getting out of it if I wasn’t making anything better?

  More to the point—what did I really want to wish for? What did we really want? What did we need?

  That night after dinner, alone in my room, I looked at the box. I thought about the wish I’d made for my mother’s present. I thought about how the box had known what my mom wanted.

  “I wish … for something that …,” I said slowly. “I wish for … whatever will make my parents get back together again.”

  I took a deep breath and opened the box.

  It was empty.

  CHAPTER 11

  For the most part, I didn’t touch the box for a few days after that. There was only one time, when my mom was missing her car keys and needed to run to the grocery store. She was in her room, rooting through the pockets of all the clothes in her dirty laundry basket and shouting, “I know they’re here someplace. Otherwise how did we get into the house?”

  I snuck into my room and whispered, “Mom’s keys, please?”

  I couldn’t help feeling just a little smug when I joined Mom in her room and dropped the keys noisily on the floor beside her.

  “Lose something?” I said.

  She looked up at me from where she was kneeling next to the pile of clothes. Lew was beside her, playing with some dirty socks.

  “Oh, thank God! Where did you find them?” she asked me.

  Before I could answer, Lew looked up from beside her, smiled, and stuck his hand in the air, something he’d been learning to do at his preschool back home. He waited for me to call on him. “Oooh! Oooh!”

  “What is it, Lew?” my mom asked him.

  I held my breath. For a minute I was sure he was going to spill the beans, but then Lew put his arm down and blinked at me. I think he was probably trying to wink, but he can’t do that, so instead he squeezed both eyes shut and laughed as he shouted, “Nuffing! Wight, Babecka?” He blinked again.

  I let out a sigh of relief. I blinked both eyes back at Lew and said, “Right.”

  As I walked away, my mom called after me, “You still haven’t told me where you found my keys!”

  I kept walking.

  Oddly enough, I found life was pretty much the same without the bread box. I went to school, where I mostly followed Hannah around, trying not to look too much like I was following Hannah around. I listened to Mr. Cook read poems out loud and did a bad job in gym class. I walked home each day. I did my homework. I ate dinner with my family and always offered to wash the dishes as soon as we were done. I kept on avoiding my mother for the most part, but that wasn’t hard, because she wasn’t around too much. She was working a lot.

  The only real difference was that now, when I was alone in the afternoons, I wasn’t so alone. Each day I spent a little more time with Lew, and that felt different. It was like he’d been a piece of furniture before, a big doll, and now he was a person, just because I’d noticed he was. Or maybe because he was in on my secret. Of course, I knew he didn’t understand half of what I said to him, but what mattered was that I said things to him. I had someone to say things to. That made life easier at school too. I spent the day collecting little things to tell Lew about, saving up stories.

  “Hannah says her favorite food is sushi, but I don’t believe her,” I’d tell him as we pushed and rolled blobs of Play-Doh around on the kitchen table. “I think she just tells people that to sound cool.”

  And Lew, who had no idea what sushi was, would hold up a smooshed red triangle and say, “Shooshee! Nom nom nom.” He’d pretend to eat the Play-Doh, and then we’d laugh and laugh.

  “Coleman is growing out his Mohawk,” I’d tell Lew.

  “Me too!” Lew would announce.

  Or I’d read him one of the poems Mr. Cook handed out in class. Sometimes he’d listen to the words, the way he listened to lullabies at night, not exactly like he understood the words, but like he enjoyed them anyway.

  Some days we went places, Lew and I. Half the time I pushed him in the stroller, and half the time he walked on his own. When he walked, I usually had to carry him at the end, but I got to like that, the feeling of having him on my hip. It felt like my hip was a little shelf. He was almost heavy enough to topple me over, but he never did. I could make it about three blocks before I’d have to put him down.

  One day he climbed into his stroller and we walked and walked. We didn’t stop walking for a long time, going farther than usual. Finally we found ourselves walking along a big, wide road, and then we crossed it and entered a cemetery. We read the gravestones, which were old and grown over. I stumbled upon the grave of the lady who wrote Gone with the Wind. Lew only wanted to knock on the doors of all the “little houses.”

  Another time we walked to the park to sit in the swings, but we didn’t swing; we just sat together in a swing, me holding Lew on my lap. It was too cold for swinging, the wind sharp against our faces. We watched a man climb a tree in the park and put Christmas lights up. I realized that Hanukkah was coming too, though nobody had mentioned it at home. I wondered if I should send something to Dad. I didn’t want to send him a gift and then have him not send me something. That would suck.

  Once Lew and I walked all the way to a big baseball stadium, which was strange to see empty. Cold and quiet and massive. We walked all the way around it. It reminded me of the Orioles games I used to go to with my dad, way up in the nosebleed section at Camden Yards.

  “Do you remember going to see baseball with Daddy?” I asked Lew.

  “No,” said Lew.

  Did he really not remember, or was he jus
t saying no? Lew liked to say no. I hoped he hadn’t really forgotten.

  Just in case, as we walked home again, I tried to remind Lew about Dad. “He’s kind of short, remember?” I said, peering over and into his stroller. Though as soon as I said it, I realized that Dad was probably very tall to Lew.

  “Otay,” said Lew.

  “He’s skinny,” I said, “and he likes anchovy pizza. Fish pizza.”

  “Ew,” said Lew.

  I guess he remembered anchovies. That made me laugh. “He hums but he doesn’t realize he’s doing it until you tell him he is.”

  Lew started humming, and I wondered if any of this mattered. None of that would add up to Dad for Lew, if he’d already started to forget. Dad would just sound like some guy, some noisy, short, skinny guy who liked fishy pizza. That wasn’t Dad any more than home was just boarded-up row houses and seagulls and snowball stands. All of those things were just words. When I tried to think of words that meant anything, they just sounded like words. They didn’t sound like the smells and the memories and the weather and the people and the day after day after day of living in a place. I couldn’t explain home. Thinking about that, pushing the stroller along, I thought about what it might feel like to be a writer, a poet. To be able to use words the right way, the best way, so people could see what you were saying. The way the poems Mr. Cook read out loud made me see things. I bet it felt cool.

  Anyway, whether Lew understood or not, I think he liked that I was talking to him. I’m pretty sure he did.

  Being with Lew made me feel like me. It made me wish I could just kind of fade back to being Rebecca. If Hannah forgot about me, I could stop trying to look bored when Mr. Cook read poems, and I wouldn’t have to listen to people getting picked on. I wouldn’t have to roll my eyes. Since I’d stopped bringing candy to school, and lip gloss and stuff, it had started to feel like that might happen anyway. Hannah wasn’t passing me notes in class so much, and she usually sat next to somebody else at the lunch table.