One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street Read online

  A poem could be written by anyone.

  And Pug wasn’t dumb when he looked at those pictures, remembering good times, hoping for more.

  One day, years later, because Mrs. Tilley had died, Larry returned to Orange Street. He was now a tall, bald man with a beard and a green car. And except for his height, he looked just like his father.

  The back bone connected to the neck bone

  The neck bone connected to the head bone

  Now hear the word of the Lord!

  Little Pop was doing his exercises. Nelson was squawking. It was a morning like all the others at 301½, except it wasn’t, because Leandra had stayed up a lot of the night to greet it. She’d even witnessed the sun rising for the very first time, as it floated up like a lazy balloon from behind the hills. The other difference was Bean, whose life they had saved. It was a wonderful thing, to save a life.

  Ali stood outside Leandra’s house, waiting to help her escort Bean back home to the orange tree. She peeked into the FedEx box. “I’m glad everything worked out. It doesn’t matter who nursed the bird, as long as it survived. You did a super job, Leandra.”

  “Thank you,” Leandra said. Then she yawned, because of all the sleep she’d missed.

  Ali thought Leandra looked different, somehow: She seemed sweeter, with a new, serene smile.

  The girls began walking down Orange Street, Leandra carrying the FedEx box, Ali thinking about the Girls Who Save Birds’ Lives Club.

  “I’m sure your wishing stone helped save Bean, too,” said Leandra.

  “Well, I don’t,” said Ali. “Wishing is babyish and dumb. You only wish when there’s nothing else you can do, and you’ve kind of given up hope. I was thinking of burying it again, except it’s so pretty.”

  “I think wishing is hoping,” Leandra said. “What’s wrong with hoping?”

  Ali stopped in her tracks. “Leandra Jackson! That is absolutely the most incandescent, amazing thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

  “What’s incandescent?” Leandra asked.

  “Shining and clear. Brilliant. I will try to remember what you said, always.” And all of a sudden, incandescently, Ali knew what else to say to her friend. “I think you’re going to make a great older sibling.”

  “You do? Really?”

  “I do. I really do.”

  Robert noticed the hummingbird parade as the girls passed beneath his window, although he didn’t realize it was a hummingbird parade. He did wonder what was in their box, why they kept bending over it, and murmuring quietly. He went to get his own shoebox, which contained a few orange chunks, an empty tuna fish can, napkins, and some leftover restaurant rice balled up in plastic wrap.

  It was time. He was ready. Ready to wow everyone— especially Ali—with the magic and wonder of his ancient trick.

  He ran outside and followed them down the street toward the empty lot.

  “The Girls Who Save Birds’ Lives Club should take turns guarding the tree,” Ali was saying, as the girls reached the lot. “We have to make sure the babies are safe, until they can fly on their own.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I can handle it,” Leandra said. “It’s my project and my bird, after all!”

  “It’s not your bird!” said Ali.

  “Well, who else’s then? OK, the mother hummingbird’s, of course, but I think I should be the human in charge.” Leandra’s new, serene smile had disappeared.

  “Well—” said Ali.

  “And I don’t like that name for our club, The Girls Who Save Birds’ Lives Club. Whee-hoo! What a mouthful!”

  “We can talk about it later,” Ali said, grinning. She was actually relieved that the old, bossy Leandra was back!

  Bunny/Bonita was coming down the street. She was finishing up her breakfast banana and trying hard to concentrate on her right-side-of-the-mouth chewing—for her mother’s safety. The good part about right-side-of-the-mouth chewing was it took her mind off her mother’s airplane, but only for a few seconds at a time. As soon as she stopped chewing, her mind went right back to her worry.

  And there were Leandra and Ali with that baby humming-bird! Bunny/Bonita tapped her mother’s gardening hat, then blinked rapidly three times. Then she checked her ticking watch. They better hurry up and put that baby back into its nest, so she’d have time for her good-luck wave. Only twenty minutes left before the plane was scheduled to fly by!

  The strange thing was, and they talked about this later, none of them had thought much about the orange cone since the other morning. It had been sitting at the curb in front of the lot for twenty-four hours, blending right in with the rest of the Orange Street scenery. This morning it had even taken on a kind of innocent glow, the color of sunrise and juice. It was only when that brown truck drove up the street, rattling to a stop right behind the orange cone, that they began to worry again about the color orange.

  man hopped from the truck and moved the orange cone from the curb to the sidewalk. When Ms. Snoops saw that man and that truck, she knew what was going to happen, just as the orange cone had forewarned.

  She dialed 9-1-1.

  “I’d like to report a murder,” she said, when the dispatcher answered.

  That wasn’t exactly true, she realized.

  “Actually, it’s an attempted murder I’m reporting.”

  That wasn’t true, either.

  “The murder hasn’t been attempted yet, but it will be attempted any minute!” She was practically whispering now, even though the attemptee outside the window couldn’t hear her.

  There was silence at the other end of the phone line.

  Probably looking me up on the computer, thought Ms. Snoops. As usual . . .

  Ms. Snoops seemed to remember causing a ruckus the last few times she’d tried to report a murder, as if she herself were the criminal. People even accused her of “crying wolf”! Wolves had nothing to do with this crime.

  And how could they, when all the wolves, well, actually coyotes, poor things, had disappeared from the area, too?

  Finally the dispatcher asked, “Is this another Bird of Paradise?”

  “No. Those have already disappeared. Extinct on Orange Street, you might say.”

  “Dying potato vine or sick night-blooming jasmine?”

  “Gone, too, from neglect and abuse.”

  Ms. Snoops supposed it was all there, lit up on the computer screen: all the old cases she’d reported in the past, to no avail.

  “Starving cactus? Sunburned azalea? Weeping willow?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Excuse me, I’ve never reported those! And certainly not a weeping willow. I don’t remember one growing in this neighborhood,” said Ms. Snoops indignantly. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard the dispatcher giggling.

  “Who, or what, is going to be murdered this time?”

  “A tree. A very old orange tree.”

  “Whoa. I’ll get the entire police force right on this.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Ma’am, I have a hard job, sometimes a sad one, and yes, I’m not taking you seriously. Thanks for making me smile this morning, but I just can’t tie up this line.”

  “I guess I understand,” said Ms. Snoops. “I just didn’t know who else to call.”

  Ms. Snoops hung up the phone and sat down on her orange and green striped couch, plucking at the antimacassars. Mitzi padded over and added a few snazzy scratches to the stripes.

  “Well, I’m glad I made someone smile,” she said to her cat.

  That was one of Ms. Snoops’s rules of life: Always try to make at least one person smile as you go about your day. It was a worthwhile rule, except it didn’t feel as worthwhile when that person was smiling at your expense—or at the expense of a worthy cause, such as saving an old tree.

  Ms. Snoops thought of another rule of life, one she was breaking that very moment.

  Don’t just sit there. Do something.

  Do something about that huge brown monstrosity of a machine
parked in front of the empty lot and its heartless, cigar-chomping driver at the controls, and his muscular helpers. She’d seen their likes before, on Orange Street. She knew what murderous crime they were contemplating. That orange tree had survived lightning, fires, and earthquakes, but it would never survive that vile crew!

  But Ms. Snoops couldn’t think of anything to do. She didn’t feel like eating her breakfast, or drinking a last glass of fresh, organic orange juice (a heartbreaking thought), or walking across the room to work at her desk. It all felt so inevitable.

  So Ms. Snoops just sat there breaking her rule for a few minutes. Then she decided to go to her desk and call 9-1-1.

  “Madam,” said the dispatcher, after Ms. Snoops had described the situation. “9-1-1 is not for garden emergencies, as someone has explained to you earlier this morning. Please don’t call us again.”

  Ms. Snoops caught her breath. “Have I already called this morning?”

  “Yes, dear. And yesterday morning, too. Maybe a little note near your phone would help.”

  “I am so, so sorry to keep bothering you,” said Ms. Snoops. “I’m having a bit of a memory problem, lately . . . I promise it won’t happen again.”

  Ms. Snoops peeled off a yellow Post-it note on which she drew a circle with 9-1-1 inside of it. She drew a thick, dark line across that circle and stuck the Post-it to the phone.

  “Now, now, magic now,” Ms. Snoops whispered.

  Then she plopped herself down on her orange and green striped couch again and began to cry. She cried and cried until her chest ached. She cried for all the neglected plants that had died over the years, and for her disappearing memory and for one beloved tree and all its stories.

  Gone, going, and about to be gone. Mitzi jumped onto her lap, licked a tear that had fallen onto Ms. Snoops’s knuckle, then curled up for a nap.

  “The only thing I can do,” Ms. Snoops said, stroking her cat, “is dream the impossible.” That was another rule of life that she tried to follow, from time to time.

  Mitzi’s tail quivered in her sleep, as if to say: If something’s impossible, what’s the point of dreaming about it?

  “I know, I know. Cats dream only of possibilities, such as chicken and catnip,” said Ms. Snoops, wiping her eyes on a sleeve of her bathrobe. “There’s no point in dreaming the impossible. It just makes me feel better.”

  Ms. Snoops began to dream and imagine and wish for two impossible things.

  First she wished she could go back in time.

  She wished she were that same girl with bony knees, that girl who liked to look at the world upside down from tree limbs, with her best friend, Gertrude; that girl who, dizzy from the blossoms’ perfume, made up stories, even before she got the idea to write them all down.

  She wished she were that girl who learned to make ambrosia from her mother, who learned it from Mrs. Stott; that girl who believed Mrs. Stott when she said ambrosia was the food of the gods and made you immortal; that girl who had pleaded, “Mr. Stott, please, please, please let your orange tree live!” when old Mr. Stott bragged about his plans for a backyard swimming pool—and Mr. Stott said that he would consider her request.

  Ms. Snoops wished she could go back in time, better yet, stop time, right on the morning of that very day, because that had been one of the happiest, amazing mornings of her life. She had been so relieved. Though old Mr. Stott died before the day of the planned backyard excavation, Ms. Snoops wanted to believe he would have honored her request.

  Now Ms. Snoops dreamed and imagined and wished for the second impossibility, the craziest one of all: She imagined she was a main character in a book, or maybe even a Hollywood movie! Just around now she would do something important to save the day.

  But I’m not a character in a book or a movie, thought Ms. Snoops. The day had come and she didn’t know how to save it. This thought made Ms. Snoops leaping mad. That is to say, so angry she leaped up from her orange and green striped couch, sending Mitzi tumbling. She ran to the window and jerked it open.

  “Hey, you! LEAVE THAT TREE ALONE!” hollered Ms. Snoops, shaking her fist at the driver of the brown truck. There went another of Ms. Snoops’s rules: Always speak in modulated tones. But Ms. Snoops didn’t care, because a rule of life maybe broken for an important reason. And that was another rule of life.

  The kids of Orange Street were standing in a knot at the edge of the empty lot. Startled, they all turned and looked up at her.

  et’s go back in time, but only a few minutes or so. Sid (according to the name embroidered on his shirt) had begun to relay the gruesome details of the killing to come. He thought the kids were interested in learning about his job.

  “First thing you do is strip off all your smaller branches and limbs,” Sid said calmly, his hands in his pockets. “Debranching, we call it.”

  Ali felt dizzy. Debranching sounded unsettling.

  “Then, we feed the branches and limbs into that wood chipper over there.” Sid, his hands still in his pockets, jerked his head toward a huge funnel on wheels, attached to the back of the truck, “That does the trick. A big mess of sawdust is what you get!”

  It was clear those weren’t gruesome details to Sid. They were just the ordinary details of Sid’s job, in which he took great pride. It was easy to imagine him telling other kids those details, say, on Career Day at his son’s or daughter’s school.

  “Then comes the stump grinder,” Sid continued.

  “The stump grinder?” whispered Bunny/Bonita. That sounded like something from a horrible, bone-chilling movie, the kind she wasn’t allowed to watch. (Except for those trailers that popped up unavoidably, every now and then on TV.)

  “Rocks the tree’s stump back and forth to loosen ’er up,” Sid said. “Then it’s easy to dig the stump out, just like a big, fat molar.”

  The kids turned to the Valencia, looking as fresh and morning-pretty as ever, not like the condemned prisoner it really was. There was a silence, and for one whole minute, even if any of them had known the entire Oxford English Dictionary by heart, not one of the kids could think of a single word to say.

  There was a peculiar smell to that moment: Sid’s cigar mixed with Ruff’s fresh poop on the parkway (which Bunny/Bonita quickly scooped into a bag), and oranges and musty leaves; or maybe it was the smell of sadness, or fear, if those feelings had a smell.

  Ruff himself ran into the lot to curl up under the tree, as usual.

  As Bunny/Bonita’s watch clicked, suddenly the words returned, in the form of questions.

  “Hey, what about all the oranges?” asked Robert.

  Robert pictured the truck crushing all the fruit, then a great geyser of juice gushing up and splattering all over Orange Street, lost magic and opportunity disappearing down curbside drains, forever.

  “Kid, oranges are a dime a dozen, or whatever the going rate is at the supermarket,” Sid said with a not unkind, lopsided grin.

  “You’ll dismantle the swing for us, won’t you?” asked Manny, who’d arrived with Edgar in his stroller.

  Sid shrugged, as if dismantling a child’s swing was a very, very minor problem. “Of course. We’ll make sure you get it.”

  “What about the birdhouse? And the wind chimes?” asked Bunny/Bonita.

  “The nests! What about the nests?” asked Ali. “You can’t see them, but believe me, there are nests there! Some are as small as walnuts.”

  Then Leandra whispered, “What about the babies?” She murmured something into her FedEx box, and that’s when Robert realized she had been comforting something tiny and alive.

  Robert also realized something else.

  It was a terrible time for a magic show.

  He could have a hundred, a thousand, a million bucks of incredible equipment in his shoebox. He could have, say, an elephant in there, an elephant just waiting to disappear into thin air! Even magic in the shape of some orange chunks and tuna fish cans! But all that wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Manny was right. If your audience
doesn’t want to be wowed, there’s just no magic there. Incredible Magic Tricks for a Rainy Day had neglected to tell him that.

  “Whoa, wait a minute, kids,” said Sid, holding up his hands as if they’d all been hurling eggs at him, instead of questions. “You’ll get your belongings, and some oranges, too, if you like. The rest, I can’t help you with.”

  “Is there anything we can do to save the tree at this point?” Manny asked. Edgar began to fuss in his stroller, as if he, too, recognized that something was very wrong.

  “Sorry,” said Sid. “The tree is on private property.”

  Bunny/Bonita glanced at her watch. There were ten more minutes to touch the sky.

  Then Ali asked the question everyone had been thinking, but hadn’t gotten around to asking: “Why are you doing this?”

  “The owner—hey, there he is now—wants to clean up and level the land. He’ll be building a house on the lot. He said something about wanting to say good-bye to the tree.” Sid chuckled. “Imagine that . . . Saying good-bye to a tree!”

  A green car was turning the corner, just around the time an amazing chain of events began to unfold on Orange Street.

  hat’s when Ms. Snoops leaned way out over her windowsill and hollered, “Hey, you! LEAVE THAT TREE ALONE!”

  Then

  the kids of Orange Street turned to look up at her.

  At that moment

  the owner of the empty lot, Larry Tilley, got out of his green car.

  And it was at that moment—

  not a moment you’d expect anyone to be pondering the meaning of words—that Ali suddenly realized the amazing complexity of the word “owner.” She thought about how dollars and cents and deeds of sale and all those thick sheaves of paper Leandra’s real estate agent mother made sure people signed, well, all that meant piddley-poo and diddley-squat.

  “YES, YOU LEAVE OUR TREE ALONE!” she hollered at Sid, who blinked and took three steps backwards, as if she’d just turned on a wind machine.

  And then