One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street Page 3

  “Maybe we made a mistake,” her mother said.

  Bunny had heard the story a zillion times about how she was named after someone from long ago whose name was Bunny. How her parents thought the name was just right because their Bunny was such a cute, perky “bunnikins” when she was born. She was a bunnikins all right, a soft, shivery, scared one. She couldn’t imagine Leandra, for instance, letting anyone get away with making fun of her (not without punching them in the nose, or something).

  Bunny didn’t feel perky as she followed her mother down the hall. She felt the way she always felt when her mother went on a trip by plane: slowed way down, like a turtle or a snail. But then another question occurred to her: Do turtles and snails ever feel perky, in their own way?

  Before she could ask her mother that important question, Bunny’s eye caught the eye of the wonderful woman she was named after. The wonderful woman was in a photograph hanging on a whole wall of photographs of dead and alive family members. The original Bunny Perkins was one of the dead ones. She had traveled from Missouri in a wagon train to a gold-mining town in California in the 1850s.

  No one knew how the original Bunny had gotten her name. Modern-day Bunny’s grandmother, Alice Perkins, had a wooden box with long-ago Bunny Perkins’s journal inside of it. Not once did long-ago Bunny complain about her odd name in that journal. She had too many other things to think about, such as setting broken bones, delivering babies, smoking peace pipes with Native Americans, and cooking for her six children. Once, she met a roaring mountain lion by the creek near her cabin. She drew herself up as tall as she could, then hollered “AU-AU-AU-GUSTUS!” And that lion lumbered away, defeated. Later, she wrote in her journal, “I am glad my dear husband Augustus’s name sounds like a lion’s roar! I daresay I quaked and trembled, but I did what I had to do, for all of our sakes.”

  There was one thing modern-day Bunny knew for sure: Long-ago Bunny didn’t look like she quaked. And she didn’t look like a cute, perky bunnikins, either. She looked like she shot bunnikins, and skinned them and boiled them and gobbled them down in three or four bowls of rabbit stew at every meal, easy. She had a shotgun over her shoulder and she looked as tall as the bright pioneer sky. Her eyes were smart and squinty. Her mouth was a stern, familiar-looking straight line, like modern-day Grandpa Ed Perkins’s mouth, just before he soaked his feet bunions in Epsom salts. That was probably because long-ago Bunny’s feet were stuffed into skinny laced-up boots, peeking out from under her long skirt.

  “I just figured out her real name,” Bunny said grumpily. “It’s Bunion. I’m named after someone named Bunion.”

  Mrs. Perkins laughed. “Bunion is a lovely name,” she said.

  Bunny was mad at herself for cracking a joke at such a serious moment, and mad at her mother for laughing, and mad at long-ago Bunny Perkins for being so brave, even though deep down, the wonderful woman was quaking like crazy. But Bunny knew what real quaking was like. You just couldn’t hide it that easily, when you were a soft little bunnikins.

  Ruff scampered to the front door, his tail going fast like a plane’s propeller. Bunny let her dog outside. “I’ll be there soon!” she called after him, knowing he was off to dig in the empty lot.

  Ruff didn’t seem to worry whether she’d be there with him or not. Suddenly, Bunny was mad at Ruff, too. Dogs didn’t worry about anything! Not about plane crashes, or sad, sick kids like Edgar, or mean kids, or wars, or bad luck. Still, just for one day, just for one minute, Bunny wished she could be like Ruff, with no strong feelings about anything, except what was happening right then and there. Instead of worrying about the past and the present and the future, like she herself did, all in one quaking jumble.

  Her father emerged from his dark, little office, his eyes smart and squinty in the bright morning light. His office used to be the kitchen pantry, but now it was where he spent hours telecommuting to work when Mrs. Perkins went on a business trip.

  “How’s my favorite nine-year-old?” asked Mr. Perkins, a joke which Bunny had heard a zillion times that year, so it wasn’t really a joke anymore. And, according to her classmate Melissa Fung’s aunt, if you counted the months you grew inside your mother’s uterus, you were one year older than everyone said you were, which made Bunny ten. That was the Chinese custom anyway, which made a lot of sense. Except that would add only nine months to your life, which was something else Bunny would have liked to discuss with her mother.

  But at that moment Mrs. Perkins was telling Mr. Perkins about all the carrot-eating questions from mean kids. To Bunny’s surprise, her father said, “Tell you what . . . You think about what you’d like your new name to be, and when Mom comes home, that’s what we’ll call you.”

  Bunny didn’t need to think about it. She’d already discussed the topic with Ali Garcia, who always had amazing ideas. “I know the most fitting name,” Ali had said. “Bonita! A name that sounds pretty, and also means ‘pretty.’”

  “Bonita,” said Bunny to her parents.

  “Fine,” said her mother, slipping on a crisp navy work jacket.

  Now would come the giant smooch between her parents, then a kiss for her, and Mrs. Perkins would be out the door, even though she had so many questions left to ask her mother. Zillions of them.

  For instance, why couldn’t her mother just stay on the ground and be a real estate agent and get to see the inside of VIPs’ homes, like Leandra Jackson’s mother? And why couldn’t the sky be the plain old sky like it used to be in pioneer Bunion Perkins’s day, instead of a sky where bad things could happen?

  But there was only time for two more questions.

  “Do you think that orange cone means Danger or Keep Out?” Bunny asked.

  “Neither, in my opinion,” said her mother. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Probably means No Parking for some reason or other,” said her father. “Street cleaning, is my guess. Nothing to do with you and your friends.”

  And then the most important question of all. “What time is takeoff?”

  “It’s supposed to be eleven forty-five,” Mrs. Perkins said. “Add a few more minutes and we’ll be flying over Orange Street. I’ll be waving.”

  “Me, too,” said Bunny/Bonita.

  Cone or no cone.

  t was the mysterious stranger’s birthday. He leaned against his car and gulped down a bottle of water. After that, he began to whistle the birthday song to himself. The funny thing was, it felt just like another morning, long ago, when he was ten and it was his birthday, that not-so-great birthday. The same sun heating up the oranges. The same heavy, still air in between the traffic noise. And the same . . . Holy moly! It was the same dog! The same cream-colored, foamy-mouthed, runaway Lab!

  Of course it wasn’t the man’s dog, because the man’s dog had been dead for quite a while. But for a second there, the stranger sure thought so, because everyone knows all good dogs are like all good dogs, and there was Ruff, jumping up on him, wagging his tail, loving him up.

  And soon after that, there was Bunny/Bonita coming toward the empty lot. She was carrying a copy of Little House on the Prairie, which she loved because it took place in times before people traveled by plane, and wearing her father’s watch. The watch was the old-fashioned kind with a loudly ticking second hand, to help her keep track of the passing time, so important on this particular morning. She had just finished tapping her purple hat twice and blinking six times as two squirrels scampered by, so the mysterious stranger startled Bunny/Bonita at a particularly vulnerable moment.

  She saw Ruff prancing about across the street, even though he was trained to stay on one side of the street only! She saw the stranger feeding him a tempting delicacy. And then, suddenly, she stopped walking, because the strangest thing was happening to her. It was a blistering hot day, but her sneakers were trapped in a block of ice. RUFF, COME! HE’S A DOGNAPPER! Bunny/Bonita wanted to shout. But she discovered that her mouth was frozen shut, too. She just couldn’t get it to work, to yell out LEANDRA
! ALI! HELP! WHERE ARE YOU?

  The man could have told her that everyone had gone off every which way, in a big huff. (Except for one of them.) But he thought Bunny/Bonita looked like a girl who never talked to strangers, and he was right about that.

  “Let’s go, boy,” the man said. He grabbed Ruff’s collar and led him across the street, past the orange cone, and up onto the sidewalk to Ruff’s stuck-to-the-spot owner. Bunny/Bonita suddenly became unthawed, hugged her dog, and escaped to the empty lot.

  Then the mysterious stranger went back to his green car. He realized he was hankering for a big hunk of red velvet cake with vanilla frosting, or even better, a piece of boysenberry pie, and he was going to drive around town to find some. He’d return to the lot that afternoon, and maybe do some digging before it got dark.

  range trees need nitrogen. Store-bought organic fertilizer, the kind Ms. Snoops used, has nitrogen in it, and so does dog pee. Ms. Snoops wasn’t exactly thinking about dog pee when she ate her breakfast orange with gusto. And Ruff didn’t know he was keeping the orange tree healthy, when he did his business under the tree.

  But Ruff knew so many other things, that morning:

  He knew he was sleepy.

  He knew the earth smelled of stinky fertilizer and worms.

  It was warm under his nose, but cooler where his belly touched the ground.

  Something tiny, maybe a ladybug, was tickling his left ear.

  A small rat raced through the weeds.

  Mitzi the cat was watching, somewhere.

  Robert, eating a PB&J sandwich behind the vine, was watching, too.

  Ants scurried over and under the hollowed-out orange skins.

  A wasp buzzed above Ruff’s head, but not close enough to sting.

  A squirrel held her breath on the branch above the wasp.

  Hummingbirds whirred and hovered, like tiny helicopters among the blossoms, feeding their babies again and again.

  And above them all sat Bunny/Bonita, lost in her book, her wristwatch ticking.

  And also Ruff was thirsty.

  And he had to pee again.

  And he was much too deliciously sleepy to get up.

  All that, Ruff knew.

  Here’s what Bunny/Bonita would say: “Lucky Ruff, just lying there enjoying the here and now.”

  “The magic now,” Ms. Snoops would say.

  But they’d be wrong.

  As he lay under the orange tree dozing, then waking, then dozing again, Ruff, in his dog-smart way was also remembering:

  the lamb bone deep under his right paw

  the two and a half rawhide bones he kept burying and digging up again

  the little teapot in the lot’s middle, and beside it

  that wooden thing with wheels he’d chewed in half

  the stones of various shapes and sizes, buried and unburied, and the two glass marbles underneath

  that jar with something in it, poking up from a freshly dug-up hole

  And in every corner and all along the fence:

  the peanuts, nasturtium seeds, raisins, smelling of rat and cat and squirrel

  (some spelling someone’s name, but this Ruff didn’t know—he wasn’t that smart!),

  and of course,

  those two moldy shoeboxes buried near the vines.

  Ruff also remembered the green car, though the car looked grayish to Ruff. He remembered the person who smelled like food, who got out of his car to stare at the empty lot for a long time.

  “Sit, Cream!” the man said, before he gave Ruff that bit of leftover hamburger meat. Then he said, “Good dog!” when Ruff did.

  Ruff remembered the meat, salty and warm. He lay under the tree, hoping for more.

  “All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” Ms. Snoops would say. “Ruff remembers the recent past, much better than I do, as a matter of fact, but certainly not the distant past!”

  Ms. Snoops would be wrong.

  Didn’t Ruff remember his mother, that black mutt with no name, and his father, the runaway hound? Didn’t he remember sleeping in dark corners and shivering under the freeway? Foraging in garbage pails, the hunger squeezing his stomach? Didn’t he remember the hard, cold cage at the pound, before the Perkins family brought him home, small and scared?

  And what about those two moldy shoeboxes buried in the lot? Inside one, there was a tin of ashes and toys of that old cat Fluff. Inside the other, the bones of Moe the Macaw. One was a dear friend and one a dire enemy.

  When Ruff yipped and yapped in his sleep, he was remembering all that.

  Then Bunny/Bonita would probably pipe up loudly, “But you can’t tell me Ruff worries about the future!”

  Sure, Ruff didn’t worry about his own future shoebox, or think about the poem Bunny/Bonita would one day place with his ashes:

  The days are tough

  Without my Ruff

  We will miss you always.

  (A poem similar to the one she wrote for her cat Fluff.)

  But the near future, that’s another story.

  When that plane zoomed overhead and woke up Ruff at 11:50, and Bunny/Bonita whooped, “YOW-EE!” then reached up, touching the sky to save her mother, then clambered down from her branch, this is what Ruff knew:

  He would lift his leg by the tree, and pee.

  He would feel a whole lot better.

  Then he and Bunny/Bonita would scamper home to 308 Orange Street, where his water bowl and his chew bone and his soft, odorous bed would be waiting.

  hile Edgar was having his afternoon nap, Ali brought some of her dug-up treasures over to Ms. Snoops’s house. In her office, Ms. Snoops served orange-raspberry zinger tea and ambrosia, a delicious glop of orange slices mixed with coconut. Ali loved Ms. Snoops’s sunny office, with its hundreds of books that lined the walls, the sweet-smelling bowl of potpourri of orange rinds and cloves on her desk and the comfy orange and green striped sofa with its lacy antimacassars to protect the sofa’s arms from cat scratches. (Ali had learned antimacassar from Ms. Snoops, and so far it was the fanciest word she knew.) Sometimes it felt as if Ms. Snoops’s office itself were the inside of an orange; it felt safe, and she didn’t worry about Edgar as much while she was there. If she and Ms. Snoops were the same age, Ali knew they would be the best of friends.

  “I had the most wonderful idea yesterday, while I was watering the tree in the empty lot,” Ms. Snoops said.

  “Yes! That happens to me all the time! It just happened this morning!” said Ali. “What was your idea?”

  Ms. Snoops went to her desk and brought back a sheet of paper marked with a big handwritten “M.” “As soon as I got the idea, I wrote this note to myself, just so I wouldn’t forget. I’m embarrassed to tell you I can’t remember what the ‘M’ is for.”

  “‘M’ is for mystery,” said Ali, “but that doesn’t help you much. How about muffins? Maybe you were thinking of baking your delicious orange muffins. You haven’t made those in a while.”

  “No,” said Ms. Snoops. “It was more important than that.”

  “Money? Medicine?” asked Ali.

  “No, it had something to do with you, I believe.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right, but I’m not sure how. Well, let’s not let this spoil our get-together! What treasures have you brought this afternoon?”

  From her bag, Ali pulled out the round metal disk, the icy-blue stone shaped like a heart, the iron nails, the woolen sock, and the rusty cookie tin with the head inside of it. She spread everything out on the coffee table.

  Ms. Snoops placed the disk, the nails, and the sock in a separate pile. “These are common household items,” she said. She picked up the scratched metal disk. “This is part of a glass preserve jar. Everyone put up fruits and vegetables in the old days. And if they were lucky to have orange trees in their yards, they made marmalade. I maybe the only one around who still puts up her own preserves, however.” She tapped on the iron nail. “A nail is just a nail. And the sock probably fell from an
old-fashioned clothesline on a windy day. No particular memories come to mind about these articles. Hmmm . . . But this is interesting.”

  She held up the icy-blue stone. It twinkled in the sunlight from the window. “I would bet dollars to doughnuts this was one of Pug’s stones. He collected unusual ones. That boy’s pockets were so full of stones, sometimes his pants dragged. Pug would probably say this one looked like a heart.”

  “But it does!” said Ali. “Don’t you think so?”

  Ms. Snoops peered at the stone. “I guess you could say that,” she said. “Funny little guy. He drew pictures, too, like his mother. His father didn’t approve much of his artistry. He had an older brother who was good in sports, if my memory serves me.”

  “How nice that you remember all that,” said Ali. “Sometimes I forget that other families once lived on this street.”

  “I used to love the old stories when I was your age,” said Ms. Snoops. “I would pick up bits and pieces, do some digging, and fill in the holes myself, metaphorically speaking.”

  “That’s just what I like to do!” said Ali.

  “That’s what all writers do when they create stories. They steal, disguise, and make things up.”

  “I’m actually planning on becoming an archeologist, not a writer,” Ali said. Although she had to admit, sometimes making things up was a lot more fun than sticking to the facts.

  “No reason you couldn’t be both,” said Ms. Snoops. “When I—”

  Ms. Snoops stopped in mid-sentence. She reached for the rusty metal cookie tin. “What do we have here? Oh, my goodness! Can it be?” She opened the box slowly, then peered inside. “It is! It is! Shirley! Dear old Shirley! It’s so good to see you again!”

  She lovingly removed the head from the box and laid it in her lap. The doll looked up at her with its one good eye, and its smile seemed to say, Likewise, I’m sure.

  “I knew this doll when I was a young girl,” murmured Ms. Snoops. “Oh, Shirley, the memories I have of you!”