September Surprises

  “Perfect!” said Olivia. “Everything comes to about twelve dollars. That’s not bad.”

  “But my mom would really like one of those picture frames,” said Melody. “Oh, and that perfume.”

  Olivia shook her head. “Not for a budget basket.”

  Melody looked very sad. Then she said, “Olivia, I’d never ask this, except that we’re becoming such good friends. I don’t want to take advantage of you, but … you must get free stuff. I mean, it’s your store.”

  “Not rea —”

  “So maybe,” Melody rushed on, “you could,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “just let me have those things for half price.”

  Olivia drew in a deep breath and was considering her answer when a loud voice from the next aisle said, “Olivia, that is not allowed.” Robby peered at Olivia and Melody through a shelf of baskets.

  “Excuse me,” said Melody, “but I don’t think this is any of your business.”

  “It’s okay, Robby.” Olivia led Melody to a corner of the store.

  “What do you think?” asked Melody. “Half price? Please? I know you can do it.”

  Olivia knew she could not do it. But she said, “Well, since it’s for your mother’s birthday …”

  “Thank you!” exclaimed Melody.

  At the end of the day, after Melody had left the store in high spirits, and Robby, frowning at Olivia, had been picked up by his mother, the Walters gave Olivia her first afternoon’s pay.

  Olivia handed half of it back. “I let my … my friend Melody have some things for half price,” she confessed.

  “And you’re paying the other half?” said her confused father.

  “Don’t ask,” said Olivia. “It’s not important. And it won’t happen again. Really.”

  Olivia, looking at the pitiful amount of money left in her hand, wondered just what, exactly, she had done.

  The sign in the window of Needle and Thread read:

  “Flora, this is so exciting,” said Nikki. “Just think. Cage comforters for the cats and dogs at Sheltering Arms. Well, mostly for the cats. The dogs aren’t in cages so much. But some of them are. And did you know that when an animal is adopted from the shelter, the cage comforter goes with him to his new home?”

  Flora nodded vaguely. She and Nikki, Olivia, and Ruby were sitting squeezed together on one of the couches at the front of Needle and Thread. Approximately every thirty seconds, Flora pulled up her sleeve and looked at her watch.

  “Flora! Quit checking the time!” exclaimed Ruby. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “But it’s almost twelve o’clock and no one’s here yet.”

  “Maybe that’s because it’s almost twelve o’clock,” said Ruby. “The sign doesn’t say, ‘Come in slightly before noon.’ It says ‘Noon.’”

  Min called from behind the cash register, “For heaven’s sake, Flora, you know people are going to show up. We’ve been advertising the workshop for weeks. Do you girls have everything set up in back?”

  “Yes,” said Olivia. “We’re all ready.”

  The idea for the cage comforter project had been set in motion by Nikki, whose association with Sheltering Arms had begun the previous autumn. The Shermans’ home in the country seemed to attract stray dogs, and softhearted Nikki had been only too willing to feed them — until so many were showing up each day that Nikki couldn’t afford food for them all. Finally, Tobias had suggested that they talk to someone at the new animal shelter. Nikki, hesitant at first, had been pleased by her visit and with the help she had later received. When she learned that the people at Sheltering Arms tried to help the animals there feel more safe and relaxed by lining each cage with a colorful, padded “cage comforter,” she had suggested to Flora that perhaps the next community sewing project for Needle and Thread might benefit Sheltering Arms.

  “They always need cage comforters,” she had told Flora. “And you know how many animals are there.”

  “I bet a cage comforter wouldn’t be hard to make,” Flora had replied.

  And that had been the beginning. Min and Gigi had liked the idea, and this September Saturday had been selected as the date for the workshop.

  “Well,” said Flora now, looking at her watch for the umpteenth time (as Min would say), “it’s noon exactly.”

  “And there’s Mrs. Fong!” cried Olivia. “I’ll bet she’s here to help.”

  “Here comes Mr. Pennington, too,” said Ruby.

  By twelve-fifteen, every seat at the table at the back of the store was occupied. With the help of Min and Gigi, Flora and Nikki were explaining how to make a cage comforter.

  “It’s pretty simple,” said Flora, “if you’ve done any sewing.”

  “And if you’re not experienced,” Gigi interjected, “we’re here to help you.”

  “What you do,” said Flora as she handed out sheets of instructions, “is choose two rectangles of fabric. We’ve already cut the fabric for you.”

  “In two sizes,” added Nikki. “Smaller pieces are for the cages for cats and small dogs, larger ones are for the cages for big dogs.”

  “Then,” Flora continued, “you cut out a rectangle the same size from this batting. The batting is padding for the comforters. You’re going to sew the batting to the wrong side of one of your pieces of fabric —”

  “The wrong side?” asked Mr. Morris, who had brought along Lacey and Mathias.

  “Yup. You’ll see why in a minute,” said Nikki.

  “You’ll sew around all four sides,” continued Flora, “then trim the batting close to the stitching. After that, sew the two pieces of fabric right sides together, and when you turn them inside out, the batting will be on the inside. Remember to leave an opening to turn.”

  “We’ll show you how to finish the opening when you get to that point,” added Min.

  “So,” said Flora, “the pre-cut fabric is there” (she pointed to the middle of the table) “and, well, I guess that’s it.”

  “Ooh, ooh!” cried Lacey. “Look! I like this fabric.” She reached for a piece of red fabric dotted with tiny cats wearing neckties. “Do you have to use the same fabric for both sides?” she asked Flora.

  “Nope. Be creative.”

  This was followed by silence as the people around the table considered the fabric pieces — which Flora, Ruby, Olivia, and Nikki had spent hours cutting out.

  Finally, Mr. Pennington said, “I’m going to make a small comforter and use cat fabric on one side and dog fabric on the other. That way, it could go in either a cat cage or a dog cage.”

  Mathias said, “I’m going to put stripes on one side and — oh, are these pigs? Pigs on the other side!”

  “I want both sides the same,” announced a little girl Flora didn’t recognize.

  Before long, sewing machines were humming and everyone was laughing and talking. Frank arrived with trays of coffee and tea and hot chocolate from Frank’s Beans. College Pizza delivered sodas. Mrs. Walter sent Robby around with a tray of cookies from Sincerely Yours.

  “I wish I could make one,” said Robby, looking longingly at the growing pile of comforters in the middle of the table.

  “Come back after your shift,” said Olivia.

  “Okay,” said Robby. “And then I’m going to make two.”

  By four o’clock, Flora was exhausted. Stitchers had come and gone all afternoon. “Half an hour left,” said Flora to Ruby. “I just counted the comforters. You know how many we have so far?”

  “How many?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “And you thought no one was going to show up,” said Ruby. “Ha.”

  Two days later, Min drove Flora and Nikki to Sheltering Arms, the cage comforters carefully packed in bags. They carried the bags inside and presented them to Mrs. Hewitt, who had been helping Nikki with the stray dogs. Mrs. Hewitt beamed. And she invited Flora, Nikki, and Min to visit with the cats and dogs waiting to be adopted. Before Flora left that day, she watched as Mrs. Hewitt opened a cage containing a trem
bling cat, his tail tucked between his legs, and spread Mathias Morris’s comforter on the bottom. The cat waited until Mrs. Hewitt had closed the door of the cage and stepped back. Then he stood, turned around twice, and settled himself on the comforter. Flora heard a small rumbly purr start up before she followed Mrs. Hewitt back to her office.

  Vincent Barnes, who handed out assignments to his students nearly every day, had given himself an assignment: By the end of September, all his boxes would be unpacked and his new house would be in order. He thought this sounded reasonable. It was mid September now, and he felt he was about halfway through the unpacking. The unpacking would have gone more quickly, he knew, if he had moved to Camden Falls over the summer, before school started, but he hadn’t been able to do that. So the unpacking proceeded in its own time as the new school year unfolded — as homework was assigned and collected, as quizzes were graded, as teachers’ meetings were attended, and now as the seventh-graders’ book club took shape with Mr. Barnes at the helm.

  Mr. Barnes’s new house, which was actually a fairly old house, was cozy and charming and as different from the home in which he had grown up as anything he could imagine. There was a fireplace, which was large and constructed of fieldstone. There was a bay window looking out on East Elm Street. There were steps made of smooth unbroken stones leading to his front door. On the first floor were four rooms, including a dining room. On the second floor were three bedrooms. All this for one person. Also, there were one and a half bathrooms, and both toilets worked. So did all the kitchen appliances, the phone line, and the furnace.

  Vincent Barnes stepped to the end of the couch he had placed in front of the bay window and reached for the curtain pull. He drew the curtains shut, then opened them again. In his boyhood house, his mother had kept the windows covered day and night, for reasons of safety. She said that if burglars couldn’t see inside, then they wouldn’t know whether anyone was at home. Burglar bars would have been more effective but were low on the list of things the Barnes family needed. Much higher on the list were running water, a working telephone line, a working furnace, and a working stove. All of these, except for the telephone line, were the landlord’s responsibility, but he refused to return Mrs. Barnes’s phone calls, and nobody in the family had the wherewithal to track him down.

  The Barneses’ rented house was so small it could have fit handily inside the first floor of Vincent Barnes’s new house. There was one bedroom, which Vincent and his brother and sister shared, while their mother slept on the couch in the living room — the only other room in the house apart from the bathroom and the useless kitchen. Above each window in the house was nailed a sheet or a portion of a sheet. These were never raised, and the interior of the house was dim all day long. Another sheet had been hung over a clothesline in the bedroom to separate the boys’ side of the room from their sister’s.

  All these things Mr. Barnes saw clearly, even as he stood in his house — this house he owned — with its curtains and many rooms and working appliances. He saw, too, the high school to which he and the kids in his neighborhood had been bused. Most of those kids had been placed in remedial classes. But not Vincent. He had worked and studied and made his way into Advanced Placement classes, the only kid from his neighborhood to do such a thing. He hadn’t spoken to the other students in the AP classes, though, and when school ended each day, he rode the bus back to his streets of boarded-up buildings and littered yards and went straight to the bedroom and worked and read until finally his brother would angrily and wordlessly turn out the light. If Vincent wasn’t very, very careful with his books and assignments, they were apt to disappear from the bedroom.

  When Vincent finally graduated from high school with a scholarship to a college in the Northeast, he said good-bye to his family and never returned to his old home. After he landed his first teaching position, he faithfully sent money to his mother every month until she died. He had no idea where either his brother or his sister was.

  Now here he was in this first home that was all his own, finding a place for himself in a gentle and welcoming town. Every weekday morning he looked forward to arriving at Central High, and every afternoon he looked forward to returning to his house. On the weekends, he explored Main Street and took drives in the countryside. He had agreed to coach the seventh-grade boys’ basketball team, and in addition, he would now oversee the meetings of the book club that some of his students wanted to start. He would let them choose all the books themselves, he decided. He would attend meetings only to monitor discussions and offer advice.

  Mr. Barnes looked from the nine packing cartons in his living room to the sunny street outside. He opened the front door and breathed in the scents carried on the autumn wind. It was a humid day and the air was thick.

  What, he wondered, would his students choose to read for their club? He considered handing them a list of some of his favorite books — A Wrinkle in Time, Sounder, The Yearling, The Pigman, The Outsiders, maybe The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — but telling them that these were suggestions only; the actual choices would be theirs.

  Around the corner of the house on his left ran two small boys and Max, a woolly dog of dubious lineage. “Hi!” the boys called to Mr. Barnes, and he waved to them.

  A car drove down the street, followed by a truck and another car. Mr. Barnes sat on his stoop. He tipped his face to the sun. When he was young, he hadn’t been allowed to sit on the stoop. Too dangerous, his mother had said, and she was right.

  The front door of the house across the street opened and a woman hurried down the walk and climbed into her car. She had introduced herself to Mr. Barnes on the day he had moved in. She had said that she, too, was new to the neighborhood. Her name was Allie Read and she was a writer. Mr. Barnes had been impressed. He had read some of her books. He wondered now if she was working on anything new.

  Mr. Barnes checked his watch and stood up. Better unpack a few more boxes. Maybe, he thought, recalling the sight of Max romping through the yard, he would get a dog.

  Ruby hustled through the halls of Camden Falls Elementary, Hilary Nelson in front of her, awful Andy Cheney behind her. Andy liked to step on the backs of people’s heels, so Ruby hopped from side to side, avoiding him, as her class made their way to the auditorium.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” Ruby said to Hilary, sidestepping Andy once again. “I can’t wait to see who won the contest.”

  Ruby felt that this was going to be a good day. She had felt it from the moment she woke up, because when she opened her eyes, she had found King Comma staring at her from the foot of the bed. A staring cat, Ruby thought, was a good sign. Sure enough, the first thing Mrs. Caldwell had said to her students that morning after she had taken attendance and collected homework was, “Class, I have a surprise for you. At today’s assembly, the winner of the T-shirt design contest will be announced. And,” she went on as Andy let out a whoop followed by a belch, which she ignored, “the announcement will be made by a special guest.”

  “Mayor Howie?” asked Ruby, who had met Camden Falls’s mayor on more than one occasion.

  Mrs. Caldwell smiled and shook her head.

  “Somebody’s mom?” asked Ava Longyear.

  “Nope. Our special guest is … Mrs. Samson,” said Mrs. Caldwell. “She’s traveled all the way from Florida to talk to our school today and to tell us more about Clinton Elementary. And this afternoon, she’s going to visit our classroom to tell us about her students. They’re going to become your pen pals, so Mrs. Samson will give each of you a letter from your pen pal, which you can answer, and she’ll hand out your letters to her students when she returns to Florida. After that, you’ll correspond with your pen pals by mail.”

  Ah–ha, thought Ruby. So I was right. A staring cat is a good sign.

  Now Ruby and her classmates were on their way to the assembly, Ruby nimbly avoiding the tips of Andy Cheney’s shoes.

  “I wonder how many kids entered the contest,” said Hilary, turning around to glare at
Andy, since Ruby was now accidentally stepping on Hilary’s heels.

  “Eighty-one,” Ruby replied instantly. “I heard Mrs. Caldwell say so on Friday.”

  “Wow. Eighty-one. That’s a lot.”

  “You worked really hard on your design,” said Ruby, who had spent very little time on her own design.

  “I thought about it while we were packing up to move.”

  Hilary’s finished design showed an outline of the eastern coastline of the United States, Florida on the bottom, Maine on the top. Standing over Florida was a boy who extended his hand to a girl standing over Massachusetts. Their hands met in the middle, each holding one edge of an open book. “See?” Hilary had said to Ruby on the day they handed in their designs. “The kids in Massachusetts and Florida are reaching out to each other and learning from each other. That’s what the book represents — learning, and also the books we’ll be buying for the new school.”

  Ruby had been impressed. Her own design had shown an open book, too, on the left page of which she had written Massachusetts and on the right page of which she had written Florida.

  “What does it mean?” Flora had asked when Ruby had shown her the design.

  “I don’t know. It’s just, you know … books and states … and … I guess that’s it.”

  Ruby and her classmates now settled into their row of seats in the auditorium. Presently, their principal, Mrs. Covey, walked onto the stage. She greeted the students and talked to them about Hurricane Donna and the destruction it had caused in Rawlings, Florida, and the surrounding towns. “And,” she said, “here to tell you more is Juliette Samson, a fifth-grade teacher at Clinton Elementary and a friend of Mrs. Caldwell, one of our own fifth-grade teachers.”

  Mrs. Samson, a cheerful-looking woman wearing a Clinton Elementary School T-shirt, crossed the stage, shook Mrs. Covey’s hand, took the microphone, and said, “Thank you, students and teachers at Camden Falls Elementary. I want to tell you how grateful everyone at my school is that you’ve agreed to help us. Clinton wasn’t the only school destroyed by the storm. Lots of schools need help, so we’re doubly thankful for yours. I’d like to begin by showing you some photos of Rawlings before and after Hurricane Donna.”