Attaboy, Sam!

  "Gross," he murmured to himself, shaking his head. But it wasn't for him to decide, he knew. The gift was for his mother. And now he had two of her very favorite smells.

  He was already wondering what the third should be.

  4

  "Sam," Anastasia said to her brother on Monday morning before she left for school, "listen to this. I changed the first part a little. And I added another line. Tell me what you think."

  She had stopped by his bedroom on her way downstairs for breakfast. Sam was sitting on the floor beside his bed, trying to decide if his sneakers were on the correct feet before he Velcroed them closed.

  He glanced quickly toward the Lab when his sister entered the room. The Lab was secret. He didn't want Anastasia—or anyone else—to know about it.

  But Anastasia didn't even look at the Lab. If she had, it would have seemed just like Sam's old toybox to her. He had even sat some stuffed animals on its lid so that no one would suspect that secret stuff was taking place inside.

  Anastasia was interested only in the paper that she had unfolded. She read aloud to Sam:

  I'm glad that you are 38

  I'm glad you're Katherine, not just Kate.

  I'm glad our father is your mate.

  I'm glad you have good body weight.

  Sam gave his sister a perplexed, quizzical look.

  She made a face. "It's not any good, is it? That last line, I mean."

  Privately, Sam agreed with her. He thought the last line was terrible. But he didn't want to hurt Anastasia's feelings. He tried to tell her the truth in a kind way. "I don't exactly understand what it means," he said.

  "Well, it means that Mom is a good size. Not too big, not too small."

  "Why don't you say that, then?"

  Anastasia frowned. "Because I want it to rhyme."

  Sam examined his feet, decided that the sneakers were correct, and closed the Velcro fasteners. He stood up. "Why don't you just say that her size is really great? That would rhyme," he suggested.

  Anastasia stared at him. She said the new rhyme under her breath, testing it out. Then she grinned.

  "Attaboy, Sam!" she said, "you're a creative genius."

  "I know," Sam said happily.

  "But your shoes are on backward," she pointed out as she left the bedroom.

  Anastasia had left for school, clattering down the back steps in her hiking boots and calling to her friend Meredith out on the sidewalk.

  Sam's dad had left for work—he was a professor at Harvard University—muttering angrily at the car as he backed it out of the garage. Mr. Krupnik hated cars. He especially hated their car, which sometimes wouldn't start on cold mornings and which backfired noisily when it did.

  Sometimes, when his dad was muttering about the car, Sam suggested that the Krupniks should buy a new car. All the guys at nursery school talked about Lamborghinis, and when they played cars they played Lamborghinis, saying "Rrrrrrrrrr" loudly in their throats as they crawled across the floor.

  Sam did not know exactly what a Lamborghini was, but he knew it was a good thing to have, so he had told his dad that a Lamborghini was what they should buy. His dad did not think that was a good idea.

  Now that Anastasia and Mr. Krupnik were both gone, the kitchen was quiet. Sam's mom was busy at the sink, wiping the counter with a sponge. Sam, finishing a piece of toast and jam, peered through the window for his Monday carpool driver, his friend Leo Lizotta's mom. All the kids called her Mrs. Lasagna. She didn't mind.

  "Would you like it if your name was Mrs. Lasagna?" Sam asked his mother.

  She laughed. "No," she said, "because then I would be married to Mr. Lasagna. And I'd rather be married to your daddy."

  "But if you had to have a food name, what food would you choose? I'd be Sam Egg, I think."

  His mother squeezed the sponge, set it in the sink, and thought for a minute. "Let me see," she said. "I guess I'd be Mrs. Soup. Katherine Soup. Katherine Chicken Soup."

  "Why?"

  "Because I love the smell of chicken soup. It makes my mouth water to think about it. Maybe, if I have time, I'll make some chicken soup this afternoon."

  Then she frowned. "Speaking of food, I'd better get back to work on those cabbage drawings. I'm so sick of cabbages. And I hate the smell of cabbage soup."

  "Here comes Mrs. Lasagna," Sam announced. He ran to the door. His mom leaned down to give him a kiss and ran her fingers through his hair. "Mmmmm," she said. "That new shampoo is nice. Your hair smells like—"

  "Chicken soup?" Sam asked.

  Mrs. Krupnik laughed. "No. Like newly mown hay in a sunny field. And maybe a wildflower or two. Plus the smell of little children's clean hair, of course. It's a wonderful combination."

  Sam checked his pockets. He had a Ziploc bag folded in each one. These days, with such a complicated project, he needed a serious supply of Ziploc bags.

  Trotting to Mrs. Lasagna's car, he tried to remember the smells his mother had mentioned. Chicken soup. That would be pretty easy—He'd just snitch some from the pot when she was making it.

  Newly mown hay? Sunshine? Wildflowers? Where on earth would he get those things?

  But then he remembered. His mom had said that clean hair smelled of those things. And hair was just about the easiest thing in the world to collect. Heck, all you needed was scissors.

  Sam climbed into the back seat of Mrs. Lasagna's station wagon. He punched Leo hello, stuck his tongue out briefly at Jessica, and ignored Rosemary, who was in the front seat pretending to read a book about lions, even though everybody knew that she couldn't read at all yet; she still got her starting sounds all mixed up.

  Sam buckled his seat belt, and Mrs. Lasagna headed to the nursery school.

  Two hours later Sam found himself sitting in the big green time-out chair. He dangled his feet, swinging them back and forth, and sighed.

  His dad had explained to him once that even grownups needed time-outs sometimes. In hockey games—grownup hockey games, with the Boston Bruins—the guys who behaved badly had to go sit in a special place. Sam had seen them on TV. The hockey players in the special place (they called it the penalty box) sat there looking mad, and they watched the clock to see when they could come out and play again.

  It was the same at nursery school. Sam sat and sighed and looked mad and waited for the time to pass. He pretended that he was a Boston Bruin who had hit some other guy with his hockey stick and maybe knocked out his teeth.

  "Okay, Sam," Mrs. Bennett said cheerfully after about a million minutes.

  Sam climbed out of the green chair and pretended that he was skating into the game again, wearing his helmet and big gloves.

  He skated carefully over to the art corner and sat back down at the table. He picked up the colored papers and crayons he'd been working with before he got into trouble and had to have time-out.

  He noticed that Mrs. Bennett was watching him very carefully.

  Nonchalantly, Sam began drawing balloons on his paper. He drew a red balloon and a green balloon and a pink balloon with a brown happy face in it.

  Mrs. Bennett began helping another child work with clay.

  Sam picked up the plastic scissors and began to cut out his balloons. Mrs. Bennett glanced over and smiled at him.

  He smiled back. He was being good. He was only cutting out his balloons.

  When no one was watching, he touched his own head behind his right ear, just to check it out. It didn't feel too bad. There wasn't a bald spot or anything. It wasn't like the time when he was younger (and therefore dumber, and therefore naughtier) and had cut all his hair, all over his head, and ended up looking like a porcupine.

  This was just a small clump of hair, and Mrs. Bennett had gotten entirely the wrong idea because dumb Jessica had yelled and said that Sam was chopping everybody's hair off with the scissors, which was not true at all. It was only his own hair, and it was for a perfectly good reason, even though it was so secret that he had not been willing to explain it to Mrs. Benne
tt.

  Somehow, with no one looking while he sat in the time-out chair, he had managed to get the little handful of hair into his Ziploc bag and safely into his pocket.

  Sam sure hoped his mom would appreciate all the trouble he was going to for this birthday gift.

  The soup was easy, just as Sam had imagined. It was simmering on the stove when he got home. And it did smell delicious. Sam, to be perfectly honest, had not agreed with his mother at all about the smell of babies. And he really wasn't much interested in the smell of shampooed hair. But the chicken soup aroma in the kitchen was wonderful.

  His mother was in her studio. Sam climbed onto the kitchen step-stool very carefully, spooned some soup into his plastic clown cup, and then carried it secretly to his room. He couldn't resist taking a little sip when it cooled, but he didn't eat it all.

  With the door to his bedroom closed, Sam knelt beside his Lab. He took the bag of hair from his pocket, dropped the curls into the cup of soup, swirled the mixture around a little, and then added it—he didn't spill a drop, or a hair—to the large perfume bottle. He replaced the cap, tightening it carefully, and shook the bottle. The pipe made a clunking sound. The tissues that had contained the baby smells were now a dark purple mass on the bottom of the bottle. The hairs floated a bit, and he could see, holding the bottle up to the window, that he had captured two noodles from the chicken soup as well.

  It was making a rather thick, and interesting, and unusual perfume, Sam decided.

  It also didn't seem to smell very nice yet.

  5

  Tuesdays were boring. Sam didn't go to nursery school on Tuesdays. Some children did. Some children went every day. But Sam was a three-day-a-week person. So he went to nursery school only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.

  But Tuesdays were sort of boring.

  "Can I—I mean, may I — go outside?" he asked his mother.

  She looked up from the washing machine, which she was loading with blue jeans, and glanced out the window to see what the weather was like. "I suppose so," she said, "if you wear a jacket. And stay in the yard."

  She helped Sam into his blue corduroy jacket and opened the back door for him. "Do I have to stay in my yard?" he asked. "Or can, I mean may, I go into Gertrustein's yard?"

  Gertrustein was their next-door neighbor. Her real name was Gertrude Stein, but Sam had always called her Gertrustein. She was one of his best friends, and often when he went to visit, she had just baked cookies to share with him. Sometimes she told him stories about when she was a little girl seventy-five years earlier, which she said was almost the same time as dinosaurs, although she had never seen any.

  "Well," Mrs. Krupnik told him, "let me give her a call and see if she'd mind your dropping by."

  Sam waited in his yard, fooling around with his tricycle. Anastasia had shown him how to attach a piece of cardboard to the wheel with a clothespin, so that it made a loud flippety noise when he rode fast. He rode up and down the driveway, pretending to be a race car driver in a Lamborghini.

  "Okay, Sam!" his mother called from the kitchen door after a few minutes. "Mrs. Stein says she'd love to have your company!"

  "Did she maybe just make cookies?" Sam asked.

  "As a matter of fact, she told me that she just made bread!"

  Sam made a face. "Not cookies?" he asked sadly. "Bread is boring."

  His mother smiled. "Not homemade bread. There's nothing better than homemade bread. The smell of homemade bread is the most fantastic smell in the world!"

  Sam climbed off his tricycle. He felt his pocket, just to be certain that he had one of his Ziploc bags. In the old days, before he had started work on his mom's birthday present, his pockets used to be full of interesting stuff: stones and marbles and paper clips and Matchbox cars and He-man models and broken crayons. Once, for a long time, he had carried around a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. At nursery school, the children were all working on a big, hundred-piece puzzle of a zoo scene. Sam wanted to be the person to put in the last piece, so he had—well, he hadn't really stolen a piece; he had hidden a piece—so that it would be the last one. He could tell, just by looking, that it was a part of the zebra.

  But the puzzle had never been finished. There were about ten pieces missing at the end. Mrs. Bennett thought it was very mysterious, because it was a brand-new puzzle, and she said that maybe she would have to return it to the store and complain. She took it apart and put the pieces back into the box.

  When he thought no one was looking, Sam returned his little piece of zebra to the box.

  Later he saw Leo return a piece, too. And Adam. And Skipper. And Nicholas.

  Sam sighed, thinking about his pockets and that they weren't very interesting anymore. He found the opening in the hedge that led to Gertrustein's yard and pushed his way through.

  Then he remembered something. On the other side of Gertrustein's yard was the Sheehans' driveway, which contained the box of kittens.

  Sam had told his mother that he would only go to Gertrustein's house and no farther. But if he stood with his feet in Gertrustein's yard, he could lean his head over to the Sheehans' driveway and just look at the kittens.

  He decided to do that.

  FREE, the sign still said. So they hadn't changed their minds. They were still giving those kittens away absolutely free.

  From where he stood, Sam could see the big box and the sign, and he could hear the kittens. He could hear little mewing sounds. But he couldn't quite see them.

  Guiltily, he edged his feet into the Sheehans' driveway just far enough so that he could peek into the box. Just for one second he would peek.

  There were only three kittens left. One, the little gray one, was curled up sound asleep. The two yellow ones were playing, wrestling with each other and jumping around.

  Sam inched his feet a little closer. He reached down into the box with one hand and touched the sleeping gray kitten with a finger. Its fur was very soft. Its little head came up, the neck stretched, and the kitten yawned. It began to purr loudly as Sam's finger rubbed its head.

  "Hi, Sam!" The voice startled Sam, and he looked up. Mrs. Sheehan was on her porch, holding her baby. The baby wasn't as small as Alexander. It was one of those babies that wears shoes and can walk already but isn't smart yet. One of those that you have to watch every minute or it would walk into the street and stuff. Its name was Kelly. Sam didn't know if it was a boy or a girl baby. There wasn't any way to tell, yet.

  "Hi," Sam replied. He scurried back to the edge of Gertrustein's yard.

  Mrs. Sheehan smiled. "A family came last night and took both the gray and white ones!" she said. "They had two little girls, and each one will have a kitten. They're going to name them Fluffy and Scruffy!"

  "Oh," Sam said. He wondered who they were. He wondered who was so lucky that they could have two kittens of their own.

  "That little gray one would be a great pet for you, Sam," Mrs. Sheehan said. "It's as friendly as can be."

  "I know," Sam said. Under his breath, so Mrs. Sheehan wouldn't hear, he whispered sadly, "My daddy is 'lergic."

  "Well, you think about it, okay? And don't forget—a free bag of cat food goes with each kitten!" She jiggled Kelly on her hip and turned to go back into the house.

  Sam peeked into the box one more time and saw that the gray kitten had gone to sleep again. He scampered back across the yard and up the porch steps to ring Gertrustein's doorbell. As soon as the door opened, he knew that his mom had been correct about the smell of fresh bread. It was better than cookies.

  "Butter? Or jam? Or honey?" Gertrustein asked. She was holding a piece of warm bread in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other.

  Sam nodded with his mouth full. "Awvit," he said.

  "Awvit?" Gertrustein looked at him, puzzled.

  Sam swallowed hastily. "All of it," he said. "Butter. And jam. And honey.

  "Please," he added politely.

  Gertrustein nodded and began heaping butter, jam, and honey onto th
e bread.

  One of the things that Sam liked best about his elderly friend was that nothing surprised her. She had explained to him that after a person is seventy years old, nothing surprising is left.

  Sam was looking forward to that himself, although he had a few years to go, still.

  "My mom said that homemade bread is the best smell in the world," Sam said.

  Gertrustein thought that over carefully. "I think she may be right," she said finally. "But I have to admit that I love the smell of newly washed sheets that have hung on a clothesline on a very sunny, windy day in a yard where rosebushes are blooming."

  "I never smelled that," Sam said.

  "Well, I haven't either for a long time. My arthritis is so bad that I can't hang things outside, so I just put them in the dryer."

  "So does my mom, and she doesn't even have arthritis."

  "She's a busy lady, that's why. She has two children and a career. I'm going to send you home with a loaf of bread for her, Sam. Think she'll like that? I know she doesn't have time to bake."

  Sam nodded. He licked the edge of his bread, where the honey was dripping.

  "Here, let me show you something." Gertrustein got up from her chair. Slowly (her legs didn't work very fast because of her arthritis), she walked to the kitchen counter. She picked up a large blue bowl that was covered by a yellow dishtowel. She set it on the table in front of Sam.

  "Are your hands clean?" she asked.

  Sam looked at his hands. He tried to remember what they had touched lately. Tricycle. Doorbell. Kitten.

  "Yes," he told her.

  Gertrustein lifted the towel, and Sam looked at the pale mass of dough in the bowl. "That's bread dough," she explained. "It's rising, and I have to punch it down. Want to help?"

  Sam nodded eagerly. If there was ever any kind of punching to be done, Sam wanted to be the one to do it. Punching bags? Pow! Pillows? Sometimes his mom wanted the pillows on the living room couch punched into shape. Pow!