Staying Together

  “Hi,” replied Flora and Nikki in unison. Nikki added, “Nothing at Sheltering Arms yet.”

  “Well, I appreciate your looking — for an older dog,” Mr. Pennington reminded her. “Since I’m older.”

  “I know,” said Nikki. “No problem.”

  “And on the smaller side,” added Mr. Pennington.

  “I promise we’ll find just the right one.”

  Mr. Pennington was still standing by the door when the bell jangled yet again and in walked Mrs. Grindle, who owned Stuff ’n’ Nonsense across the street.

  From behind her, Flora heard Ruby hiss, “Hide!” She turned to see her sister, who was struggling along an aisle of fabric with a carton labeled DECORATIONS, come to an abrupt halt at the sight of Mrs. Grindle. But there was nowhere to hide. Worse, Flora thought Mrs. Grindle had heard Ruby. Mrs. Grindle said nothing, though, just trained her beady eyes on Min and marched across the store.

  “I have had it up to here!” she announced.

  “Good morning, Gina” was Min’s reply. (Flora stared hard at the floor. If she had looked at Nikki she would have started laughing.) “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, if it isn’t one thing, it’s another. People littering — in the store,” said Mrs. Grindle. “People talking on their cell phones all day long, people looking forever and not buying a thing. What has happened to manners?”

  “Yup. People are pigs,” whispered Nikki, and Flora had to run to the storeroom so she could laugh without being heard by Mrs. Grindle.

  The morning passed pleasantly. Mrs. Grindle finished complaining and left the store. Old Mary Woolsey stopped by to pick up a pile of clothing that customers had dropped off for mending and altering. Flora, Olivia, Nikki, and Ruby worked on the fabric flowers, and Flora and Ruby managed not to fight. At lunchtime, Olivia’s father poked his head through the door. The Walters owned a store nearby called Sincerely Yours. Robby Edwards worked there part-time. “Hello!” called Mr. Walter, waving to Gigi, who was his mother, and tugging at Olivia’s ponytail. “Stop by the store before you go home, okay?” he added, and Olivia nodded.

  By late in the afternoon, the flowers were finished. Ruby had grown tired of the project and Min had given her permission to go to Hilary’s apartment. Nikki hopped on her bicycle and headed for home, and Olivia left for Sincerely Yours. Flora had just sat down at the table in the back of the store and picked up several of the quilt squares when a shadow fell across her work. She turned around.

  “Hey, Flora,” said Margaret Malone.

  “Hi,” replied Flora.

  “Boy, that’s a big job.”

  “I know, but it’s fun.” Flora looked lovingly at her project. “Are you on your break?”

  Margaret worked at Heaven, the jewelry store next door to Sincerely Yours.

  “Yup. And I need stuff to make pillow shams. For my dorm room.”

  Flora looked at her curiously. “You got in?”

  Margaret grinned. “I got in! In exactly five months I’ll be on my way to Smith College.”

  “That’s great!” Flora jumped up and gave Margaret a hug. “I know that’s what you’ve been wanting, but … wow, I can’t imagine going away from home. I wouldn’t want to leave my friends and Min and everyone and go to a new place all by myself.”

  “You’ll feel different when you’re my age,” Margaret told her. “Really. You’ll be ready to leave. I’ll miss my dad and my friends, of course. My sister … well, I guess that’s a different story. Lydia and I have a lot of differences. I don’t think we’ll miss each other. But anyway, it’s time for me to move on.”

  Flora thought about Margaret’s words as she stitched away at the quilt squares. She and Ruby certainly had differences. They’d been drifting apart lately. Did this happen to all sisters? Flora hoped not. And she hoped that whatever had changed between her and Ruby could change back. But before that happened, Ruby had to fix the very bad thing that she had done.

  Ruby was in trouble. If only she could blame the trouble on someone else, but she couldn’t. To her credit, she was trying hard to fix things. But if you listened to her sister, Flora, not only was Ruby not fixing things but she was a big, fat, untrustworthy liar. Which wasn’t true. Well, not entirely. Ruby hadn’t told Min a lie. She just hadn’t told her something that, well, all right, Min would want to know about. But Ruby felt she could fix things without Min ever finding out what had happened.

  This, however, was what always made Flora begin talking about sins of commission versus sins of omission — sins of commission being the bad things you actually do and sins of omission being the difficult things you should do, but conveniently don’t. She made Ruby sound like a thieving, pillaging villain instead of a fifth-grader who had made a mistake.

  As Ruby walked toward Main Street after school one Monday, she thought back to the afternoon when she had decided to entertain herself by looking through Min’s drawers. She hadn’t intended to do anything wrong; she had just wanted to see what her grandmother might be keeping hidden. Peeking in drawers was fun.

  “Would you want someone going through your drawers?” Flora had asked her when she’d finally learned what had happened.

  “I wasn’t going through her drawers,” Ruby had replied. “I was just looking.”

  “All right, would you want someone looking in your drawers? Me, for instance. How would you feel if you came into your bedroom and caught me pawing through the things in your desk?”

  “Min didn’t catch me, though,” Ruby had said. “If you do something like that, you have to do it in secret. The trick is to avoid getting caught.”

  Flora had let out a sigh so enormous that Ruby had backed away from her because she could smell Flora’s breath, and Flora had been chewing mint gum, apparently for quite some time, and it had a sour edge to it.

  “Ruby, you are missing the point. Okay. Let me rephrase the question.” (Ruby had decided not to ask Flora if she’d been watching courtroom stuff on TV again.) “How would you like it if you knew I’d been looking in your drawers?”

  “But if I knew, that would mean I had caught you, wouldn’t it? And I already —”

  “Not necessarily,” Flora had interrupted her. “What if I just confessed to you that I’d been going through — I mean, looking in — your drawers?”

  Ruby had narrowed her eyes. “Have you?”

  Flora had shrugged. And when Ruby had said nothing, Flora had smiled. “See? It doesn’t feel very nice, does it?”

  Ruby turned onto Main Street now and attempted to put the conversation out of her head. She was not a villain. All that had happened was that she had found a beautiful crystal owl in a box in Min’s desk, had recognized it as something that had belonged to her mother (Min’s daughter), and had borrowed it. Well, and then she had dropped it and it had broken into many pieces. Ruby had not panicked, though. She had thought about the situation in a calm manner and had decided to replace the owl before Min discovered it was missing.

  “That is wrong on so many levels,” Flora had said after Ruby told her what had happened.

  According to Flora, what Ruby had done was wrong because:

  A. She shouldn’t have been looking in Min’s drawers in the first place.

  B. She should have told Min the truth right away.

  C. The owl was in the box along with several other items belonging to Ruby and Flora’s mother that Min had clearly been saving because they were special to her, and if Ruby replaced it with a different owl she was cheating Min out of something important.

  But if Ruby managed to find another owl that looked almost exactly like the one she had broken, and Min never knew what had happened, what was the problem? Ruby was just trying to keep Min from getting upset.

  Still, it was all very complicated, and on this afternoon, as Ruby headed into town to carry out her plan — to buy the replacement owl at long last and to sneak it back into the box in Min’s desk — she wasn’t entirely sure that what she was doing was right. Ce
rtainly, Flora thought it was far from right. But Ruby had worked awfully hard to earn money for a new owl — a new and very expensive owl. Which just went to show how much Min meant to Ruby. Ruby had been willing to work for weeks, months even, to raise enough money for a new owl. And in the process, she had tried to improve herself.

  That was another thing Flora was conveniently overlooking. When Ruby had realized that she needed to correct her mistake, she had taken a good look at herself — at all her faults — and decided she needed improving. So she had drawn up a self-improvement plan, and it had been a huge success. She’d become neater, she’d brought her grades up, and she was working hard in her dance class and in the Children’s Chorus at the community center. You’d think Flora would have been pleased that Ruby, who in November had been put on probation in the chorus after a disastrous performance, was now a regular member again and had even been given a solo in an upcoming performance. The performance was, in fact, to be a fund-raiser for the community center, the very same organization for which Flora had had the idea to make the quilts.

  But no, all Flora saw was that Ruby had stolen (stolen!) Min’s owl, broken it, was covering up her mistake, and was cheating Min.

  Well, Ruby thought now, that was Flora’s problem, not hers.

  Ruby marched herself along Main Street. In her backpack was an envelope containing the money she would need to buy the owl she had found in Camden Falls’s most expensive jewelry store and had put on hold several weeks earlier. The man who had waited on her in the store had been particularly unpleasant (Ruby had gotten the impression that he didn’t like children), so Ruby felt she should get even more credit for having to deal with such an awful grown-up. That was how much she wanted to set things right with Min. She had braved two trips to the snooty store so far and had arranged for the crabby man to hold the owl for her, even when he clearly did not want to. She couldn’t wait until she got home, secretly slipped the new owl into Min’s box, and put the whole affair behind her.

  Ruby walked by Needle and Thread, waved through the window to Min and Gigi, and continued along Main Street.

  “Ruby!”

  She had almost reached the jewelry store when she heard Hilary Nelson calling.

  “Hi, Hilary.” Ruby turned around and saw her friend hurrying after her.

  “Where are you going?” asked Hilary.

  Ruby paused. She had not told anyone except Flora about the owl, and considering how sorry she was that she had told her sister, she wasn’t about to divulge the secret to somebody else, not even Hilary, who in the last year had become one of her good friends. Hilary’s family had moved to Camden Falls from Boston the previous summer in order to open the Marquis Diner. The venture had not gotten off to a good start. Before the diner had even opened, it had been damaged in a fire. After it had been repaired, thanks partly to a lot of support from the community, it had opened and done reasonably well. But the economy (Ruby decided she hated that word) had not been kind to the Marquis.

  “I’m just, um,” (Ruby didn’t want to tell an actual lie) “I’m just sort of taking a walk.”

  “Well, guess what,” said Hilary in a dull voice.

  “What?”

  Hilary sighed deeply. “I didn’t want to tell you this in school today because I didn’t want to get upset. And just talking about it …” Hilary’s voice trailed off.

  “Oh, no. What? Tell me.” Ruby pulled Hilary to a bench by a lamppost and they sat down.

  Hilary sighed again. “Mom and Dad had a talk with Spencer and me last night.” (Spencer was Hilary’s younger brother.)

  “Yeah?”

  “And they said …” Hilary’s voice wobbled. “They said …” Now she tugged at the zipper on her coat. “Okay, they said that they’re going to see how the diner does this month. If we make a certain amount of money, then everything will be okay for a while. But if we don’t make enough, then they’re going to have to start thinking about moving back to Boston.”

  “You mean closing the diner?” yelped Ruby.

  Hilary nodded miserably. “Not only that, but if we move to Boston, we won’t be able to afford a house there until the diner sells, and that could be a long time. We sold our old house to buy the diner, you know, so …” Hilary shrugged.

  “What would you do?” Ruby couldn’t imagine being in such a precarious situation.

  “Move in with my grandparents. I love them and everything, but they don’t have a very big house — just two bedrooms. I don’t know where we’d all sleep. And I don’t want to start at another new school. Or leave Camden Falls. I like it here.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” said Ruby. “Don’t think so far ahead, okay? Your parents said they’re going to see how the diner does this month, right? Maybe it will do really well. And maybe we can help it along. We could make special signs for the windows or come up with new sandwiches.” Ruby desperately wanted to see a sandwich called The Ruby listed on the board above the counter.

  “That’s true,” said Hilary, and she smiled. “Good idea!”

  “Thank you,” Ruby replied modestly.

  Hilary ambled back to the Marquis then, and Ruby got ready to face the man in the jewelry store.

  “Pretend you’re about to go onstage,” she said to herself. “Pretend you’re getting ready for the performance of a lifetime.”

  She stood outside the jewelry store and took a series of deep breaths. In and out and in and out and in and out, she chanted slowly in her head. She closed her eyes briefly.

  Just as she was starting to feel a calmness wash over her, the door to the store flew open and the horrible man stuck his head outside and said, “Excuse me, what are you doing, little girl?”

  Ruby’s eyes opened wide; then she glared at him. It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “Hello, I will be e-lev-en on my next birthday,” but she remembered the owl and knew she had to do whatever was necessary to get it. “Sorry. Just enjoying the nice fresh air,” she replied. “May I please come in? I’m here to pick up the owl. I have all the money.”

  The man said nothing but held the door open for Ruby, and she squeezed by him. Then she reached into her backpack and pulled out the envelope with the money inside. “This is what I owe you.”

  The man looked mystified. He stepped behind the counter, with its display of necklaces and rings and watches, and peered at Ruby over his glasses. “Excuse me?”

  “The owl?” Ruby said again. “I put it on hold? I said I’d be in to pick it up in a few weeks? My name is Ruby Northrop?”

  “Just a moment. Let me see if it’s in the back.”

  See if it was in the back? It was definitely supposed to be in the back. Ruby felt panic rising. The man couldn’t have sold it. He had said he would hold it for Ruby for a month. And the month wasn’t even over yet. Not quite. Furthermore, it had taken Ruby forever to find an owl that resembled the one she had broken. She couldn’t start the search all over again. Min might look in the box and discover that the old owl was missing —

  “Ruby Northrop?” said the man. He was returning to the counter, and he was holding a box in one hand.

  “Yes!” squeaked Ruby. “I mean, yes, that’s me. Is that the owl?”

  “It is.”

  Ruby sagged against the counter. Then she handed the man the envelope with the money inside. “It’s all there,” Ruby told him. “You can count it.”

  “Always a good idea,” said the man, and he began counting.

  Five minutes later, Ruby was walking out the door, a fancy shopping bag dangling from her wrist. She began to run down Main Street. She had done it. The owl was hers. All she had to do now was sneak it back into Min’s desk, which wouldn’t be a bit of trouble since Min would be working at Needle and Thread for another hour at least.

  When Ruby let herself into the Row House, she was greeted noisily by Daisy Dear, who barked joyfully, and quietly by King Comma, who twined himself around her legs. “Hi, you guys,” said Ruby. And then she called, “Flora???
?

  “In the kitchen,” her sister replied.

  “Okay. I’ll just be in my room. I’m going to start my homework.”

  Ruby hung up her coat and flew upstairs. She closed the door to her room, tossed her backpack on her bed, and sat on the floor with the shopping bag. She drew the box out and opened it carefully. The owl was beautiful. It was perfect. It was not exactly like the one she had broken, but it was close, and she was sure Min wouldn’t notice the difference.

  Ruby set the owl on her bed, opened her door a crack, and listened for sounds from downstairs. Nothing. Cradling the owl in both hands, she tiptoed into Min’s room. She knelt in front of the desk and silently slid the bottom drawer open. There was the cardboard shoe box with the fat rubber band holding the lid in place.

  Ruby’s heart was pounding and her hands had begun to shake. “Calm, calm, calm,” she said to herself. She slid the rubber band toward one end of the box, praying that it wouldn’t break. It didn’t. She set it aside and lifted the lid. There were the other things belonging to her mother that Min had decided to keep: the snail shell, the bottle of perfume, the letter opener, the wooden box with a special penny in it. Ruby let her eyes wander over them. Then, very gently, she laid the owl in the box. She replaced the rubber band, slid the box in the drawer, and closed the drawer.

  Done.

  It was over. Ruby could end this awful chapter of her life and get on with things.

  She stood up and turned around.

  Flora was standing in the doorway.

  Flora stared stonily at Ruby. “So you did it.”

  Ruby could feel herself blushing. “Well, I said I was going to.”

  “You really are something.”

  “Look, I’m just trying to keep Min from getting upset. Honestly, Flora, she isn’t going to know that this is a different owl.” Ruby paused. “You want to see it?”

  “No, I don’t want to see the owl! You just don’t get it, do you, Ruby?”

  “Get what?”

  “What I’ve been trying to tell you all along. You are cheating Min.”