MO HAD NEVER, in her entire lifetime, which as everyone knew had been spent entirely on Fox Street, climbed Mrs. Steinbott’s porch steps. Not that she’d ever wanted to. The Baggott boys had, dozens of times, depositing a sack of dog poop or a dead mouse, ringing the doorbell and running for their cowardly, shrivel-brained lives. The Jehovah’s Witness ladies had, and a cookie-selling Girl Scout from two streets over who didn’t know any better, but nobody, nobody, was ever invited up those four gleaming white steps. Till now.
“Invited” was probably too polite a word.
“That’s far enough!”
Starchbutt swung her hand up like a traffic cop.
“You’re going to Walcotts’. You go there every day.”
“That’s right, Mrs. Steinbott. I do.” Mo attempted to make her voice pleasant. Maybe, who knew, they could have a little chat. Maybe she could ask Mrs. Steinbott why she stared at Mercedes that way and, if possible, could she cut it out? Immediately? “Mercedes Walcott is my best friend. She and I-”
“Take this.” Mrs. Steinbott picked up a box lying on a low wicker table and thrust it toward Mo. The box was entombed in pink tissue paper held together with at least half a roll of tape.
“How nice,” Mo said, still working on the pleasant tone. “Who’s this nice present for, may I ask?”
“You know!” Mrs. Steinbott sputtered. How skinny she was! A good wind would knock her flat. She narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t know, did you?”
“Well, it’s been a delight. I hope we can do this again.” Mo sped down the stairs. “Not!” she added as she crossed the street.
She found Mercedes, who refused to sit on the front porch anymore, lying on Da’s couch, talking on her cell.
“I know I promised.” When she saw Mo, she held up a finger and went back to the call. “She’s at a doctor’s appointment right now. The church van took her-she’s fine. She takes her insulin and…Mom, if you’re so concerned, why don’t you just come up here yourself and…I’m not being fresh!” She rolled her eyes at Mo. “Yes, I got the money. Tell him I said…” Here Mercedes’s voice choked up as if a boa constrictor had her by the throat. “Tell him I said thanks, dude.” More eye rolling. “Dude? Dad? It’s one vowel!” She put her hand over the phone. “She should be grateful I didn’t say dud.” She spoke back into the phone. “Excuse me?”
Mo set down the present and wandered around the living room, dusting furniture with the hem of her T-shirt and straightening piles of newspapers. Da did the daily crossword, in ink of course, but hadn’t gotten to it in a while. A stack of puzzles going back as far as December moldered on an end table. Mo took a bouquet of flowers that had seen better days and dumped it off the side of the porch. When she came back in, Mercedes still lay on the sofa, an arm flung over her eyes, her ultrasensitive nose twitching.
“What is that repulsive smell?” she asked.
Mo set Mrs. Steinbott’s package on Mercedes’ chest.
“Your secret admirer sent it.”
“The Queen of the Night?” Mercedes sat up. “What if it’s a bomb?”
“I don’t hear any ticking.”
Mo sat beside Mercedes while she undid the zillion layers of paper and tape. What could be so precious? Inside was a box and, inside that, more paper.
“This is creeping me out.” Mercedes pushed it into Mo’s hands. “You open it.”
“Thanks so much.” Mo extracted a little jar of pink crystals, its label yellowed and peeling at the edges. “Imperial Deluxe Rose-Scented Bubble Bath,” she read.
“Great!” Mercedes flung herself backward on the couch. “Now she’s telling me I need a bath. What next?”
“I may be wrong, but I think she’s trying to be nice.”
Mercedes’s eyes grew wide. “I only take showers! I haven’t taken a bath since I was four years old! She knows nada about me! Negative zip!”
“It’s the thought that counts. Right?”
“Look at that ancient jar! It could be from Pompeii. Crudsicles!” Mercedes threw an arm over her eyes. “I’m besieged by adults on all sides.”
Mo thought of the letter her father had just gotten, and how he’d catapulted out the door to the realty company. If she told Mercedes about that, it would prove Mercedes wasn’t the only one with problems brewing.
But what if it was the new, heartless Mercedes who answered? What if, instead of sympathizing, she replied, “Why are you so surprised? He’d do anything to quit the water department-you know it as well as I do.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Mo said. “It’s not that bad.”
Mercedes lowered her arm and peered at Mo. “It’s not that good, either. But you refuse to admit it.”
“Guess what?” The sudden urge to tell Mercedes about the fox scat shot up inside Mo like her own personal geyser. “I found something I’ve been looking for a long time.”
“What?”
Mo hesitated again. What if Mercedes wrinkled her hyperactive nose and demanded to know what, precisely, did a poop pile have to do with anything? Mo clutched the ancient jar of bath crystals. The truth was, she could no longer predict how her best friend would react to things. She couldn’t count on Mercedes to say the thing she most needed to hear.
Not to mention, what if all she’d discovered was the poop of a weird dog with a taste for raspberries?
“What?” repeated Mercedes.
Mo stood up. “Umm, nothing.”
Mercedes lowered her window-shade arm again. “If I didn’t know how much you hate secrets, I’d swear you were keeping one from me.”
“Me? Secrets? Ha ha.”
“Three-C sent me money. Want to do something?”
Mo was about to say her father had given her ten dollars when Mercedes pulled two twenties from her pocket.
“We could take the bus to the mall,” Mercedes suggested.
“The mall?” When they had some money, they usually toured the aisles of the E-Z Dollar, then got pop and chips at Abdul’s Market. “We never go to the mall.”
“And we can never do something we never do.”
“I mean…”
“Never mind. I’ll just lie here all day, perfecting my sarcophagus imitation.”
Hurt, Mo turned toward the door.
“Please,” added Mercedes, “could you kindly take that stink bomb with you?”
Stepping onto Da’s porch, the first thing Mo saw was Mrs. Steinbott standing on her lawn clutching her big pruning shears. What if she concluded Mo was stealing the wonderful present for herself? She might call the police, which she regularly did on the Baggott boys. Or attempt to stab Mo through the heart with those colossal shears, the way she’d once dispatched a UPS driver who got the wrong address. People said.
Mo slid the pink jar into the top of her shorts and pulled her T-shirt over it. As she crossed the street, Pi Baggott rumbled up on his board.
“Wazzup.” His skin was a map of scars and scrapes. His full name was Pisces, but instead of a fish, he longed to be a bird. No matter how often he wiped out, he was back on that board, trying to fly.
Speaking of boards.
“You got a new one,” she said.
Pi was the kind of person who always had something in his hands, something he was fixing or improving. While Mo could never stop considering and wondering and stewing over life’s endless complications, Pi inhabited a fret-free zone. Not that he was thoughtless. Just that the part of him that did his thinking seemed to be located in his hands, not his brain.
“I found it down the ravine. I can’t believe what people throw away. All it needed was new wheels.” He flipped it over to show her how he’d removed the axle nuts and replaced the old wheels with shining new ones. He’d scraped off the old decals, too, and sanded it smooth as glass.
“It’s better than new,” Mo said.
“Try it.” He set it at her feet and held out his hand. “I’ll hold that.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re smuggling under your shirt.”
By now Mrs. Steinbott was beckoning impatiently from her porch.
“You!” she called. “Get over here!”
“Hey,” said Pi. “Is that bloodsucker bothering you? Want me to hose her for you?”
“It’s okay.”
“Just let me know.” He jumped back on his board. “Or if you ever want to borrow my board.”
“Skateboarding’s not for me.”
Pi looked puzzled. “How do you know that?” He rolled away, popping a smooth, sweet ollie.
“You!” repeated Mrs. Steinbott. She leaned over her porch railing. Mo crossed her arms over the bulge beneath her shirt. “What did she say?”
“She said…wow. She’d never seen the like.”
Mrs. Steinbott continued to fix Mo with an expectant look, as if there must be more.
“She said…” For some unearthly reason, Mo longed to tell her crazy neighbor whatever it was she longed to hear. If only she could guess what that might be. From the foot of the steps she gazed up while Mrs. Steinbott gazed down, the two of them yearning toward each other, their longings crisscrossing above the glorious, indifferent roses.
“She liked it,” Mrs. Steinbott prompted.
Mo clutched the jar with one hand and slid the other behind her back, crossing her fingers. “She really did.”
Mrs. Steinbott nodded. Exactly the answer she’d been looking for. Settling back in her chair, she picked up her knitting needles and commenced clicking away, her eyes on Da’s front porch, as if it were an empty stage and she were waiting for the play to begin.