OPENING HER BEDROOM DOOR the next morning, she stepped into an ambush of tangled sheets and candy wrappers. Mo kicked them aside. Her eyes felt hot and grainy, as if she hadn’t slept a single wink.
Downstairs, Dottie’s cereal bowl, swimming with blue milk, sat on the floor in front of the TV. It was Saturday, and Dottie should have been deep into her lineup of favorite cartoons. Mr. Wren should have been trying to start the lawn mower, cursing, trying again, giving up, and borrowing Mr. Duong’s.
Instead, ghost house.
At least he could have left a note. Just because she wasn’t speaking to him didn’t mean he had no obligation to let her know where he was.
Unless he didn’t want her to know where he was.
Mo rushed out the side door. The morning air smelled strangely burned, as if an angry giant had lit and blown out a forest’s worth of matches. The sky hung low and heavy. On Mrs. Steinbott’s clothesline, the boiled sponges should have been swaying in the kicking-up breeze, except her line was empty.
No sponges.
No cartoons.
No car.
No father.
She went back inside and did the dishes, but her hands were clumsy and she broke a glass. Cleaning up the pieces, she nicked her finger and stuck the Band-Aid on crooked, and later, when she put the laundry in, she dripped drops of blood on her father’s T-shirt and had to rinse it in cold water and treat it with stain remover.
Wait’ll I tell Mercedes.
Oh.
No best friend.
As the washer churned, Mo dragged herself up the basement steps. Her father had forgotten his cell phone, there on the counter. Mo looked out the front window. Da’s front porch was empty. The handbag was gone from the knob. What time was Three-C due? Mo didn’t know. The way things stood, she wouldn’t even get to meet him. She’d be reduced to spying from across the street, just like Mrs. Steinbott.
Outside, the heat wrapped itself around her like a wool coat. The air smelled as if the sky were paper and the heat lightning had singed it all along the edges. Bag on his shoulder, Bernard the mailman strode up the sidewalk.
“Nothing but junk for the Wrens today. Sorry!” He handed Mo a bundle of circulars. “Instead it’s other folks’ turn to finally get their registered mail.”
Mrs. Petrone stood on her lawn, refolding a sheet of paper, her lips pressed as straight as if they held a row of bobby pins. A few doors up, Mrs. Baggott paced her front porch, a sheet of paper in her hand, too. She was gabbing into her cell phone, her voice excited. Her shoes were actually going flip as well as flop.
Bernard knocked on Mrs. Steinbott’s door. And knocked. Watching him shift the heavy bag on his shoulder, Mo’s brain served up another one of Da’s quotations. “Love is patient.” She was sure there was more to it-love was gentle, maybe? Or was it strong? Or both? Her mind was fog. A cry cut through its swirling mist.
“Mo! Guess what?” The Wild Child tore across the street.
“Stop! Halt! What’d I tell you about looking both ways?”
Dottie jerked her head from side to side, though she was already on the sidewalk.
Mo grabbed her shoulder. “I thought you went with Daddy.”
“Daddy?” Dottie wriggled free.
“The man who lives in our house? Where is he?”
But Dottie couldn’t be bothered with boring questions.
“Guess what? The Baggotts got a letter. It’s going to be M and M dough rain around here.”
The back of Mo’s neck prickled as if icy fingers had reached out and stroked it.
“Make sense,” she hissed.
“M and M’s!” Dottie giggled at her sister’s stupidity. “I hope it’s not peanut. I hope it’s regular. And I hope the dough’s quarters, not pennies.”
Mrs. Steinbott cracked her door at last. Mo watched her take Bernard’s pen and sign. The mailman clattered down the porch steps, climbed in his truck, and drove away.
“You’re seriously grounded,” Mo informed Dottie.
Dottie made a sound like a sick moose. “But it’s going to rain candy! Candy and money!”
“Inside! Before I pulverize you!”
Dottie walked backward up the driveway, her tongue stuck out. Mo pressed her fingers to her temples. The sparrows were acting oddly, fizzing up like feathery bubbles. Not a single bee hovered over Mrs. Steinbott’s roses. Mo took her neighbor’s porch steps two at a time. In all her years on Fox Street, she’d never done this without permission.
“Good morning, Mrs. Steinbott.”
Her porch gleamed. The leaves of her roses shone. Every speck of dirt and dust had been boiled or scrubbed away. Every beetle and blight had been obliterated. On this sterilized porch, the world was in precise, predictable order. Mo looked around longingly. If only she could stay here, safe and solid!
What was she thinking? Had she really just wished she could stay with Starchbutt?
Who held a piece of white paper, neatly folded and creased.
“I see you got a letter,” Mo said.
“Everyone did.” She peered at Mo. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t look right. Oh, no.” Her gaze darted across the windswept street. “Did something happen to her? Are they all right?”
“They’re fine. They’re inside getting ready for some important company. Do you mind if I read your letter?”
“Company?” Without tearing her eyes from Da’s porch, Mrs. Steinbott passed Mo the paper.
Mo recognized the stationery at once. The same opening paragraph, introducing himself, blah blah blah. She scanned the page. Here. Right in the center, like the worm in the apple.
“Every indication is that the city is considering tax abatement… Other residents have already accepted this timely offer… Act now to avoid the possibility of the jurisdiction of eminent domain. Avoid legal tangles!”
The words wriggled, wormlike, as she tried to reread them.
“Could it be?” Mrs. Starchbutt’s voice was so low, she must be talking to herself. “Could it be?”
One line squirmed worse than all the rest. Mo told herself she couldn’t have read it right.
Other residents have already accepted this timely offer.
Yes, that’s what it said. Her heart plummeted. It was too late. He’d made up his mind.
“You gave her the purse, didn’t you?”
“What?” Mo rubbed her eyes. “Um, sure.” So what if she hadn’t exactly given it to Mercedes? Why quibble over small details at a time like this?
“That’s good. You’re a very good girl.”
“Do you mind if I keep this letter?”
Mrs. Steinbott had already turned away and opened her front door. “He was sweet as a climbing rose,” she said. “Without the thorns.” The door shut quietly behind her.
Mo tried to put the letter in her pocket but realized she was wearing her one and only pair of pocketless shorts. All her others were in the wash.
The wash. She’d left the fur on the shelf beside the machine, where she’d set it when she emptied pockets. In her grogginess, she’d forgotten to take it upstairs and put it in her drawer for safekeeping. As she hurried down the front walk, Pi Baggott coasted by on his skateboard. He flipped up the board, blocking her path.
“What’s wrong?”
Mo clenched the letter in her fist. Why did people keep asking what was wrong with her? Nothing was wrong with her-it was the whole entire rest of the world that was wrong.
“Your mother,” she accused. “She got a letter about selling your house.”
A bee so big and fat it could barely keep aloft bumbled between them, landed on a purple rose, and burrowed in.
“Right-everybody did,” said Pi. “Didn’t your dad?”
Lies danced on the tip of her tongue-how easy deception had become in the last few weeks. But why should she protect her father? Why pretend he was innocent? He’d taken that crook’s offer. He was ready to trade away everything for what he wanted. He was the true traitor.
“My father’s been getting letters for weeks.”
Pi set his board down and pushed it back and forth with the toe of his shoe. Mo could see him adding up two plus two. The purple rose nodded up and down. “So he knew. Is he the one who already sold?”
How she longed to pour out every last thing to him. What a relief that would be! Instead she stared at the sidewalk.
“My mom says we gotta sell,” he went on. “If we don’t, the city takes the house anyway and hardly pays us jack.”
Pi was a patient person. You could almost hear the steady beat beat beat of his heart as he waited for her to say something. But Mo, it seemed, was only capable of staring at the sidewalk. Mo Wren, moron.
“I think she’s wrong, though,” Pi said at last. “If you read the letter real careful, it just threatens. Like a punk saying, ‘I will freakin’ bust your head if you don’t give me your jacket.’ Like that.”
He waited some more and, when Mo still didn’t speak, pushed off. Just as quickly he wheeled around. He coasted back, arms at his sides, as if he’d forgotten something. Something of great importance, judging from the serious look he bent on Mo.
“If we have to move,” he began. He touched a finger to the purple rose, and the bee shot up and away with an angry hum. “We wouldn’t live on the same street anymore.”
“You just figured that out? You’re really a genius.”
If Pi’s lips had been about to release a secret, instead they closed around it. Mo watched him zoom up the street, crouch, and leap. Beneath his feet, the board twirled in a perfect 180. In the hazy air Pi hovered as if gravity were a myth. Landing perfectly, he raced away, leaving her in the dust.