Coming Apart (9780545356152) (5 page)

She resettled herself on the bed, lay against the pillows, and turned the pages in the geology chapter of her fifth-grade science book. She was supposed to be reading about sedimentation and erosion and layers of dirt, but the chapter on mammals was much more interesting, so she studied the photos in it.

Mammals made her think of animals, and animals made her glance at her dresser, on which sat her collection of china animals. It really was quite a collection, thought Ruby. She let the book slide out of her hands and tried to count the animals from her spot on the bed. She had added to them considerably since she and Flora had moved to Camden Falls. This was mostly because across the street from Needle and Thread was a store called Stuff 'n' Nonsense, which, although it was owned by an absolutely horrible old woman named Mrs. Grindle, had a very good selection of china animals, and Ruby had spent quite a bit of her allowance money in there. She now had a china ibex and a china camel and a china elephant and a china fox and a china rhino and fifty-six other animals, including her newest purchase, a china polar bear.

Ruby sighed. Her homework was not going well. She got to her feet, stood in her room for a few moments, and just listened. When she and her sister had first moved to Camden Falls, it had taken Ruby a while to become accustomed to the sounds of the Row Houses. There was steam heat, for one thing, and squirrels running along the roof, and the noises from the houses on either side of theirs. Ruby's bedroom shared a wall with Olivia's bedroom next door, and occasionally Ruby could hear voices or laughter or faint music. All very different from the sounds of the house in which she had grown up.

But at the moment, Ruby didn't notice these things. She listened instead for sounds from the first floor. She heard nothing. Good. Perfect Flora was undoubtedly still at work in the kitchen, sitting up straight in her chair.

Ruby tiptoed to her doorway and listened again. She stepped into the hallway and listened. She walked five steps toward the back of the house and listened. When she still heard nothing, she slipped into Min's bedroom.

“Drawers,” Ruby said to herself, and nodded.

There was a total of eight drawers in Min's room: four in her bureau, three in her desk, and one in her nightstand. Now would be a good time to explore them. Grown-ups' drawers were usually interesting. Sometimes they were boring, like the top drawer in her father's bureau, which she had long ago waited patiently to explore and then had found to hold only neatly folded pairs of socks and a rock that Flora had painted when she was three. But mostly they were interesting. She had discovered that in the very back of her mother's middle desk drawer had been a box containing all of her mom's old report cards and also a fascinating plastic pin in the shape of a beetle, with black cords for legs and bobbling wire antennae. Ruby had secretly worn the pin at dinner one night, hidden under her sweater, before replacing it in the drawer. And she had read the report cards, lingering over such phrases as “a delight to teach” and “needs to work on class participation — we would like to hear Frannie's voice!”

Where were her mother's report cards now? wondered Ruby. She wanted to read them again, especially since she attended the very same school at which her mother had once been a student. And where was the bug pin?

Ruby glanced over her shoulder before gently sliding Min's top bureau drawer open. She gasped.

Underwear! And not regular old-lady underwear, but rather large old-lady underwear. Well, Min
was
on the large side. But Ruby hadn't expected her underpants to be quite so …

She held up a pair and then slipped both of her legs into one opening. I'll bet Lacey and I could wear this pair together! thought Ruby.

Ruby replaced the panties and then rummaged carefully through the rest of the drawers in the bureau, but apart from containing a lot of plus-size articles of clothing, the contents weren't particularly interesting.

The small drawer in the nightstand revealed only the remote control for the ceiling fan, a bag of almonds, and two bookmarks. But the bottom drawer of the desk was a different story. Behind all the neatly stacked folders labeled
NEEDLE AND THREAD
(Ruby had a vague idea that they might contain tax returns) was a cardboard shoe box, the lid held in place with a fat rubber band.

Aha! thought Ruby, and she sat back on her haunches and pulled out the box. She tackled the rubber band gingerly, afraid it might snap apart and hit her in the face. But the band was new and nicely pliant. Ruby set it on the floor and lifted the lid. Inside were a collection of objects that looked familiar — a silver letter opener; a round wooden box with a sheep painted on the top and a penny from 1966 (the year of her mother's birth) inside; a small crystal owl, its wings extended in flight; a half-empty bottle of perfume; and a perfectly shaped snail shell. But it wasn't until Ruby saw the plastic bug with the string legs and the wire antennae that she recognized the items as having belonged to her mother. In a flash, she could picture each one in its spot in her old house. The letter opener on her mother's desk, the perfume bottle on her bureau, the owl next to the perfume …

Ruby ran her finger over the smooth, cool surface of the owl and then lifted it gently from the box. She held it in her hand and saw tiny rainbows on the surface as she turned it in the light.

This was my mother's, thought Ruby, and Min is hiding it in her desk. (Ruby conveniently forgot that her mother was Min's daughter.) Min has all these keepsakes that were Mom's and I have … She considered. Well, she actually did have a number of things. Min had made certain that Ruby and Flora had been given several items that had belonged to their parents. Ruby had a photo album that her mother had kept when she was Ruby's age and a bracelet her mother had loved and worn nearly every day, but she didn't have anything nearly as spectacular as the crystal owl.

Ruby set the owl on the floor and cocked her head to listen. She heard a creak and jumped, her knee connecting with the box and causing an alarming rattling sound. She leaped to her feet, fully expecting to find Flora standing accusingly in Min's doorway, but everything was silent again. Ruby hurriedly replaced the rubber band on the box, stashed the box in the back of the drawer again, and closed the drawer. The owl still lay on the floor.

Ruby picked it up. She would just borrow it, she thought, like she had borrowed the bug and worn it to dinner. She carried the owl down the hall to her room and stood in front of her bureau. “Animals,” she said, “I want you to meet a new friend.” She held the owl aloft. “This is Owlie. He's been stuffed away in a box for about a year and a half, poor thing. It's really tragic. Polar Bear, you're the newcomer here. I want you to make Owlie feel welcome.” It was while Ruby was re arranging the animals that her hand slipped and she dropped the owl. She watched as, in horrible slow motion, it hit the edge of her metal wastebasket and then landed squarely on the eight-inch strip of wooden floor between the edge of her rug and the wall.

The little owl now lay in three jagged pieces, the wings broken off of the body amid a handful of smaller shards.

“Uh-oh,” said Ruby. And when she heard Flora climbing the stairs, she added, “Yipes.”

“Ruby?” called her sister.

Ruby slammed her door shut. “Just a minute!”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I need to ask you something.”

Ruby opened the door two inches. “What?”

Flora frowned and tried to peer into the room. “What do you want for dinner? Min said to start something before she gets home.”

“Spaghetti,” Ruby replied, and closed the door firmly.

She sat on her bed and stared at the mess. “Okay,” she said to herself as Flora's footsteps retreated. “Okay. This is going to be all right. First things first. Clean up the mess.”

Ruby retrieved the dustpan and broom that Min kept in her sewing room and swept the pieces of crystal into a bag, which she would dispose of very carefully later on so that no one would get cut.

Now, how to replace the owl? For that was what Ruby had already decided she must do: replace the owl before Min realized it was gone. Ruby was certain Min looked in the box from time to time (that was why the rubber band was new), so simply pretending the event hadn't taken place was out of the question. The owl would be missed eventually. But Ruby thought she had some time in which to make the switch, perhaps even several months. The question was whether the owl could actually
be
replaced. Certainly Stuff 'n' Nonsense didn't carry anything like it, but maybe one of the fancier stores on Main Street did. Ruby would check all of the gift stores as well as the new jewelry store. If necessary, she could also check the stores out at the mall someday.

Ruby's heart, which had been beating very fast, began to slow down. But she continued to sit on her bed and think. She had been in a bit of trouble recently. Actually, more than just a bit. She had nearly gotten herself expelled from the Children's Chorus back in November for not attending rehearsals and subsequently making a mess of one of her solos in the Thanksgiving concert. In the end, although she hadn't been expelled, she had very embarrassingly been put on probation. Furthermore, her grades, which had always been mediocre at best, had been slipping even further, and just the previous week, when school had started again, her teacher had called Min and arranged for a special conference, reminding her that Ruby would soon be in sixth grade, with a heavier workload and more responsibilities. Was Ruby prepared for that? Min had returned home and had quite a talk with Ruby that evening.

Miserably, Ruby began to list her other faults: She didn't listen to adults, she was careless, she was messy, she was impulsive, she didn't plan ahead, and evidently she had a tendency to be rude.

“Well, I'm going to take care of all that,” Ruby now said aloud.

She jumped up and made her way to her desk. The fact that she couldn't find anything in the stew of junk there made her more determined than ever to take matters in hand.

“I will draw up a self-improvement plan,” she announced. “And I'll start off the list with: Be neater.”

To that end, Ruby threw away all the gum wrappers and stray scraps of paper littering the surface of her desk. She stowed her pencils and pens and markers in the top drawer, and put all the nondesk items (jewelry, candy, clothing) in their proper places in her room. At last she sat down, pulled a pen and a sheet of paper from the recently tidied drawer, and wrote:
Ruby Northrop's Personal and Private Self-improvement Plan. THIS IS SERIOUS
.

Ruby began her list. It took her ten minutes to complete it and she was quite pleased with it.

1. Be neater
.

2. Go to all lessons and rehearsals unless I am sick
.

3. Plan ahead. (Ask someone how to do that.)

4. Finish homework on time
.

5. Practice lessons (chorus, tap) at home
.

6. Listen to adults and then actually do what they say
.

  7. Try very hard not to be rude. If I slip up, I should apologize right away
.

8. Check my work before I hand it in
.

9. Think before I act
.

 

(Previously, Ruby had been under the impression that this last bit of advice referred to acting on the stage, but now she realized it had a different meaning, and that maybe it would even help her to plan ahead.)

 

10. Become the Doer of Unpleasant Jobs again
.

 

In November, when Ruby had realized she needed to earn some money to buy Christmas presents, she had started a small business. She had become the Doer of Unpleasant Jobs and had distributed flyers to her neighbors announcing that she was available to do all those unappealing chores people tended to put off: cleaning out basements and storage rooms, washing windows, organizing shelves, and so forth. Her business had gotten off to a good start, but Ruby had let it lapse after she had earned enough money to buy gifts for Min and Flora and Aunt Allie and Janie and several of her friends and neighbors.

Now, Ruby realized, she would have to get her business up and running again. She had a feeling that a crystal owl (should she be able to find one identical to the one she'd broken) would not be cheap. Certainly it would cost more than $6.71, which was the sum total of Ruby's cash that afternoon.

Ruby had her work cut out for her.

But as she sat on the bed amid her unfinished homework (which she now realized she would have to complete, and complete properly, before she went to sleep that night) she felt calm. Calm and rather grown-up. The accident with the owl had been bad, but it had awakened something in Ruby that had led her to address her problems in a very adult manner. The only sad thing was that she couldn't tell anyone about the self-improvement plan, or at least not the reason behind it. That would have to remain a secret.

Oh, well, thought Ruby. I guess that's part of growing up, too. Sometimes you do something just because you have to, even if you're the only person who knows how great it is.

And she lugged her books to her desk and sat down to begin her assignments.