Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (23 page)

“It’s okay,” Mom said. “I know you’re concerned, but school doesn’t start for nearly eight more weeks! This won’t make a difference.”

“It’ll make a difference to me!” I cried, blowing my nose in my napkin, hiccupping in full force. Evidently, she
had
been humoring me when I got measured for the uniform. This was way worse than I thought.

“I thought it would be a nice change,” Richard said, clearly terrified by my dinnertime snot explosion. “I’m sorry.”

“It will be great,” Mom said through gritted teeth. “Moxie, you’re overreacting.”

“Overreacting? Are you serious?!” Hic! “How can you expect me to leave? How can
you
leave?” Hic! “What will Nini do without us? Not to mention Grumps!” If I had any energy left, I would have stormed upstairs, but I was so worn out, I just put my head in my hands and let my tears fall onto my plate while the hiccups shook my body.

“Wait…wait a sec,” said Richard. “Hold on…I think we need a—what do you guys call it, Anne? A time-out?”

“Do-over,” said my mother, voice clipped.

“A do-over,” Richard said. “Moxie. Moxie, look at me for a second.” I shook my head. I didn’t want to look at either of them ever again.

“C’mon, Moxie. Seriously. Look at me.” Something in his voice made me bring my head up. He gave me an encouraging smile, and slid his napkin across the table to me. I blew my nose on it between hiccups. “I think we have a miscommunication here,” he said.

“I don’t,” I snapped. “You want to take us away from our home. That seems pretty clear to me.” Hic!

“I
do
want to take you away,” he answered. “On
vacation.
”

“Wha-what?” I cocked my head at him and hiccupped again. He nodded.

“Vacation,” he said the word slowly and clearly. “That’s not what you were thinking, was it?”

I shook my head, unable to speak. They
weren’t
getting married. I
wasn’t
going to move. All of this anxiety was over a stupid
vacation.

I was such an idiot.

But the relief was so huge, I didn’t care how idiotic I was. It felt as though all the blood had drained out from my arms and legs.

Mom’s mouth was wide open. “What did you think? That we were…moving there?”

I nodded, and started crying again…tears of relief this time. “It’s just that…that…” Hic! “Richard always talks about how much he likes New Hampshire better than Boston, and you didn’t pay for my uniform, and I just fih-fih-figured…” I trailed off, sobbing. Mom slipped out of her chair and put her arm around me. I turned in to her and cried some more, soaking her shirt and not caring.

“Baby, this is our home. We’re not going
anywhere.
For
anyone.
Richard knows that. Right, Richard?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“And I didn’t pay for your uniform yet because I was waiting until I got my overtime check from those two wakes I worked last week.”

Mom and I stayed like that for a few minutes, until I got
control and my sobs stopped. When just hiccups were left, she straightened and returned to her seat. I shot into the bathroom to clean up. Add a red nose, red-rimmed eyes, and blotchy cheeks to my already banged-up body and scratched face, and you get the idea of what a pretty picture I was.

I went back to the table, feeling a heck of a lot lighter and thinking Richard was a lot less putrid.

“Okay.
Vacation.
Yeah. Sounds great. When do we leave?”

It’s amazing how a relatively normal night with my mom (minus a major freak-out over a miscommunication) wiped away nearly two weeks of constant stress. I didn’t even have any crazy dreams. My life was in a bubble of normalcy.

My bubble burst the next morning, though. Only two days left to find the art. If I made it through the Fourth of July in one piece, Mom, Richard, and I would be heading to the Kangamangus Highway at the end of next week. And knowing it wasn’t permanent made me actually look forward to it.

The “making it in one piece” part was key.

I checked in with Ollie, who asked when I was moving as soon as he came on the phone.

“Never,” I replied, and explained the misunderstanding.

“So he’s Not-so-Putrid Richard now?” he asked, laughing.

“Pretty much,” I admitted. “I’m totally lame, I know!”

After a few more minutes of ragging on me, Ollie explained that he’d been doing some research on Fenway Park too—but he’d been studying how we’d get in.

“Doesn’t look good, Moxie. The doors to the ticket gates are like giant garage doors that get locked at the end of every game.
There’s the players’ lot and the ambulance bays, which are where employees park when it’s a non-game day, but there’s security there if those doors are open. To sneak past them, we’d have to probably climb a fence on Van Ness Street.”

I groaned.

“So we’re stuck, then?”

“Not necessarily. If we’re in this boat, so is The Redhead. Our best bet is to see if we can score tickets to the game on the Fourth and pull a state house.”

I considered this. Hiding out in the state house was a huge risk, sure—but Fenway was a whole other (pardon the expression) ball game. There are security guards, Boston police officers, and the zillions of people who work there. I’d been to plenty of games, and seen them on TV, and I knew that emptying the ballpark was serious business. No stragglers.

But we were out of options. And time. I sighed.

“We’ll need a
great
plan.”

“I’m on it,” said Ollie. “People have cached at the park, so I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Cool. I’m going to talk to Grumps, see if I can get him to lay down where the last two pieces are.”

We agreed to check in later, and I headed downstairs.

At least this time Nini agreed that I wasn’t a contagious threat to anyone at Alton Rivers. While she got ready to leave, I flipped through the newspaper on her kitchen table, even though I’d checked online this morning. Again, nothing about the paintings. I nibbled a cuticle. The police
didn’t have them, so The Redhead probably did.

“So I heard you and Richard and your mother are going on vacation soon,” Nini said, a mischievous gleam in her eye. She turned onto Centre Street.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Nini. We’re going on vacation. Not moving.” I paused. “You have no idea how much that was stressing me out.”

Nini’s face softened. “I can imagine. Family is very important to you, Moxie. To all of us. And I really appreciate how supportive you’ve been of Grumps…both before and since he’s been in ARC.”

Great, now I felt guilty. As much as I loved and wanted to protect Grumps, all I’d been doing lately was betraying him—calling the police, uncovering his secrets, and—I knew this was to come—forcing things to change in a big way.

Luckily, we turned into the parking lot before I could say anything back. Iris was on the phone and she waved us through sign-in. It was another hot day, and the A/C was cranked in the reception area. The rec room? Not so much. Old people get cold really easily, so it’s always a slightly drowsy seventy-five in there. Nini stopped to speak with Mrs. Ricci and I went to find Grumps. He wasn’t on the porch or in the rec room, so I headed to his room.

The door was closed. I knocked quietly and pushed it open, not wanting to wake him if he was napping. But instead of Grumps lying on the bed, I saw a huge mess: rumpled sheets covered with clothes from his drawers, books in a crooked pile on his end table, and, smack in the middle of it, one hand
reaching into his bookshelf—The Redhead. No Grumps.

I was so shocked I couldn’t move. Neither could she. We stared at each other for a few seconds, until she sneered and pulled her hand out.

But my shock was immediately replaced with anger. How
dare
she come in here and mess with Grumps’s stuff?!
How dare she?!

I didn’t even bother with the “I’m going to act super-cool if you act super-cool” illusion that I’d been cultivating for the past two weeks.

“What the HELL are you doing in my grandfather’s room, you freak? Where is he?” I snapped. Grumps’s mirror reflected the bright red patches on my cheeks.

She glanced around, probably trying to gauge if there was any way to make it out a different door. Nope. His room has one door, and the windows are small at ARC. Can’t have the patients wandering away after dark.

“As if you didn’t know,” she snarled. Even though she wore her usual “I couldn’t care less about you” expression, she was rattled. She was desperate too, if she was checking my grandfather’s room in the middle of the day!

Too bad.

I grinned, and took two big steps to reach the side of his bed. Showing her my closed fist, I slammed it into the red
EMERGENCY
button next to his nightstand. Immediately, an alarm wailed. It’d sound at the nurses’ desk and reception—residents used it if they had a medical problem and families used it if a patient managed to wander outside.

“Busted,” I said sweetly.

Almost before the word finished hitting the air, The Redhead barreled around the bed and shoved me. I crashed into the bedside table, slamming my bruised hip. Everything—water glass, books, Grumps’s extra glasses, me—tumbled to the floor. As I gritted my teeth with pain, she took off into the hall.

Seconds later, Angel and two other staffers appeared at Grumps’s door with a crash cart and other medical devices.

“What happened?”

“Moxie, are you okay?” Angel helped me up.

I nodded, rubbing my beaten hip, and made a split-second decision: Tell the truth. “Yeah. There was someone messing with Grumps’s stuff. I nailed the alarm button and scared her.” And, almost as an afterthought, “Where’s Grumps? Is he okay?”

“OT,” Angel answered. “Your grandmother’s with him. The regular occupational therapist is on vacation this week, so we had to juggle schedules.” The other staffers left with the medical equipment, but they would return with security. “Who was in here? A shopper?”

Some Alzheimer’s patients will wander into other rooms and take something little—an item off a dresser, or a stuffed animal, or a sweater—and bring it to their own room, not really realizing they have it or that it doesn’t belong to them. The staff call these patients “shoppers.”

“No. Definitely not a shopper. A youngish woman with long red hair.” I was getting savage pleasure out of this. Why not turn up the heat on The Redhead? She’d been turning it up on me.

Security showed up a moment later, Nini with them. She clucked and fretted while they questioned me—I gave them a description of The Redhead and told them no, she didn’t have a bag or anything with her, and I didn’t think she’d taken anything from the room.

Nini, satisfied that I was in one piece and had not been traumatized, turned her attention from me to putting Grumps’s things back. She and Angel didn’t want him to see his room in such a topsy-turvy state—he was having a good day and the chaos would upset him. So he was playing checkers in the rec room with Mrs. Ricci.

“We’d like to call the police and alert them as to what happened,” one of the security guards said. “We can’t legally do anything, and need them to act on your information.”

Nini, who’d been refolding Grumps’s clothes, straightened like a soldier coming to attention.