The Manny Files book1 (11 page)

Grandma closes her eyes and smiles until the sun is completely gone. She plays Puccini on the CD player, and Belly always climbs up onto the pillow next to her and watches the lights dance across the ceiling. It makes you forget that Grandma is lying in a hospital bed and has cold feet.

Grandma always sings a song about froggies going to school to Belly. Belly stares at her mouth and touches Grandma’s lip with her finger while she sings.

“‘Twenty froggies went to school….’”

When I was Belly’s age. Grandma used to babysit me. She’d put an afghan around me that smelled like she did, like Estee Lauder perfume and freshly cut grass. She’d rock me back and forth in her chair and sing my favorite song, “Little Joe the Wrangler.” It’s about a little cowboy who ends up getting crushed by his horse.

I’m not sure why I liked it so much, but when she finished singing it, I’d say, “Sing it again. Grandma.”

She usually had to sing it five or six times before I would fall asleep. I heard her singing it to Belly the other day.

Grandma doesn’t let Dad close the curtains until it is pitch-black outside.

“I don’t want to miss anything,” she says to Dad.

Grandma says that summer is her favorite time of year. She used to have a flower garden that was full of peonies, roses, and lavender. It was in her garden where Grandma taught me
how to use the bathroom outside. I was three years old, and she said that anytime I was in her garden and had to go, I should just stop where I was and pee. I peed on her peonies. I peed on her tulips. I peed in her birdbath. Then Grandma told me that she preferred it if I just peed in the dirt. I liked to go to the bathroom outside better than I did inside. Whenever I was watching television with India and had to use the restroom, I’d run outside and go off the back porch, instead of running down the hall to the toilet. This ended when Mom took me to the flower shop and I got confused. I thought I was outside and ended up peeing in a vase of calla lilies.

Mom has never been back to that store.

Grandma misses her garden. She talks about it all the time. Uncle Max brought over all her old gardening books and photographs of her gardens from many years ago. In one of them she’s standing next to a huge yellow rosebush. Mom is standing next to her. Mom looks like Belly, except her hair is brushed, there isn’t dirt on her face, and she’s wearing a shirt. Grandma looks like Mom does now, like she smells like tea and sandalwood.

One day the manny said he was going to take us to the nursery.

“We’re a little old for the nursery, aren’t we?”
I asked, trying to talk the way that Lulu does.

“Not a baby nursery, dodo,” said Lulu. “A plant nursery.”

“I know. I was just joking,” I said.

But I wasn’t.

The manny had come up with a brilliant plan, or at least that’s what Dad said. We were going to transform the backyard into a beautiful flower garden for Grandma to look out of her window at. Even Lulu liked the idea, but she said that she had thought of it first, she just hadn’t said it out loud.

Right now the backyard has our old rusted swing set and a big tractor-tire sandbox in it. We can’t play in the sandbox because all the neighborhood cats use it as a communal litter box. We discovered this when Belly came into the house one afternoon smelling like cat poop. Mom made her take a bath for an hour and then cleaned the tub with Clorox when she was done.

At the nursery the manny let us pick out flats of flowers and a huge pot to take care of as our very own. Lulu picked something called chocolate cosmos because they smelled like and were the same color as chocolate. India picked daisies. She said that daisies were like “sunshine growing out of the dirt.” Belly picked out yellow marigolds. I thought they were ugly, but they
ended up living longer than any of the other flowers. I picked petunias. I hate the name, but I think that they are very pretty. They are Mom’s favorite, too.

When we were finished picking out our own flowers, we walked through the aisles choosing flowers and plants for Grandma’s garden. We picked lilies, a hydrangea, lavender, peonies, rosemary, mint, and a rosebush with yellow roses. The manny held up a bunch of hollyhock plants behind him like a peacock tail and cawed at the top of his lungs. The other shoppers moved to a different aisle and made sure their children were close to them.

The cashier rang it all up, and the manny used Uncle Max’s credit card to pay for it. Uncle Max had sold a painting and wanted to be a part of our Grandma’s Garden Surprise plan. He couldn’t come with us, so he gave the manny his credit card. I watched how well the manny wrote Uncle Max’s signature. He had beautiful handwriting. I bet the manny probably had to spend a lot of time after school writing sentences.

We left the nursery and went down to the riverbank, where we looked for rocks to line the flower beds with. Lulu decided that she was in charge of inspecting the rocks that we found. She said that we needed big, smooth
rocks that were all around the same size. She said no to every rock that I picked out. The manny threw a rock into the river, which splashed Lulu. He pretended that it was an accident, but I think he did it on purpose, because after he did it, he said, “I’m melting, I’m melting,’” like the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz.

Lulu quickly snapped back, “‘I’ll get you, my pretty.’”

Then she looked at me. “‘And your little dog, too.’”

I laughed, but I don’t think she really meant it as a joke, because she was grumbling after she said it. If she were a cartoon, there would have been a bubble coming out of her mouth with exclamation marks, question marks, and other bad-word marks. I wish she were a cartoon. I’d erase her so the manny would want to stay forever.

I stopped trying to find round, smooth rocks and started to look for rocks that were shaped like different states. I have a collection of twenty-four state-shaped rocks. I even have the Hawaiian Islands.

I found Oklahoma and shoved it into my pocket.

When we got home, we ate dinner and waited
for the sun to go down. We had to wait until Grandma would let Dad close the curtains before we could start planting the surprise garden. We didn’t want her to see us. This meant we had to use flashlights and whisper like we were spies.

Finally the sun was going down, and Grandma and Belly were drifting to sleep in the big, shiny hospital bed. The manny grabbed flashlights, and we began the transformation. First we planted our own private flowerpots and placed them along the porch right outside of Grandma’s window. We tiptoed. Then we dug all the sand out of the tractor tire and replaced it with soil that we had bought in bags. The manny tripped over the tire and fell right on his back with a thud. I tried to cover my laughter so that I wouldn’t wake Grandma up, but it made me have to go to the bathroom.

My first pee in Grandma’s new garden.

While I tried to control my laughter, we planted the hydrangea bush in the middle of the tire. Lulu and the manny began to arrange different flower beds, using the river rocks as the edges. They left enough room so that Grandma’s wheelchair could roll through the middle. Lulu kept telling the manny what to do, like she was in charge. The manny didn’t look like it bothered him. His face stayed calm. He says that he’s
really good at looking “collected,” and that’s why he has a good chance of winning the National Poker Finals next year in Las Vegas.

We planted the rosemary, the mint, and the rest of the flowers in the river-rock-lined beds.

Uncle Max brought over an old birdbath that he had found at a flea market. Uncle Max calls the stuff he buys at flea markets “treasures.” Grandma calls the stuff “trash.” The birdbath was painted white and had a fancy base on it. It reminded me of something that might have been in the Snow Queen’s garden from the Chronicles of Narnia. Last Christmas, India was in a play called
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
that was based on the Chronicles of Narnia. She played a little girl who was turned into a stone statue. Every night after dinner she practiced standing completely still, even her face. She looked like the plastic mannequins from the front window of Saks Fifth Avenue. I tried to make her laugh by mooning her, but Mom told me to stop because I was teaching Belly inappropriate things. I got into big trouble during India’s performance because Belly turned around on her chair, pulled up her green velvet dress, and pulled down her white tights to moon India, who was up on the stage pretending to be a statue.

I said to Mom, “India was really good. She never even
cracked
a smile.”

Mom didn’t think my joke was funny. I had to unload the dishwasher for a whole month.

Once the birdbath was filled with water, the manny cooed like a dove and plunged his face into the water. Uncle Max laughed at the manny and rubbed the back of his hair the same way he rubs mine when I do something funny.

I was glad that Lulu didn’t see him do it, because I knew she’d write it in “The Manny Files.”

The manny and Uncle Max said that they would be back in the morning before Grandma woke up.

They left.

I hung my clothes for the next day on my clothes valet and wrote in my journal.

I pressed a petunia from my flowerpot in between the pages of my journal and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of bacon coming from the kitchen. I disrobed my clothes valet, hung my pajamas where my clothes had been, put on my watch, and ran down the stairs into the kitchen.

Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table in their robes having coffee. India sat next to them in her silk kimono from Uncle Max. She had her legs crossed like Mom’s. She was sipping apple cider, but I could tell that she was pretending that it was coffee. The
New York Times
was spread out all over the table. Mom had the Week in Review. Dad had the Sunday Style section. India had the special
Fashion of the Times magazine
insert. She flipped through the pages of unsmiling models with their jeans slung low around their waists.

“I hope washing your hair comes back into fashion again soon,” she said, shaking her head and sipping her apple “coffee.”

Uncle Max was standing at the stove frying bacon and sausage in a pan. Lulu was next to him scrambling eggs.

She whined, “That’s so gross. Look at all that grease. I would never eat bacon. Pigs are disgusting.”

She grabbed a sausage and shoved it into her mouth.

Uncle Max shriveled up his nose and said, “Oink! Oink! I guess you think sausage is a vegetable.”

Lulu, remembering what she had just said about pigs, pretended to be disgusted. She spit the chewed sausage into the sink and ran the disposal. She poured an entire glass of milk down her throat, the same way I do when I have to take cough medicine. It never even touches my tongue.

While Uncle Max made bacon and sausage, and Lulu scrambled eggs, the manny made toast. He asked me to go and get the breakfast-in-bed tray that I had gotten Mom for Mother’s Day. Mom kept it in the hall closet, where she keeps her grandmother’s china and where Dad used to hide his cigarettes. He quit smoking when Belly was born.

I got the breakfast-in-bed tray from the hall closet and took it in to the manny. We put eggs
and bacon on a big plate. We put toast on a small plate. And we put Grandma’s pills on a little tiny plate from Belly’s tea party set. Uncle Max poured coffee into Grandma’s Charlie Brown mug that says
GOOD GRIEF.
It was a gift from her friend June, who’d gotten it for her after the water bed hip-injury fiasco.

I learned the word
fiasco
from Ms. Grant during our school’s Halloween parade through town. I was dressed up as airport security. I even had a pretend metal-detecting wand that made
beep, beep
noises. We lined up, like we always do, from shortest to tallest. Ms. Grant was dressed up as Little Bo Peep and had on a huge, frilly skirt that was held out with a hoop at the bottom. She led our class through the streets, which were lined with our parents. I, of course, was first in line behind her. Two blocks into the parade, while I was waving at Mom, I accidentally stepped on the back of Ms. Grant’s long, frilly hoopskirt. She fell down, and before I could stop myself, I fell on top of her. The kids behind me were all waving at their parents, so nobody was paying attention. One after another my classmates piled on top of Ms. Grant. It was a dog pile of witches, ghosts, and Raggedy Anns. We climbed, one by one, off of Ms. Grant, who couldn’t get up on her own because of the big
hoopskirt. She just rolled around with her frilly, bloomer-covered legs kicking in the air until Mr. Allen grabbed her underneath her arms and pushed her back onto her feet.

“What a fiasco,” she had said to Mr. Allen.

Lulu carried the breakfast-in-bed tray in to Grandma, who was looking at a garden book with Belly. Belly was petting the side of Grandma’s cheek while Grandma flipped through the pages.

“Oh, my word,” said Grandma when she saw Lulu carrying the tray. “What a nice treat.” Belly grabbed a piece of bacon and shoved it into her mouth.

“Just wait,” I said, running to pull open the curtains.