Adventures with Waffles (4 page)

That’s just what she’s like, Lena Lid.

T
he next day, Dad began his summer project. He has one every year. The project is generally something large and difficult to build, and it’s always Mom who decides what that is. This year, Mom had decided that we should have a stone wall above the paved part of our yard. Lena was delighted. She loves balancing on walls.

“Please make it high and narrow,” she ordered.

Dad grunted from between the stones. He doesn’t like his summer projects. He would rather sit on the porch drinking coffee. We hadn’t been standing there watching him laying stones for long before he asked us to run far, far away and play.

When we had run through the hedge into Lena’s yard and gone up to her wall, I asked, “Hey, Lena, why don’t you have a dad?” and then quickly tried to cover up the question with a nervous cough.

“I do have a dad,” Lena answered.

She held her arms straight out as she walked backward, balancing on the wall. I watched her worn-out sneakers move farther and farther away.

“Where is he, then?”

Lena said she didn’t know. He’d run off before she was born.

“He ran off?” I asked in dismay.

“Can’t you hear?” Lena looked at me, irritated. Then she burst out, “What use are they, anyway?”

I didn’t really know what to answer. Do they need a use?

“They build things,” I suggested. “Walls and so on.”

Lena had a wall.

“And then they can . . . um . . .”

I’d never thought properly about what use my dad was. To get ideas, I stretched up onto my toes and peeked over the hedge. Dad was standing there muttering about his summer project, red in the face. It wasn’t too easy to come up with exactly what use he was.

“They eat boiled cabbage,” I said in the end.

Neither Lena nor I like boiled cabbage. It tastes like slime. Unfortunately we have a whole field of cabbages in Mathildewick Cove. Both my mom and Lena’s mom say that cabbage is something we should eat, for our own good. But Dad doesn’t say so. He eats my cabbage. I just heave the green glob over onto his plate when Mom’s looking the other way.

I could see that Lena didn’t think that was such a silly suggestion. She had a good view of Dad and his summer project from up there on the wall. She stood on one foot for a long while, studying him thoroughly.

“Hm,” she said eventually, jumping down.

Later in the day, we went to the general store to buy the things that Magnus had forgotten. Lena’s mom works there. She was in the middle of counting cans of sweet corn when we arrived.

“Hi!” she called out.

“Hi,” I said.

Lena just lifted her hand and waved.

When we came back out, we stopped to read the ads stuck on the door, like we always do. Today there was an extra-big one. We leaned down closer.

Lena read the card over and over.

“Do you want a dog?” I asked.

“No, but surely it must be possible to do something similar for dads too?”

Magnus had once told Lena and me about personal ads. They’re the kind of ads you put in the newspaper when you want to find a boyfriend or girlfriend. Lena had thought a bit about it, she told me. When it came to this dad thing, would it be possible to write an ad like that for a dad? There was just one disadvantage: you never knew who might be reading the paper. It could be gangsters or principals or whoever. So it was better to put up her ad at the general store, where she knew who would be shopping.

“You write it, Trille. You’ve got such good handwriting,” she said when she’d been into the shop to fetch a pen and paper. One of her pigtails was hanging off to the side at a funny angle, but she looked very determined. I felt very skeptical.

“What should we write, then?”

Lena lay down on the wooden table outside the shop and started thinking so hard that I could almost hear it.

“Write ‘Wanted: a dad,’” she began.

I sighed. “Lena, don’t you think—?”

“Write it!”

I shrugged and did as she said. After that, Lena went quiet for a long time, by her standards. At last, she cleared her throat and spoke loudly and slowly: “Must be nice and like boiled cabbage, but anyone welcome as long as he is nice and likes boiled cabbage.”

I frowned. It sounded strange.

“Are you sure we should write about cabbage, Lena?”

No, Lena wasn’t sure. But he
would
have to be nice.

In the end, the ad looked like this:

Right at the top we wrote Lena’s phone number, and then she stuck it up, just below the dog advertisement.

“You’re nuts!” I said.

“I am not nuts. I just like to speed things along,” answered Lena.

Lena really had sped things along. Just half an hour after we got back to her house, the phone rang. Actually, I don’t think Lena had thought very carefully about what we had done until that moment.

The phone kept on ringing.

“Aren’t you going to get it?” I whispered eventually.

She stood reluctantly and picked up the receiver.

“H-hello . . . ?”

Lena’s voice was as thin as a piece of thread. I put my ear up to the phone too.

“Hi, there. It’s Vera Johansen here. Was it you who put up an ad at the general store?”

Lena looked at me wide-eyed and then coughed. “Yes . . .”

“Great! Then I’ve got something that will interest you. He’s still a bit nervous, but, you know, he hasn’t peed inside once in the past two weeks!”

Lena’s chin almost fell down to her stomach. I could see her tonsils.

“Does he pee outside?” asked Lena in alarm.

“Yes, isn’t he clever?”

Vera Johansen sounded very proud. She had to be crazy, I thought. A dad who didn’t pee inside! Lena’s face took on a strange look, but she probably thought she had to pull herself together a bit, so she cleared her throat and asked a little sternly if he liked boiled cabbage. There was silence for a moment at the other end.

“No, actually, I’ve never fed him that. Is your mom home perhaps? Surely she’d like to have a say in the matter too?”

Lena sank to her knees. Vera Johansen said she would bring him over at five-ish so we could have a look at him. It would be easier to decide then.

After she had hung up, Lena stayed there, seated, staring into space.

“Does your dad pee outside, Trille?” she asked after a bit.

“Very rarely.”

Lena lay down on her stomach and banged her head on the floor.

“Oh, fish cakes! What’s Mom going to say?”

We soon found out. The door banged wide open like a thunderclap, and in came Lena’s mother with the advertisement in her hand and flushed red cheeks. She looked like Lena.

“Lena Lid! What is this?”

Down on the floor, Lena didn’t move.

“Answer me! Are you completely nuts?”

I noticed that Lena didn’t have much to say.

“She’s trying to speed things along,” I explained.

Luckily, Lena’s mom is used to being Lena’s mom, so she isn’t shocked by things like this. I looked at her and thought that there must be a lot of people who would like to marry her. She has a silver nose stud.

“I’ll never do it again,” Lena promised from down below.

Her mom sat down on the floor too. They tend to do that in their house.

“Oh, well. I managed to take it down before anyone saw it.” She laughed.

I saw that I would have to help out again: “Vera Johansen is bringing him at five o’clock.”

That afternoon, Lena’s mom called Vera Johansen seventeen times. Nobody picked up. The clock was ticking. From quarter to five, all three of us sat around the kitchen table, waiting. The minute hand crept toward the twelve, notch by notch.

“You’re making this up,” Lena’s mom said.

Then the doorbell rang.

A smiling Vera Johansen stood on the doorstep, wearing a red blouse, her head tilted at a friendly angle. We tried to see past her. None of us could spot any dads, but you never can tell. Maybe he was having a pee around the corner.

“Good afternoon,” said Lena’s mom.

“Good afternoon, good afternoon! Well, now, you must be excited to see what I’ve brought with me!” said Vera, almost shouting.

Lena’s mom tried to smile. Unsuccessfully.

“A-actually, we’ve changed our minds,” Lena stammered, but Vera Johansen was already on the way to her car. It’s impossible to stop ladies like her.

Lena isn’t so easy to stop either, as it happens. She jumped out onto the doorstep and sprinted past Vera.

“Listen, we don’t want him! They’re supposed to pee indoors!”

Just then, we heard a tiny, delicate bark from the car. A puppy’s head appeared in the window.

“A dog?” whispered Lena.

“Yes.” Vera Johansen frowned. “Wasn’t it a dog you wanted?”

Lena opened and closed her mouth several times.

“No, I wanted—”

“A chinchilla!” her mother shouted from the door.

The puppy that Vera Johansen had brought was sweeter than a chinchilla. Lena wanted to keep him, but, as her mom said, you have to draw the line somewhere. Afterward, Lena’s mom spent a long time fixing the motorcycle in order to calm down. Lena and I sat on the washing machine and watched. Now and then she asked us to pass her tools. Otherwise we stayed silent.

“You can’t just randomly put up ads, Lena,” her mom said eventually. “Didn’t you think about who we might have ended up with?”

I thought about all the bachelors who do their shopping at the general store.

“Besides, we haven’t got space for a dad here,” continued her mom from under the bike.

Lena disagreed. They could tidy up the cellar.

“There are enough men in this house already. We’ve got Trille,” her mom insisted.

Lena said that was the stupidest thing she had heard in a long time.

“Trille’s not a man!”

“What am I, then?” I asked.

“You’re a neighbor.”

Uh-huh
, I thought, wishing she’d said I was a best friend instead.