One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street (5 page)

Her father emerged from his dark, little office, his eyes smart and squinty in the bright morning light. His office used to be the kitchen pantry, but now it was where he spent hours telecommuting to work when Mrs. Perkins went on a business trip.

“How's my favorite nine-year-old?” asked Mr. Perkins, a joke which Bunny had heard a zillion times that year, so it wasn't really a joke anymore. And, according to her classmate Melissa Fung's aunt, if you counted the months you grew inside your mother's uterus, you were one year
older than everyone said you were, which made Bunny ten. That was the Chinese custom anyway, which made a lot of sense. Except that would add only nine months to your life, which was something else Bunny would have liked to discuss with her mother.

But at that moment Mrs. Perkins was telling Mr. Perkins about all the carrot-eating questions from mean kids. To Bunny's surprise, her father said, “Tell you what . . . You think about what you'd like your new name to be, and when Mom comes home, that's what we'll call you.”

Bunny didn't need to think about it. She'd already discussed the topic with Ali Garcia, who always had amazing ideas. “I know the most fitting name,” Ali had said. “Bonita! A name that sounds pretty, and also means ‘pretty.'”

“Bonita,” said Bunny to her parents.

“Fine,” said her mother, slipping on a crisp navy work jacket.

Now would come the giant smooch between her parents, then a kiss for her, and Mrs. Perkins would be out the door, even though she had so many questions left to ask her mother. Zillions of them.

For instance, why couldn't her mother just stay on the ground and be a real estate agent and get to see the inside
of VIPs' homes, like Leandra Jackson's mother? And why couldn't the sky be the plain old sky like it used to be in pioneer Bunion Perkins's day, instead of a sky where bad things could happen?

But there was only time for two more questions.

“Do you think that orange cone means Danger or Keep Out?” Bunny asked.

“Neither, in my opinion,” said her mother. “I wouldn't worry about it.”

“Probably means No Parking for some reason or other,” said her father. “Street cleaning, is my guess. Nothing to do with you and your friends.”

And then the most important question of all. “What time is takeoff?”

“It's supposed to be eleven forty-five,” Mrs. Perkins said. “Add a few more minutes and we'll be flying over Orange Street. I'll be waving.”

“Me, too,” said Bunny/Bonita.

Cone or no cone.

t was the mysterious stranger's birthday. He leaned against his car and gulped down a bottle of water. After that, he began to whistle the birthday song to himself. The funny thing was, it felt just like another morning, long ago, when he was ten and it was his birthday, that not-so-great birthday. The same sun heating up the oranges. The same heavy, still air in between the traffic noise. And the same . . . Holy moly! It was the same dog! The same cream-colored, foamy-mouthed, runaway Lab!

Of course it wasn't the man's dog, because the man's dog had been dead for quite a while. But for a second there, the stranger sure thought so, because everyone knows all good
dogs are like all good dogs, and there was Ruff, jumping up on him, wagging his tail, loving him up.

And soon after that, there was Bunny/Bonita coming toward the empty lot. She was carrying a copy of
Little House on the Prairie
, which she loved because it took place in times before people traveled by plane, and wearing her father's watch. The watch was the old-fashioned kind with a loudly ticking second hand, to help her keep track of the passing time, so important on this particular morning. She had just finished tapping her purple hat twice and blinking six times as two squirrels scampered by, so the mysterious stranger startled Bunny/Bonita at a particularly vulnerable moment.

She saw Ruff prancing about across the street, even though he was trained to stay on one side of the street only! She saw the stranger feeding him a tempting delicacy. And then, suddenly, she stopped walking, because the strangest thing was happening to her. It was a blistering hot day, but her sneakers were trapped in a block of ice. RUFF, COME! HE'S A DOGNAPPER! Bunny/Bonita wanted to shout. But she discovered that her mouth was frozen shut, too. She just couldn't get it to work, to yell out LEANDRA! ALI! HELP! WHERE ARE YOU?

The man could have told her that everyone had gone off
every which way, in a big huff. (Except for one of them.) But he thought Bunny/Bonita looked like a girl who never talked to strangers, and he was right about that.

“Let's go, boy,” the man said. He grabbed Ruff's collar and led him across the street, past the orange cone, and up onto the sidewalk to Ruff's stuck-to-the-spot owner. Bunny/Bonita suddenly became unthawed, hugged her dog, and escaped to the empty lot.

Then the mysterious stranger went back to his green car. He realized he was hankering for a big hunk of red velvet cake with vanilla frosting, or even better, a piece of boysenberry pie, and he was going to drive around town to find some. He'd return to the lot that afternoon, and maybe do some digging before it got dark.

range trees need nitrogen. Store-bought organic fertilizer, the kind Ms. Snoops used, has nitrogen in it, and so does dog pee. Ms. Snoops wasn't exactly thinking about dog pee when she ate her breakfast orange with gusto. And Ruff didn't know he was keeping the orange tree healthy, when he did his business under the tree.

But Ruff knew so many other things, that morning:

He knew he was sleepy.

He knew the earth smelled of stinky fertilizer and worms.

It was warm under his nose, but cooler where his belly touched the ground.

Something tiny, maybe a ladybug, was tickling his left ear.

A small rat raced through the weeds.

Mitzi the cat was watching, somewhere.

Robert, eating a PB&J sandwich behind the vine, was watching, too.

Ants scurried over and under the hollowed-out orange skins.

A wasp buzzed above Ruff's head, but not close enough to sting.

A squirrel held her breath on the branch above the wasp.

Hummingbirds whirred and hovered, like tiny helicopters among the blossoms, feeding their babies again and again.

And above them all sat Bunny/Bonita, lost in her book, her wristwatch ticking.

And also Ruff was thirsty.

And he had to pee again.

And he was much too deliciously sleepy to get up.

All that, Ruff knew.

 

Here's what Bunny/Bonita would say: “Lucky Ruff, just lying there enjoying the here and now.”

“The magic now,” Ms. Snoops would say.

But they'd be wrong.

As he lay under the orange tree dozing, then waking,
then dozing again, Ruff, in his dog-smart way was also
remembering
:

the lamb bone deep under his right paw

the two and a half rawhide bones he kept burying and digging up again

the little teapot in the lot's middle, and beside it

that wooden thing with wheels he'd chewed in half

the stones of various shapes and sizes, buried and unburied, and the two glass marbles underneath

that jar with something in it, poking up from a freshly dug-up hole

And in every corner and all along the fence:

the peanuts, nasturtium seeds, raisins, smelling of rat and cat and squirrel

(some spelling someone's name, but this Ruff didn't know—he wasn't
that
smart!),

and of course,

those two moldy shoeboxes buried near the vines.

 

Ruff also remembered the green car, though the car looked grayish to Ruff. He remembered the person who smelled like food, who got out of his car to stare at the empty lot for a long time.

“Sit, Cream!” the man said, before he gave Ruff that bit of leftover hamburger meat. Then he said, “Good dog!” when Ruff did.

Ruff remembered the meat, salty and warm. He lay under the tree, hoping for more.

“All right, all right, you've made your point,” Ms. Snoops would say. “Ruff remembers the recent past, much better than I do, as a matter of fact, but certainly not the distant past!”

Ms. Snoops would be wrong.

Didn't Ruff remember his mother, that black mutt with no name, and his father, the runaway hound? Didn't he remember sleeping in dark corners and shivering under the freeway? Foraging in garbage pails, the hunger squeezing his stomach? Didn't he remember the hard, cold cage at the pound, before the Perkins family brought him home, small and scared?

And what about those two moldy shoeboxes buried in the lot? Inside one, there was a tin of ashes and toys of that old cat Fluff. Inside the other, the bones of Moe the Macaw. One was a dear friend and one a dire enemy.

When Ruff yipped and yapped in his sleep, he was remembering all that.

Then Bunny/Bonita would probably pipe up loudly, “But you can't tell me Ruff worries about the future!”

Sure, Ruff didn't worry about his own future shoebox, or think about the poem Bunny/Bonita would one day place with his ashes:

The days are tough

Without my Ruff

We will miss you always.

(A poem similar to the one she wrote for her cat Fluff.)

 

But the near future, that's another story.

When that plane zoomed overhead and woke up Ruff at 11:50, and Bunny/Bonita whooped, “YOW-EE!” then reached up, touching the sky to save her mother, then clambered down from her branch, this is what Ruff knew:

He would lift his leg by the tree, and pee.

He would feel a whole lot better.

Then he and Bunny/Bonita would scamper home to 308 Orange Street, where his water bowl and his chew bone and his soft, odorous bed would be waiting.