Penelope Crumb Never Forgets (2 page)

2.

T
he first mayor of Portwaller, Charles Luckett,” says Miss Stunkel, pointing to a painting of a man with a tall brown hat and round, wire-framed glasses. I get real close to have a look at his nose. This is something I like to do because I, Penelope Crumb, have a very big nose that I got from my grandpa Felix.

Mayor Luckett’s nose isn’t a big one. It’s short and flat, and small for his head. Sort of like his nose stayed behind in fourth grade while the rest of his face grew up and went to college. But his nose is the
only
small thing about him. If Mister Leonardo da Vinci (who is my all-time favorite dead artist) were here, he’d surely say, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such hardworking buttons on a shirt. The fine mayor looks to be the kind of man who is very fond of strawberry tarts.”

I wonder if Mayor Luckett was proud of his big belly or if he thought the painter should have made him look a little skinnier. When I grow up and am a real famous artist person, I’m going to draw people just as they are: big bellies, big noses, and all.

A small wooden shelf sits right beside the painting of Mayor Luckett, and on that shelf, perched on a velvet cushion, are a pair of glasses that look just like the ones in the painting.

“These can’t be his real, actual glasses,” says Angus Meeker.

“Why not?” I say.

“Because he would have been wearing his real, actual glasses when he died.”

Angus doesn’t know anything about dead people. “Not if he died in his sleep,” I say. “Therefore, he wouldn’t.” (
Therefore
is a new word I learned from my grandpa Felix. He’s always teaching me new things.)

Miss Stunkel gives me a look that says, I’ve Heard Enough Out of You, Penelope Crumb. Therefore, Be Quiet. Then she says to the whole class that indeed they are Mayor Luckett’s actual glasses and that they were loaned to the museum by his family.

“Will his family ever get his glasses back?” I ask.

“They still belong to the mayor’s family,” Miss Stunkel says. “The glasses just live at the museum now because the family wanted the citizens of Portwaller to be able to see them anytime they wish.”

I tighten the grip on my toolbox. It belonged to my dad, who is Graveyard Dead, and I know I could never let any museum have it. Not even his shoehorn, which is the only other thing I have that belonged to him. What if something happened to them?

And as if Miss Stunkel could read those very thoughts in my brain, she says, “A few years ago, the museum caught fire, and many treasured items, including some of the oldest pictures of Portwaller, were lost.”

“You mean, gone forever?” I say.

Miss Stunkel touches her Friday lizard pin. “Nothing could be done to save them, I’m afraid. But thanks to the donations from some very generous Portwallerians, the building has been repaired. You may have noticed the donation box when we came in.”

I hug the toolbox to my chest and wish that gone forever didn’t always mean gone forever.

“Let’s keep going,” says Miss Stunkel, rubbing her hands together. “We want to save some time for the gift shop!”

Next on display is a pair of shoes, a rusty key that’s as big as my hand, and a broken dinner plate. Each one has a tiny card in front of it that tells you how old it is and why it is important enough to be in a museum. Here’s what they say:

WOMEN’S SHOES, CIRCA 1889.

KEY TO PORTWALLER JAIL, 1911.

PLATE BELONGING TO FAMILY OF WALTER P. FINNBROOK. THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN USED BY THOMAS JEFFERSON, THE THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DURING A GRAND PARTY AT THE FINNBROOK ESTATE, CIRCA 1819.

I slide my hand along the glass display cases, studying everything in them and trying to imagine the people they belonged to. In the next case are baby clothes that the card says are more than a hundred years old. Next to that, a teddy bear that’s missing both eyeballs, one ear, and some fur, and generally looks an awful mess, not too different from Patsy Cline’s dog, Roger, last summer when he came down with mange.

I can’t help but wonder what happened to that baby and why she left that mangy teddy behind. And how did the museum come to get it, anyway? I squeeze the handle of my toolbox a little tighter.

“Where are the rest of the baby’s clothes and toys?” I ask. “What happened to them?”

But Miss Stunkel and everyone else in my class, including Patsy Cline, have moved on and left me and Mangy Teddy alone with all the other dead people’s stuff. The room is quiet. Dead quiet. Even without eyeballs, that teddy is giving me a look that says, Where Did Everybody Go?

There’s a whole row of display cases that we haven’t even gotten to yet. Full of things—special and important things, probably—that belonged to real people. People who everybody has forgotten about. And here’s something else I know: When you forget about dead people, it’s like they were never really here at all.

I march into the museum gift shop, where I find the rest of my class. A couple of boys are stabbing each other with toy Civil War bayonets. Others are trying to decide between a glow-in-the-dark card deck and a Portwaller Town Hall jigsaw puzzle. Angus Meeker is playing with a tall brown hat that looks like the kind Mayor Luckett was wearing in the painting.

And Miss Stunkel (Miss Stunkel!) is trying on umbrellas.

I can feel my ears start to sweat. “What’s the matter with you all? We didn’t finish looking at all the stuff in there!” I yell, pointing to the museum room.

Everybody stops. My words are a heavy blanket, one that has been kept in the corner of a basement and smells of mold. It covers the room and ruins everybody’s good fun.

Miss Stunkel grips the umbrella and then peers at me out of the corners of her eyeballs. She’s got a look on her face that says, Ready, Aim, Fire! But instead of hurling the umbrella at me, she just holds her chicken-bone finger in the air.

I nod to let her know I don’t want any trouble. After a long moment, she tucks her finger back inside her jumper pocket and slides the umbrella into the wooden barrel with all the others. Then she turns away from me to keep from having murdering thoughts.

I turn away, too, and that’s when I see Patsy Cline and Vera Bogg side by side at the jewelry counter, with their shoulders touching and their heads entirely too close together.

I wriggle between them, pushing them apart. “Everybody left me behind in there.” I point to the museum room. “There’s more to see, you know. Things that are more important than a gift shop.”

“Sorry,” says Patsy Cline.

But she doesn’t look sorry. And I’m about to tell her so when Vera dangles a small white sand dollar swinging from a chain in front of my nose. Engraved on it in deep letters are the words
FRIENDS FOREVER
. “Look what we got,” Vera says.

“We who?” And then I see the same necklace peeking out from underneath Patsy Cline’s frizzy hair.

Good gravy.

Before I can help myself, right then and there in the museum gift shop, I open my mouth as wide as it will go. And then I yell loud enough for even one-eared, Mangy Teddy to hear. “Doesn’t anybody care about dead people? Dead people are people, too!” And then I reach into my pockets, pull out all the money that I had emptied from my piggy bank that morning—fifteen dollars and fourteen cents, plus a Canadian penny—and find the museum’s donation box. “This,” I announce as I stuff the money into the slot, “is for dead people everywhere!”

3.

M
r. Drather swings open the door to the bus and says, “Back so soon?”

I climb inside and slide into my seat. He’s got the radio on a country-western music station, and there’s a man singing some sad song about good love gone bad.

He turns around in his seat. “Didn’t learn anything from the Fort McHenry incident, did you, kid?”

“No.”

“Guess not.” He unwraps a candy bar and breaks it in half before eating it. “Mary hurt again this time?”

“Mary who?” I say.

He picks at the corners of his mouth with his thumbnail. “Sorry. Miss Stunkel, I mean.”

My word. I didn’t even know that Miss Stunkel had a first name. “Miss Stunkel’s name is Mary? She doesn’t really look like a Mary.”

“What does a Mary look like?” he says.

“First of all,” I say, “a Mary doesn’t have a mean face, like she’s sucking on lemon seeds all the time. And she has nice eyes. The kind that when they look at you don’t wish you were dead.”

He must not know what to say to that, because he turns around in his seat and taps his fingers on the steering wheel.

I take out my drawing pad from my toolbox and draw a Mary who is not Miss Stunkel. When I finish, I take it to the front of the bus and show Mr. Drather.

“You draw pretty good,” he says.

“Want me to draw you?”

He shrugs. “Do I have to do anything more than what I’m doing right now?”

I say, “What are you doing right now?”

“Nothing,” he says.

And I tell him that’s just fine. I sit cross-legged on the floor by his seat and start drawing his wavy brown hair that’s real short on top and on the sides and real long in the back. “How much longer do you think they are going to be?”

“Who?” he says.

“You know, Mary. And the rest of my class.”

“Now, don’t you go calling her Mary,” he says. “She’s Miss Stunkel to you.”

“Okay, fine. When do you think Miss Stunkel and everybody else will be done in there?”

“Don’t know. A while more, I’d say.”

I get back to my drawing. “You’ve got a real nice round nose.”

“Think so?” He sniffs the air. “It’s been working all right for me so far.”

“That’s good.” I get to his chin, which has a big pucker in it. Like someone finger-poked a mound of wet clay and let it dry. I’m about to tell him this, but a song I know starts playing on the radio. “Patsy Cline!”

Mr. Drather gets a smile on his face that says, Thank You, Lord Above. And his chin pucker almost disappears. He turns up the volume to the radio. “How do you know Patsy Cline?”

I tell him how my best friend, Patsy Cline Roberta Watson, is named after Patsy Cline the dead country-western singer. And how Patsy Cline, my best friend, is also a singer who knows how to sing songs by Patsy Cline, the dead one. “Did you know she is dead?”

He nods. “I did.” Then he tells me that if I could be quiet for a minute, we might actually be able to hear her sing.

I keep on drawing while the song plays, and Mr. Drather even sings along in a couple of parts.

I’ve got your picture that you gave to me,

And it’s signed “with love,” just like it used to be.

The only thing different, the only thing new,

I’ve got your picture, she’s got you.

He’s not as good of a singer as Patsy Cline (either one), but he’s not the worst I’ve ever heard. One time I sat outside our bathroom listening to my brother, Terrible, sing in the shower. Do all aliens sound like roosters that have just had their tonsils taken out? Which is what I asked Terrible when he caught me listening. But he just punched me in the arm and I never heard him sing again.

After the song is over, Mr. Drather turns down the volume and sings the last verse again real loud. Then he stares out the front window of the bus for a long while.

I whisper, “Mr. Drather?”

Then he jumps a little like he’s forgotten he’s sitting inside a school bus. And that I’m here with him. His face turns red, all except for his chin pucker. “Right. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” I decide to put a stage and a curtain and a microphone in my drawing, along with lots of musical notes. When I’m finished, I show him the drawing.

He doesn’t say anything at first, only takes in a deep breath and holds it. Then he touches one of the music notes with his fingertip.

“Well?” I say. “Do you like it? I put you on a stage. You know, because it seems to me that you like to sing.”

“I see that.” He clears his throat. “And I do.”

I tear off the page and hand it to him. “Here. You can have it, if you want.”

He nods at me and smiles. Then he rolls up the drawing, pulls a rubber band from around his wrist, and slides it over the drawing. With both hands, he tucks it into a bag by his seat. “So you never did say why you’re here.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

He jabs his thumb in the direction of the museum. “I mean, what did you do this time to get into trouble?”

“Oh, that,” I say. “I yelled and caused a disruption that interfered with our learning.” Which is how Miss Stunkel put it before she told me I’d earned an afternoon on the bus.

Mr. Drather raises his eyebrows at me.

So I tell him that all everybody was doing was fooling around in the gift shop anyway, which doesn’t involve any learning, so my yelling couldn’t have gotten in the way of that.

“What did you go and yell for in the first place?”

“Because there was stuff in the museum that we skipped over,” I say. “Don’t you think we should remember those people?”

He shrugs. “I’ve never been much for museums myself. But I think there are plenty of people we should remember, even if their stuff doesn’t make it into a museum.” He pulls at his long hair. “But that’s why you yelled for real?”

I nod. “And also Patsy and Vera and their matching necklaces.”

Mr. Drather folds his arms across his chest. “Sounds to me like maybe you’re the one that was skipped over.”

And when I think about Patsy Cline, I think maybe he’s right.