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  “Oh, you don’t look sick, mister,” said Mr. King. “When you are bigger, you can come and lift boxes for me?”

  No one ever wished Davey was bigger, so it took him by surprise. His smile was huge.

  “Can I, Mama?” he asked.

  “When you’re a lot older,” said Mother.

  “In a few years,” said Mr. King.

  Mr. King had no idea. His eyes shinnied up and down over Mother again.

  “We better be going,” she said. “It’s a long walk.”

  “I will drive you,” he said.

  “No,” said Mother, and then kinder. “We have errands on the way.”

  “I will stop at every errand,” said Mr. King. “Errands are no problem in my Ford Gran Torino.”

  He pointed to his blue Ford Gran Torino parked in the alleyway.

  “Can we, Mama?” asked Davey.

  “No,” said Mother.

  We walked past the movie theatre. We walked past the bank. We walked past the Three Brothers Trapani and one of them came out and sang Mother an opera song that she studiously ignored. We walked past Mr. Kelmendi, the shoemaker. Mr. Kelmendi asked after Davey’s shoes.

  “They’re just fine,” said Mother and she didn’t stop.

  It was a spring day, but not a beautiful one. It was hot and the sky was filled up with black clouds. Davey said his legs hurt. I said I had heat stroke. Mother shouted, “Would you stop complaining! Would you look at that, now it’s going to rain, I just know it!”

  Miss Finny, the seamstress, smiled through her window.

  It started raining at the intersection of Second and Mary. It was sudden, like someone emptying buckets of water on top of us. It was heavy and cold and we were wet through in minutes. I thought Mother would get angry at the rain but she didn’t. She looked up and smiled and held out her hands. A bus went past and sprayed us with water. Davey got mud all over his pants.

  We passed the park and the Sacred Heart Mary Street Nursery School and we refused to look at it. We passed the intersection by my school. The moon-rockiness of the buildings looked pretty after the rain but that next part of Second Street was not as tidy as ours and there was trash everywhere now and scowling women pushing strollers. Dr. Leopold’s office was beside a grocers. We went inside dripping wet and the receptionist scowled as well.

  Dr. Leopold’s name suggested a physician in a white coat rushing through corridors with a shining stethoscope, but he had a large belly that spilled over his belt and his breath smelled of mints. He didn’t like to get up from his chair much. He opened the Spink file.

  Our wetness and the rain falling past his window in a curtain and the day grown dark had caused the sadness flower to open in my chest. I felt worried in that office. My nose started to run. I wished I had a handkerchief, but it was the weekend. I sniffled and Mother scowled at me just like everyone else. “Well,” said Dr. Leopold. “Mrs. Spink. Very good. Sit down.” Davey sat on Mother’s knee. It might have seemed wrong to an outsider but he was only five.

  “What can I do for you then?” he asked.

  “I’ve come about David,” said Mother.

  She never used the name David. Never. It shocked Davey and me. Davey stared at me from Mother’s lap, his blue eyes round.

  “What seems to be the problem?” asked Dr. Leopold.

  “Well, it’s just about his height,” said Mother. She was trembling all over, like someone owning up to a very bad thing. “He’s grown very tall.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Leopold. “He is a big boy.”

  Big was such a small word. “If I had a nickel for every time someone said Davey was a big boy, I’d be rich,” was what my mother always said.

  “How old are you again, David?” he asked. “Eight?” We thought he was joking. I giggled.

  “Davey is five. I mean he’s nearly six,” said Mother. Her trembling was worse. Davey vibrated on her knee.

  Dr. Leopold inhaled deeply like the big bad wolf.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he said.

  In Mrs. Gaspar’s dream, Davey didn’t just grow. She told me in her Apollo 11 shrine of a kitchen. She waited until Davey wasn’t listening on Monday morning before school. She called me into her tiny kitchen and made me sit at her table and she lit her white cigarette. “Listen,” she said through a cloud of smoke. “I will tell you.” I listened.

  “I told you he grew and grew, yes, but this is not all. It is how he came to be, Lenora.”

  Mrs. Gaspar liked to call me Lenora when she was being mystical. I tolerated it for the sake of hearing her dreams.

  “He came out of an egg,” she said.

  I wasn’t expecting it.

  I might have gasped.

  “A big egg. Heavy. Black,” Mrs. Gaspar said. “Your mother carried it with her for many years. On her journeys. I saw her. Then one day, crack, she heard it break and out came the baby Davey.”

  “Where was I?” I whispered. What journeys? My mother hadn’t really been anywhere except for when she ran away with Peter Lenard Spink and saw the UFO. Mrs. Gaspar put her finger up to her lips.

  “He grew and he grew and grew from that egg. He grew bigger and bigger and bigger until bang, his head hit the ceiling.”

  “But Mother took him to the doctor,” I said. “He said not to worry. Just to keep an eye on him. It’s normal if there are very tall people in the family and he doesn’t have any headaches. Uncle Gus was very tall. Dr. Leopold said he’d slow down soon.”

  Mrs. Gaspar shook her head.

  “She tells me this. And this is why I tell you my dream.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette.

  Karl and Karla watched us, shining black eyes expectant.

  “What does this egg mean?” she asked and stared at me through the remaining smoke, thinking.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  “Can I have some more pretzels please, Mrs. Gaspar?” asked Davey, wandering into the kitchen.

  “Of course, my little dumpling,” she said.

  He leaned against her while she filled his bowl. They were tight, Mrs. Gaspar and Davey. He knew the Holy Rosary. He knew the entire cast of Days of Our Lives. He knew all the ingredients in goulash. They watched Starsky & Hutch together every Tuesday when Mother worked the late shift. Side by side they ate pretzels.

  “And did someone mention something about scrambled eggs?” he said.

  B:

  Beetles and Birds

  Nearly 6

  4’ 7”

  EARLY SUMMER 1975

  The B issues began arriving on June 20. We knew they were coming. We waited for them. We longed for them. We checked the mailbox each day just in case they came early. We whispered to each other in bed at night about what those pages might contain. B is such a dowdy overweight letter but we built those B issues right up inside our brains.

  “There’ll be barracudas,” said Davey.

  “And bagpipes,” I replied. Bridges, batteries, bees, baseball, and hot air balloons, but nothing prepared us for the true fabulousness when they finally came.

  Bats for starters: fringe-lipped and spear-nosed and bonneted. Leaf-chinned and bulldog and vampire. Bacteria: four kinds. Badgers and baobab trees. Several coloured pages of birds, which were brilliant. On each page, we chose and ordered our favourites. Then we chose our top seven from all the pages. My ultimate favourite was the meadowlark because it reminded me of open places. Davey’s ultimate favourite was the golden eagle and it figured; it was a grand bird with huge wings that shone all burnished bronze. In its illustration it was hunched, its wings curving, as it came down to catch its prey, its great talons ready. Davey stared and stared and stared at that picture.

  Mother said, “If you keep looking at that page, Davey, you’ll wear a hole in it.”

  But Davey didn’t stop looking at it.

  “I really want a golden eagle,” he said.

  “Well, you’ll be lucky if you get a goldfish,” said Mother. “No one has an eagle for a pe
t.”

  “I’d call it Timothy,” said Davey.

  Mother shook her head.

  “Davey, Davey,” she said.

  She was ironing her new shirt for her new extra job. Mother needed an extra job because the rent went up and Davey ate a lot. Although she was almost certain his growing was slowing down, she still had to buy him new pants and new shoes because he kept busting out of them. The new job was at Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store and the new shirt was apple green with a banana embroidered on the pocket. Sometimes Mother worked at the fruit store in the morning for four hours, then changed and caught the twenty-eight bus to the Golden Living Retirement Home.

  “Pah,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “That man is a wolf. Beware, Cyn-thi-a. His apples are bad and his bananas never ripen.”

  “Oh, he’s not that bad,” said Mother.

  CJ told me she saw Mother at school on the very last day before summer break.

  “It wouldn’t be Mother,” I said.

  “It sure looked like her,” said CJ. “Same hair, same shirt with a banana on the pocket. She was near the office talking to Principal Dalrymple.”

  “Principal Dalrymple?”

  I didn’t understand. My handkerchiefs were in good order. It couldn’t be my jumbled-up junk sale brain. I got good grades.

  Maybe it was the ants. Miss Schweitzer had pulled me aside once after class and told me it wasn’t nice for girls to play with ants. I’d stared blankly at her as though I didn’t know what she was talking about. As if I’d be involved in such disgusting behaviours. Yes, maybe it was the ants. Or beetles. I’d started hunting for beetles at school since the B issues began arriving. Matthew Milford and I discovered a black beetle in the brick fence beside the playground. Maybe we’d been spotted watching it. Mother had been summoned to the school about my insect-leaning tendencies.

  Mother didn’t say anything at home, which made my suspicions worse. I asked her gingerly, carefully.

  “You weren’t at school today, were you?”

  “I certainly was,” she said cheerily.

  It was the ants. I knew it. Or the beetles.

  “I went to enrol Davey,” she said. I swear my feet lifted off the ground with the relief. Then I plummeted back to earth.

  “At school?” I said.

  “You know as well as I know that Davey will go to school,” said Mother and she looked disappointed with me. Of course, I’d always known he was going there. I’d known it and refused to think of it. “There’s nothing wrong with his brain. He’s just big and leans a little. You know that, Lenny.”

  “What did the principal say?”

  “She said, ‘Well, we’ll see Davey on the first day of school,’ ” said Mother.

  “Did she actually see Davey?” I asked tentatively.

  “I told her his dimensions,” said Mother, like he was a piece of furniture. “I told her there were big people in our family. You need to think less about yourself, Lenny, and think about Davey and what it must be like for him. He needs to be with other boys his age. You need to grow a hide. There’ll be staring. I know there’ll be staring, but you need to think less about yourself.”

  Because now suddenly she could also read my mind.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Okay,” I said loudly.

  “What’s okay?” said Davey from the living room.

  “Nothing,” we both said.

  It was a summer of beetles and birds and endless hot days. We languished on Mrs. Gaspar’s sofa beneath pastel Jesus’s friendly contemplation. We drifted slowly in and out of rooms touching her things from Hungary. Little carved wooden bears. Her precious cutlery wrapped up in a dusty yellow cloth. A little silver clock with its hands stopped on eleven minutes past eleven the day her parents died.

  We sweated as we stared into the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia issues, the As neat in the first two volume covers, the loose mysteries of the Bs. We examined and re-examined the colour plates on birds. We re-perused bathyspheres. I ran my finger over the colour plates on beetles, hesitated, then turned the page. Beetroot. Beirut. Belgium. Bell, Alexander Graham. Bellini, Vincenzo. The Bering Sea Controversy.

  Mrs. Gaspar opened up her windows and let the sounds of the city in, all the trucks and Greyhound buses, pigeons cooing, and policemen’s traffic whistles. She wore a tea towel around her neck and her perspiration washed away parts of her drawn-on eyebrows. “Mrs. Gaspar,” said Davey, “you’re disappearing.”

  “I’m melting,” Mrs. Gaspar agreed. “Soon there’ll be nothing left of me.”

  At night, a hot moon rose and we caught crickets on the windowsills in upturned cups.

  All the while Davey grew. He didn’t slow down despite what Mother said. He grew in the heat like a plant in a hothouse. I stayed the same, but he shot up another inch so that he was exactly as tall as little round Mrs. Gaspar. His yellow hair gushed upward. His shoes split and his toes poked through. His pants strained and complained across his thighs.

  “Davey,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “This is not right.”

  He stood in front of her in his ankle freezers.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Gaspar,” he said apologetically.

  Beetles. I went back to those pages again. I tried not to. I hovered over bark, baroque painting, Beethoven, sliding my eyes to the side.

  “What are you looking at, dumpling?” said Mrs. Gaspar.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Mother, on the nights she wasn’t working the evening shift.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But I was. I was looking at the perfectly polished hemispheres of the ladybug. Scarlet beetles, emerald beetles, beetles in striped pyjamas. Beetles with anodised shells like cheap Christmas baubles. Armoured beetles. Beetles in war paint. Beetles dressed up in furs.

  “What’s Lenny looking at, Davey?” Mother asked.

  “Beetles,” said Davey.

  “I am not,” I said, flicking back to the coloured chart on beef cuts.

  “It’s all she ever looks at,” said Davey.

  “You can’t talk,” I said. He had birds open on page 642, plate four, featuring the golden eagle—the birds of prey. But I sensed more disappointment in my mother’s silence.

  I looked at those beetles that summer. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the trickery of colour; I loved the plainer beetles too. The dowdier American beetles, the skunk beetles, the acorn weevils, and the carrion beetles. I counted the notches on legs. I examined the mandibles on stag beetles. I fumbled my tongue around Latin names. The mystery of antennae, precisely beaded, feathered, saw-toothed. The simple fact that beetles had wings but they hid them away.

  Nanny Flora phoned. She said, “How’s those books of yours coming along?”

  “They’re okay,” I said. “We’re nearly up to the Cs.”

  “The Cs,” said Nanny Flora. “What if you need some information on something starting with M?”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t shrug, your nanny can’t hear a shrug,” said Mother.

  When it was Davey’s turn, I heard him say, “All she looks at is the beetle pages.”

  Now, I knew clean disinfected Nanny Flora wouldn’t like that. I’d once asked her if she owned a cat and she’d said, “I don’t care for vermin.”

  “Mother, Lenny’s looking at beetles again,” said Davey one evening. There was nothing malicious in it. He was just a champion tattletale.

  “Well, she’s going to stop that,” said Mother. She stormed in, tiny and wild in her pink Golden Living Retirement Home uniform and her hair in a fountain on her head. She took the beetles issue from where it lay in front of me and stamped off with it into her bedroom.

  “Holy Batman,” said Davey.

  “Peter Lenard Spink,” I said in the dark that same night. There’d been an evening thunderstorm and we lay sticky with sweat in our beds listening to t
he rain. The sadness flower was fully bloomed inside my chest. It made me feel empty. It made me feel full. It made me feel like all the glittering wet Grayford streets were inside me. All the lost kittens and sad old ladies waiting at bus stops and pigeons with broken legs.

  “Don’t,” said Davey.

  “Peter Lenard Spink,” I whispered.

  He was faded. I had no photograph of him. Just pieces of memory. Once, he had slapped my hand at the dinner table for reaching out for a third piece of bread. That was a bright flash of a memory. His handwriting, in Mother’s blue fountain pen, big letters, very square.

  “He’ll come back,” said Davey.

  “Don’t be a fool,” I said.

  “Mother, Lenny called me a fool,” shouted Davey.

  “Hush up, the pair of you, go to sleep. You’ll wake the neighbors up.”

  There had been no further mention of the confiscated beetle issue. No mention of the Great Living Room Encyclopedia Ambush. She had talked to me after that as though it had never happened. As though all those beetles never existed. She’d pretended to be perfectly normal at dinner, talking about Mrs. Gaspar’s lungs, when really she was a pink-clad witch.

  “Peter Lenard Spink,” I whispered.

  Mrs. Gaspar would still be awake. She’d be watching Kojak. I didn’t know what the elusive Mr. Petersburg would be doing. Probably writing letters. He got letters from all around the country. They filled up his mailbox and spilled on the floor. If you picked them up you saw they were from the Mississippi State Penitentiary and Attica State Penitentiary. Mother said, “Put that down,” as though just touching them could end you up in jail.

  “Peter Lenard Spink,” I whispered.

  “One day he’ll come back,” whispered Davey.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I just know,” said Davey.

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “He’s in Alaska.”

  Davey loved Alaska, pages 217 to 220.

  I traced my finger over the embroidered ballerina on my bedspread. Nanny Flora had sent it to me for Christmas, further proof she didn’t know me at all. I imagined Peter Lenard Spink in Alaska. His tan pants and his sallow skin. His greasy hair and his pockmarked face. It was wrong. He was bear meat if he was living in the wilds. I imagined Davey walking through the woods, smiling at the blue sky. Davey, I could see.