Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life Page 9

  I sigh dramatically. “It’s almost like you don’t want me to find the keys.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Mom says. “It will all happen the only way it happens.” She heads into the kitchen, and I follow.

  “What does that mean?” I ask. Before she can answer, the phone rings. The caller ID shows it’s Lizzy’s dad. She picks up and she says, “Yes, he’s grounded for a week. Yes, I’ll wait until the car comes tomorrow and call you at the post office. Thanks, Herb.” She hangs up. “Hey, you got off easy. Lizzy’s grounded for two weeks.”

  Poor Lizzy. She was only trying to help me. I’m sure this isn’t how she planned to spend her summer, either.

  “What do you want for dinner?” Mom asks, already reaching into the cabinet for the box of macaroni and cheese.

  “Why do you ask if you already know?”

  “I always hope you’ll surprise me.”

  “Not tonight.”

  After years of trying to get me to eat normally, Mom has given up. Dinners are now a choice between four meals—macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, fish sticks, or pizza if we’re going out. Mom once tried frying some chicken and pressing it into the shape of a fish stick, but I knew better.

  She puts a pot on the stove and pours in the water. “You’re going to drive me to drink with your finicky eating habits,” she says.

  Seeing as our house is an alcohol-free zone, unless I’m going to drive her to drink chocolate milk, I’m not too worried.

  “You’ll be thirteen in a few weeks,” she says. “It’s time to expand your horizons. I’m going to introduce one new thing each Monday night.”

  After what happened today, I don’t dare argue. “Sure, Mom,” I say, hoping she’ll go easy on me and won’t jump right to the broccoli.

  “And since today’s Monday,” Mom says, swinging open the refrigerator door, “we might as well start tonight. But don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you.” She pulls out a glass bowl covered in cellophane. I approach with caution and peer inside.

  Broccoli!

  Chapter 8: The Old Man

  Mom, Lizzy, and I are sitting on the steps of our building waiting for Mr. Oswald’s driver to pick us up. I didn’t get any notes from Lizzy last night and I didn’t write any either. I’m afraid she’s mad at me. At least she’s back in her ponytail and shorts again. No skirt and long hair blowing around.

  “You’ve both got the notebooks that the policeman gave you?” Mom asks.

  We shake our heads.

  “I got the impression you’re supposed to bring them,” she replies. “Go on up and get them. I’ll wait in case he comes.”

  As Lizzy and I climb the stairs, she asks if I’m mad at her.

  Relieved, I shake my head. “I thought maybe you were mad at me. After all, you wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me and the box.”

  “And you wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me,” she counters.

  “Do you think we’ll still be able to find the keys in time now?” I ask.

  “We’ll keep our eyes open,” she says firmly. “We won’t let this stupid community service thing ruin our plans.”

  We’re about to shake on it when the new kids come out of their apartment. “Don’t let us interrupt you,” Rick says, gesturing to our imminent handshake.

  We both pull our hands away quickly. “How’s it going?” Lizzy asks in a high voice that’s almost a squeak. She says it to both of them, but looks only at Samantha.

  “Good,” Samantha says. “We’re almost all moved in.”

  “Cool,” Lizzy says. Then she blurts out, “I like your earrings.”

  Samantha puts her hands up to her ears. “I’m not wearing any earrings.”

  Rick laughs. That kid is NOT getting any nicer, and I’m just about done feeling sorry for him for having to move to a new place.

  Lizzy turns beet red. “I mean the ones you were wearing yesterday.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Samantha says. “They were a gift from my grandmother.”

  “Cool,” Lizzy says, and nods. “If you want to come over sometime, I can tell you about the neighborhood, that sort of thing.”

  “Sure,” Samantha says. “Whenever.”

  “Cool,” Lizzy says. I want to alert her to the many other words at her disposal besides cool, but I think she would punch me.

  “Can we go now?” Rick asks, pulling his sister down the hall.

  “Bye, guys,” Samantha calls out.

  “Bye,” Lizzy says, waving a little.

  “Since when are you so friendly?” I ask her.

  “What do you mean?” she says innocently.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m just trying to be nice,” she says, putting the key in her door. “You know, neighborly, like you said. I’m allowed to make new friends, you know.”

  “Who said you weren’t?” I reply, hurrying into my apartment before she can respond. I grab my notebook and head back outside, not bothering to wait for Lizzy. She sits down next to me on the stoop a minute later. She has taken out her ponytail. I don’t know why it should bother me, but it does. I pull out my book and bury my nose in it.

  “This must be him,” Mom says, standing up and shading her eyes.

  I look up to see Lizzy staring, her mouth hanging open. Coming down the street toward us is no less than a limo. It pulls up right in front of our building. A limousine is in front of our building! Like the kind movie stars take. The driver steps out and tips his hat at us. He is wearing a real chauffeur’s uniform! I didn’t think people did that in real life!

  “Jeremy Fink and Elizabeth Muldoun?”

  We nod vigorously. Usually Lizzy is quick to correct anyone who dares to use her full name, but I can tell she’s too excited to bother.

  “I’m James. I have come to take you to Mr. Oswald,” he says. “And you are Mrs. Fink, I gather?”

  Mom says yes, and asks to see some paperwork from the community service people. Exchanging wide-eyed glances, Lizzy and I scramble off the steps and wait by the car until Mom gives us the all-clear.

  “You two behave,” she says, stepping back onto the curb.

  I’m surprised she’s not more shocked by the limo. Mr. Oswald must have told her that’s how we’d be traveling. Did she somehow forget to tell me?

  “Do you have your sandwiches?” she asks.

  “Yes, Mom,” I say, reddening as James looks on. When she steps aside, James opens the back door for us. Lizzy scrambles inside, and I follow her into the cool interior. I can’t believe we’re actually going to be driven around the city in a limo!

  The seats are cream-colored, and I’ve never sat on anything as soft. Even though it’s a bright, sunny day, the inside of the limo is dim because the windows are tinted. A small refrigerator is built into the wall, along with a television set and a radio. Another long seat faces us, and I immediately put my feet up on it. Lizzy can’t reach that far. We pull away from the building and I wave at Mom as we go, but she probably can’t see us through the windows.

  Lizzy swings open the door of the fridge. “Look! Strawberries! Juice! Soda in glass bottles! Can you believe this?”

  I shake my head, leaning back against the cool seat like I’m used to a life of luxury.

  “Man oh man,” Lizzy says. “If I had known doing community service was gonna be like this, I’d have gotten us in serious trouble years ago!”

  At the first red light, the window dividing us from James slowly lowers. He turns his head to look at us. “I imagine everything is satisfactory?” he asks, a small smile on his face.

  Lizzy unscrews the top of a Coke bottle and asks, “Is Mr. Oswald really really really super rich?”

  James laughs. “He’s pretty well off.”

  “I didn’t realize pawnbrokers made so much money,” I say.

  James turns back to the road and shakes his head. “Oh, that’s just a sideline. Used to be his family’s business. Mr. Oswald’s main job is selling antiques. He h
as a knack for finding antiques, restoring them, and selling them for much more than he bought them.”

  “Where does he find them?” I ask, interested.

  “All over,” James says. “Flea markets, antique fairs, auction houses. Sometimes even on the streets. People don’t know what they have, and they just throw it out.”

  Lizzy turns to me, and I know what she’s going to say before she says it. “Sounds like he and your dad would have hit it off.”

  I nod. “But my dad never fixed up anything to sell, only to use.”

  “Maybe he would have,” she says.

  I watch as the window divider slowly goes back up.

  “Maybe,” I say, closing my eyes. When Dad first died, I used to keep a list of all the things that happened to me that he wouldn’t get to see. Like when I hit a home run in gym class (only happened once, but it did happen), or when I won an award for a short story in sixth grade about a boy who burned an ant with a magnifying glass, and that night his house burned down, and he knew it was all his fault. But the list was all about me. I had never considered what my dad would or wouldn’t have done with his own life if he’d gotten the chance. Maybe he would have sold some of the stuff he found and made a fortune. Or expanded Fink’s Comics into a whole chain. I might even have a brother or sister by now. I bet he had dreams I never knew about. Is that what’s in the box? Dreams of a life he never got to live?

  The car stops, and I open my eyes to see Lizzy happily munching on a strawberry. “Want one?” she asks, holding out the box.

  I shake my head. Real fruit only makes me think of fruit-flavored candy like Starburst or Mentos, and the fact that I don’t currently have any.

  James opens the door, and we emerge onto the bright sidewalk. I had expected him to be taking us to a pawnshop in a less-than-desirable part of town. Instead, we’re in front of a three-story brownstone on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. Before I can voice my surprise, the front door opens, and a tall old man appears wearing a brown striped suit with a matching hat. He is puffing on a pipe. For some reason his clothes don’t seem to match the rest of him. With his round, ruddy face, shouldn’t he be wearing overalls and a straw hat?

  “You must be the little truants,” he says sternly. His twinkling eyes tell me he’s not really being mean.

  Never one to take an insult lightly, Lizzy says, “I think to be a truant you have to be skipping school, and school’s out for summer.”

  “How right you are, young lady,” he says, cocking his pipe at her. “I shall have to be more careful with my vocabulary.”

  “All right, then,” she says.

  “Come.” He steps aside so we can enter. “Let us get to know each other.”

  James ushers us up the stairs and into the house. A small entryway leads to a huge room crowded with large boxes and packing crates. It looks like most of the place is already packed up. A few paintings still hang on the walls, but all the furniture is gone. The wood-paneled ceiling is so high that the whole brownstone must be just this one floor, not three separate floors like I had assumed. A huge fireplace on the back wall actually has a fire going in it, even though it’s almost July.

  “An old man’s bones need warmth,” Mr. Oswald says, following my gaze. “That’s why I’m moving to Florida. Let’s go into my office and I’ll tell you what you will be doing.”

  A round woman in an apron appears from the other end of the room, and he hands her his pipe. She hands him his mail in return. Mr. Oswald says fondly, “This house would stop running if it weren’t for my housekeeper, Mary.” Mary smiles at us, and I notice a Hershey’s bar sticking out of one of the pockets in her apron. I smile back. She is clearly a kindred spirit. Lizzy is too busy peering inside a large open crate to pay any attention.

  Mr. Oswald leads us carefully through the maze of boxes and into a room about half the size of the first. This one has another fireplace, but with no fire. A big oak desk sits in the middle, with big leather chairs in front of it. Shelves line two walls of the room, with objects of every size and color stacked on them. I see sports equipment like baseballs and bats and footballs and hockey sticks, but also lamps, clocks, paintings, sculptures, rows of books, a telescope, radios, jewelry boxes, piles of stamps in plastic folders, trays of old coins. Basically anything and everything under the sun. I imagine this would be my parents’ vision of heaven. I have to make a concerted effort to close my jaw. I realize I haven’t spoken a word since we arrived, so I clear my throat. “Um, Mr. Oswald?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fink?” he says, sitting down behind the desk.

  I don’t know how to respond to that. I’d only heard my dad and Uncle called Mr. Fink. I don’t know why it should surprise me that when I grow up people will be calling me by the same name as my father, but it does. “Um, Jeremy is good,” I say.

  “Jeremy it is, then,” Mr. Oswald says.

  “Um, would it be all right if I look at your stamp collection? It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Be my guest,” he says, waving me over to the shelf. “Are you a longtime philatelist?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I ask.

  He smiles. “A stamp collector. They are called philatelists.”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling a bit stupid. “No, my father was. There’s this one stamp he was always looking for, so now I, well, you know.”

  He finishes my sentence for me. “Now you have taken on his quest?”

  I nod.

  “Wonderful. When you’re done, you can both take a seat, and then we can chat.”

  The stamp is blue with the word “Hawaii” at the top, so it would be easy to spot. I quickly scan through the pages of stamps, but of course it’s not there. I put the pile back on the shelf and have to pull on Lizzy’s sleeve twice before she tears herself away from an oversized doll with huge blue eyes. I don’t know which is scarier—the doll itself, which has a vacant stare and an I-might-come-alive-and-attack-you vibe, or the fact that Lizzy was entranced by a doll in the first place.

  We sit down in the large chairs in front of the desk. As tall for my age as I am, I feel very small in the chair.

  “So,” Mr. Oswald begins, “I bet you’d like to know what you’ll be doing here.”

  “Who cares what we’ll be doing,” Lizzy says. “This place rocks!”

  Mr. Oswald laughs. It’s a deep and hearty laugh. “Thank you, I think. I’m glad you like my home; I’ll be sorry to leave it. But I assure you, I do intend to have you work.”

  My throat always tightens up when I look for my Dad’s stamp. I swallow hard and say, “Officer Polansky said you needed us to, um, pack things up? These things I guess?” I gesture around the room at all the stuff.

  “Close, but not quite,” Mr. Oswald replies, touching the tips of his fingers together. “I need you to make deliveries for me. Nowhere too far, all here in Manhattan. James will accompany you.”

  I open my mouth to ask what kind of deliveries when Lizzy says, “Woo-hoo! We get to ride in the limo again!”

  Mr. Oswald smiles at her like one would a cute child who has just recited the alphabet for the first time. Then he stands up and says, “I’m late for a meeting right now, but I’m going to get you started on your first delivery. We can talk more tomorrow.”

  I quickly get to my feet, too. “We won’t see you any more today?”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t worry, James knows what to do.”

  “But aren’t you supposed to sign our notebooks at the end of the day?”

  He walks around the desk and lays his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry so much. Just record your observations tonight, and we can go over them tomorrow, all right?”

  I nod.

  “You’ll have to forgive Jeremy,” Lizzy says, popping a Starburst into her mouth. “He always reminds the teachers if they forget to give out homework.”

  Where did she get Starburst and why didn’t she offer me any? And I only reminded a teacher once before I came to my senses!

  In
between chews she adds, “He even reads books during the summer.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you to pick up a book sometime, Lizzy,” I say through gritted teeth, not wanting to argue in front of Mr. Oswald.

  Mr. Oswald picks up his briefcase and straightens his tie. “What are you reading currently, Jeremy?” He glances over at my bulging backpack.

  Lizzy rolls her eyes, but I open it and root around. I hand him my latest book, Time Travel and the Movies.

  “Are you a fan of time travel films?” he asks, opening the book to the table of contents.

  I nod. “I’ve seen them all,” I say, hoping I don’t sound like I’m bragging.

  “What was your favorite?” he asks.

  I have to think for a minute. “It depends on how realistic they are. Like if they could really happen. You know, scientifically.”

  He doesn’t answer, so I keep rambling. “I mean, like, there’s this one where all the guy does is lie down on his bed and then he concentrates really, really hard, and eventually he winds up in the past. Now that can’t really happen.”

  “I would suspect not,” he agrees, and hands me back the book. I pull Dad’s box out for a second while I stick the book back in my bag.

  “What an interesting box,” Mr. Oswald says. “May I see it?”

  For a second I’m torn. I’d decided not to show anyone else. But I can’t be rude, so I hand it to him. I look at Lizzy, who mouths the words, You brought it with you?

  I shrug. I couldn’t leave it home alone. Mr. Oswald hands it back to me and says, “Lovely. I can give you some bubble wrap if you want to wrap this up. It will help protect it.”

  “Okay, sure,” I say, surprised and slightly insulted that he hadn’t said more about it, or about the words on it. I guess he sees so much stuff that one wooden box doesn’t impress him.

  “Help yourself on the way out,” he says. “All the packing supplies are in the next room. But now let me give you your assignment.” He turns to his left and slowly strolls along one of the walls of shelves. I can’t imagine what he’s going to pull off. He walks past the oversized doll, past an old metal typewriter, and then runs his fingers along the spines of the books. He pulls out one of them, opens the front cover, then sticks it back on the shelf and pulls out another. He keeps doing this until he opens a small book with a light blue cover, and an envelope slips out and onto the floor.