Meeting Miss 405 Read online

  Meeting Miss 405

  LOIS PETERSON

  Text copyright © 2008 Lois Peterson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Peterson, Lois, 1952—

  Meeting Miss 405 / written by Lois Peterson.

  (Orca young readers)

  ISBN 978-1-55469-015-2

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8631.E832M43 2008 jC813’.6 C2008-903016-8

  First published in the United States, 2008

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928547

  Summary: Tansy’s mother is at a clinic being treated for depression,

  her father is busy at work and her new babysitter is

  old, wrinkly and meditates while she does calligraphy.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover artwork by Peter Ferguson

  Author photo by Deanna Scott

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, STN. B

  VICTORIA, BC CANADA

  V8R 6S4

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 468

  CUSTER, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1

  This is for Doug and Holly.

  Always with love.

  Acknowledgments

  My parents, Jo and Bill Peterson, taught me a love of words and stories. My brother Stephen and sister Judith shared many childhood books with me. My fellow writers (too many to name here— I hope they know who they are) listened to, read and advised me on my work over the years. My writing teachers and students challenged me to learn more. And my first “kid reader,” Sophie Vecchiato, and lovely librarian, Linda Neumann, both offered useful comments on Tansy’s story early on. Every one has made a difference in my life and my writing. I thank them all.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 Meeting Miss 405

  CHAPTER 2 The First Fifteen Minutes

  CHAPTER 3 Counting Stars

  CHAPTER 4 The Nut-Free Zone

  CHAPTER 5 Sardines and Wine Gums

  CHAPTER 6 Calligraphy Lessons

  CHAPTER 7 Loony Bins and Funny Farms

  CHAPTER 8 The Trusted Other

  CHAPTER 9 Super-Concentrated Miss Stella

  CHAPTER 10 Taking Care of Business

  CHAPTER 11 Those Scary Places Inside

  CHAPTER 12 Guaranteed Allergy-Proof

  CHAPTER 13 Googling Miss Stella

  CHAPTER 14 Poor Devin, Poor Me

  CHAPTER 15 Taking the Bull by the Horns

  CHAPTER 16 In Her Own Words

  CHAPTER 17 The Best Girls in the World

  CHAPTER 18 Show and Tell

  CHAPTER 19 One Letter at a Time

  CHAPTER 1

  Meeting Miss 405

  When Dad makes me go down the hallway to get acquainted, I walk very slowly. “I don’t need a sitter.”

  “You have no say in the matter, I’m afraid.”

  Dad says you can learn what is most important about a person in the first fifteen minutes after you meet them. We know that Mr. 104 has diabetes and likes to barbecue. Mrs. 203 has had seven operations and her pills never work. And Ms. 301 thinks a letter from her boyfriend may have been put in the wrong mailbox.

  All I know about Miss 405 is what I see when I go out on our balcony and look two balconies over. Every morning she comes outside to brush her long gray hair. At night I see the spout of her watering can dribbling water onto the tubs of her balcony jungle.

  Oh, I almost forgot. Some days on my way home from school I see her on her bicycle with a basket in front. One that is big enough for a small dog. Or a sack of potatoes.

  I can guess what is most important to Miss 405 without meeting her. Her hair and her garden. And her bicycle. Bo-o-ring!

  If I slump down in the middle of the hall and go all limp, Dad can’t make me budge. But I better not do it today. He told me twice already that he has enough on his plate.

  As he knocks on the door, I measure with my eyes how far it is from Miss 405’s apartment to ours. But I’m not a good runner. And Dad would catch me before I got there. Dad knocks again.

  I stare up at the little hole in the middle of the door.

  I bet Miss 405 is looking out to see if we are burglars. Or a man with a pizza she didn’t order. Or the landlady selling her stinky Avon stuff.

  Dad knocks again and gives a little wave at the peep hole.

  The door opens. It is too late to get away.

  CHAPTER 2

  The First Fifteen Minutes

  Miss 405 is very old. And she is wearing shiny green shorts! I stare at her tanned wrinkly skin, which goes all the way down her legs in little ripples. Right to her bare feet.

  Dad pushes me in ahead of him. “Miss Stella. This is Tansy.”

  “I thought it might be,” she says. “Come in, Mr. Hill.”

  “Call me Lew. Please,” says Dad.

  Before she can tell us to just call her Stella, I say, “In case you want to know, my name is Tansy with a T,” like I always do. This time I also say, “It was Grandpa’s dumb idea to call me after a dumb wildflower.” Dad taps me on the shoulder.

  Well, it’s true!

  I never knew knees could be bony and wrinkly at the same time. I don’t want to look up. Maybe Miss Stella’s face is all pleated like a turkey’s neck.

  She leads us down her hallway. It is just like ours, but with everything on the wrong side.

  All I can see is a roll of crinkly gray hair tied in a knot with a yellow pencil stuck through the middle. And a baggy black shirt that hangs down over her shiny green bum.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad says. “It looks like we caught you in the middle of supper.”

  On her dining room table is half an avocado on a blue plate and a brown bowl of popcorn next to a whole pile of magazines and papers.

  “I can eat that any time.” Miss Stella shoves everything to the other side of the table. “Sit for a while.”

  Dad takes one chair, and I stand next to him. I rest my elbow on his shoulder. When he tries to shrug me off, I press down harder.

  “Now, I did tell you I have little experience with children. But I understand that you are in a spot,” says Miss Stella.

  “It is short notice, I know,” Dad says. “Her mother is…”

  I press harder into Dad’s soft blue shirt. The pointy part of my elbow fits right in the dip by his neck. If he tells this wrinkly Miss Stella-whoever-she-is about my mother, I will never come back. And I will not say another word to him. Ever.

  But he makes a phony little cough. “My wife had to go away for a while. With seven weeks left in the school year, you can see why we need a sitter. Just until the end of term. Tansy can’t stay alone yet.”

  “I could too!”

  Dad reaches across and takes hold of my elbow, leading it off his shoulder and down to my side. “I often work long hours,” he tells Miss Stella, holding my hand so I can’t move it. “Sometimes I don’t get home until ten. You must tell me if this will be inconvenient.”

  Miss Stella picks up the spoon stuck in her avocado. But instead of digging into i
t, she asks, “Can I offer you some iced tea?”

  Her face is as brown and wrinkly as the rest of her. Like those rust-colored cliffs in the Fraser Canyon with ridges where the rain has run through. Her eyes are light light blue. As if the color got washed out. Maybe she stood too long on her balcony in the rain.

  “That would be nice,” says Dad.

  “Tansy?” Miss Stella makes a little puffing noise as she gets up. Just like Grandpa.

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  While Miss Stella is in the kitchen, I ignore Dad’s frowny look. I run my fingers through the stack of paper. I love popcorn, but I’m not hungry enough to grab a single kernel.

  Miss Stella comes back holding three glasses. Like a waitress, with two in one hand. She puts one on the table in front of me. “Some for you. Just in case.”

  In case of what? “This is red,” I say. Iced tea should be brown. With a slice of lemon squatting on the rim of the glass.

  Lemon I could give to Mom if she was here. Dad and I despise citrus.

  “It’s Roy Bus,” she says. “Not tea at all, really. But delicious.”

  Roy who? I want to ask. But I am not talking to either of them.

  Dad takes a sip. Miss Stella takes a sip. I stick one finger in the glass and roll the ice cubes around. I ignore Dad, who I know is watching me.

  “Delicious,” he says. When he takes another big mouthful, his Adam’s apple bobs up and down.

  “So, how will we get on, you and I?” asks Miss Stella.

  I shrug. Beats me, is what I want to say. This wasn’t MY idea.

  When I shrug again, Miss Stella rolls her eyes. Just like my friend Parveen does when one of her brothers does something stupid.

  Miss Stella does it so quickly, maybe I imagined it.

  CHAPTER 3

  Counting Stars

  At bedtime, Dad rolls me in my sheet like a mummy. I like it this way since we learned about Egyptians at the museum.

  I shut my eyes and take my arms out of the bedroll and lay them down along my body. I try to imagine my spirit moving into the next world.

  “All I ask is that you cooperate,” says Dad. I ignore him.

  “When school ends we can make other arrangements,” he says.

  I’m not saying anything.

  “We will visit your mother in a couple of weeks and figure things out then.”

  My eyes pop open without my wanting them to. “Will she be better in two weeks?”

  Dad picks up one of my hands and flaps it between his two big ones like a piece of pizza dough. “I hope so, Tansy. Meanwhile, you know your grandpa will take care of her.”

  “I could have stayed at Grandpa’s too. I like it there.”

  “I know you do. And you have been a little trouper. But you need to be here for school.”

  “It will be over soon.”

  “Soon enough,” he says in a voice that means the end of the conversation. He lets my hand drop back onto the bed. “We will make our summer plans in a week or so. Meanwhile, you have sports day to look forward to.” He gets up and picks my Harry Potter book from the shelf beside my bed. “And it will take you the rest of the school year to read this. Better put in some time now.”

  He bends down and touches my face, then kisses me. His breath smells of Roy Bus tea, which wasn’t tea at all. You won’t catch me drinking that red stuff.

  “I want a butterfly kiss,” I tell him. Butterfly kisses are really for little kids. But Dad rests his face against mine and brushes my cheek with his eyelashes.

  Then I do it to him.

  When he has gone, I stare at the stars on my ceiling and wonder which ones Mom is looking at on the Sunshine Coast.

  We took Mom over to Grandpa’s on the ferry yesterday. Every night when we’re visiting him, we sit down by the dock in gray splintery chairs with our hands resting on the flat armrests. As we count stars, I smell the smoke from Grandpa’s cigarette and listen to the water shush shushing against the beach.

  Last night before we came home, Dad and Grandpa talked baseball and stuff while it got dark and inky out on the water. I listened to Mom crying as we both stared up at the stars shining like glitter in the sky.

  I sat with my hand touching Mom’s. Suddenly one of her fingers crept onto mine, stroking them over and over and over while she cried.

  Dad says her depression makes Mom cry all the time. It is an invisible disease that feels even worse than when my hamster died and I thought I would miss him forever. Depression is more than being sad, Dad says. And it is not catching and is not my fault.

  But sometimes I wish she would just get over it. Then I feel really bad.

  For now, my grandpa will take care of Mom while Dad and I take care of business at home. Grandpa says that she can sit in the chair on the beach and look at the water and the stars. He says he will give her three square meals a day, and she won’t have to lift a finger.

  He told us that every night after he has put Mom to bed, he will call to let us know how she’s doing. So now I try and stay awake by counting the stars on my ceiling, waiting for the phone to ring.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Nut-Free Zone

  Next morning I ask Dad what Grandpa said when he called.

  “Nothing to report,” he says. “Remember you need to go straight along to Miss Stella’s after school.” When he plunks a plate down on the table, the juice in my glass shivers.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You do. We talked about this, Tansy.”

  Dad has cut my toast in rectangles. I like it in triangles. I poke my fork into the egg. It looks slimy.

  “Just eat it. Please,” he says.

  “Remember. No nuts in my lunch.”

  Dad sighs and grabs the bag from the counter and takes out the granola bar. “Shall I give you an extra banana instead?”

  “One is too many. I despise bananas. You should know that. You said you’d buy cookies.”

  “I did. But we discovered they have peanuts. Remember?”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  If Mom were here she would tell me not to be lippy. And she would remember that I don’t like bananas anymore.

  Dad just sighs and scrubs his face with his hand. “Sorry, Tan. How about tonight we go to the grocery store and buy some more cookies or something? Look, I have to get going. I can drop you off.”

  While Dad shoves the dirty dishes into the dishwasher without rinsing them, I cut my egg in teeny-tiny pieces and spread it around my plate. I eat one rectangle of toast and slip the other piece in my schoolbag.

  It is Devin’s fault I only have a bologna sandwich and a blotchy banana in my lunch.

  It was very exciting when he was rushed to hospital after he had an allergic reaction. His face got fat and his tongue swelled up, and he made funny noises right in the middle of silent reading.

  Mr. Howarth saved his life by jabbing Devin with a special medical thing called an EpiPen that he keeps in his desk. But Devin still had to go to hospital for a checkup.

  The next day there were signs all over school. This is a Nut-Free Zone. Keep Your School Friends Safe.

  No nuts are allowed in the whole school now. Devin spoiled my favorite lunch.

  Parveen and I sit on the hard edge of the sandbox while I tell her about having to go to Miss Stella’s after school. Cats are the only ones that play here most days. They leave little turds behind, so no one else wants to go near it.

  I tell Parveen that Dad and I are going to visit Mom soon on the Sunshine Coast. We will sleep under the glittery stars and rent a big sailboat and go out onto the ocean and then bring Mom home and everything will be okay again.

  “Your grandpa should live with you like mine does,” she says. “Then someone would be there to take care of you and your mother.”

  “Dad would not let him smoke at our place!”

  Grandpa and apartments do not go together. He keeps his bagpipes on the back porch and plays them every night at sunset. Sometime he takes hi
s little red boat out on the water and just sits in it for hours. Not even fishing. He chops wood for the woodpile every day. Even in summer when the woodstove is not lit.

  Maybe Mom can help him. It must be hard to cry when you are chopping wood.

  “Your dad could have asked my bebe-ji to watch you,” says Parveen when I tell her about being babysat by Miss Stella with the wrinkly legs and a balcony like a jungle. Bebe-ji is what she calls her grandma. Mine both died when I was tiny. And I only have one grandpa. We must have the smallest family in the world.

  “My bebe-ji might not even notice if you came to my house every day after school,” says Parveen. “Some days there’s me and my brothers and my cousins. Sometimes all seven of them.”

  But I already have the key to my apartment building on a shoelace around my neck. And Miss Stella said if I was not at her door by 2:47 precisely, she would come looking for me on her bike.

  “Thanks, Parveen. Maybe you can come home with me one day and meet her yourself.”

  But I bet she won’t be allowed to. Her job is to make the rotis for supper. Every night! Everyone in her house has a job to do.

  Mine used to be taking care of my mom.

  Now I am the one who has to be taken care of. By someone I don’t even know.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sardines and Wine Gums

  I stand in front of the intercom and press the button that has our apartment number on it. It buzzes. I wait.

  When no voice crackles back from the little mouthpiece, I feel sad.

  I feel grown up using my own key to get into the building. But I feel sad again when I get upstairs and have to keep going past our apartment.

  The little peephole in the middle of the door to 405 is way above my head. So after I knock, I lift up my arm and twiddle my fingers in front of it.

  “Do come in,” says Miss Stella. I take just enough steps inside so she can close the door behind me. “You made good time. I’ve been busy, as you can see.”