Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It Read Free Page B

in search of Mom. She only works part-time, and today was one of her at-home days.
    She sat at her desk scribbling in the checkbook. When she saw me, she held out an arm and squeezed me around the waist. “I was just thinking about when you were in kindergarten and the teacher said you were going to learn how to write checks. Remember?”
    How could I forget? Mom loved bringing up that story—especially when she and Dad had friends over for dinner.
    I rubbed my eyes, which were still blinky on account of the Jitters. “I thought it was sort of advanced for our age,” I said, yawning. “But I was ready to try.” Of course, the teacher meant making check
marks,
not filling out actual checks like my parents did. That was a major letdown.
    Mom laughed. “What do you want to do today?”
    “Can I go to Khalfani’s?”
    “Sure, if it’s okay with his mom.”
    “It is. She said so last night.” I sat on the spare bed, staring at the back of Mom’s head. Ed’s hair had obviously been orange like Mom’s before it turned almost all white.
    She made some more scribbles. My brain pulsed. My fingers tingled. I clasped my hands and took a breath. I felt like a beaker about to boil over. “Does Grandpa DeBose know about me?”
    Her pen stopped moving. She sat frozen.
    I was asking about the One Thing I knew I wasn’t supposed to.
    “He knows.” She started writing again.
    “Why don’t you talk to him? What’d he do that’s so bad?”
    She put the pen down and twisted in the chair. “Where’s all this coming from?”
    I’d promised Gladys I wouldn’t tell Mom about the mall, but nothing had been said about asking questions. I shrugged. “Just curious.” Mom liked my curiosity…usually. “Will you at least tell me something about him?”
    Her eyebrows pulled so close together, they almost touched. “You miss Grampa Clem, don’t you?”
    I nodded because it was true, even if it wasn’t why I was asking about Grandpa DeBose. “What kind of job did he have?”
    Her chest was turning pink. The color crept up around her neck. “He was a soil tester, for the State Department.”
    “What do they do?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Test soil. Make sure it’s safe for growing crops. Things like that.”
    “Are they scientists?”
    “I don’t know if they all are. I guess so.” Her whole neck had gone pink. “Does that satisfy your curiosity for now?”
    I blinked a few times. I still hadn’t found out what I really wanted to know. Where was Ed DeBose when he wasn’t at the Super Mall? “Can I see a picture of him?”
    “Bren, you know my photos are a mess. I couldn’t find one if I tried.”
    Mom was always saying she was going to organize her photos, along with categorizing her recipes, clearing closets and planting a vegetable garden out back—one day. But she never got around to it.
    My palms itched. My scalp buzzed. I swallowed. Time to get straight to the point. “Where does he live?”
    The pink moved all the way to her face. She was like a giant thermometer. A Momometer. She turned away. “I don’t know.”
    “Could he still live in the same place where you grew up?”
    “I suppose so.” She gripped her pen again. Not like she was going to write. More like she planned to stab something.
    “That’s close to here, isn’t it? Why can’t we go see him?” I stood next to the desk.
    Her eyes looked serious, but they sort of drooped, too. “He doesn’t want to see us, Bren. He’s made that perfectly clear.”
    My forehead tensed. Us? Why wouldn’t he want to see
us
? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I almost dropped the bomb that I
had
seen him, talked to him, even. But a promise was a promise, and I didn’t want to get on Gladys’s bad side.
    I went to my room and opened my
Book of Big Questions.
My grandpa had been missing for ten years. My mom didn’t want to talk about him. Now suddenly I’d discovered him, and he was a scientist, just like me. Who else was he? Where had he been? And