Fish in a Tree Read Free

bad on her baby.
    But I can’t find the words. My mind does the Etch A Sketch thing. Blank.
    “What is it, Ally?” she finally asks. She puts her hands on her big belly like she needs to protect it.
    I turn and run out of the room. Down the hall and out the front door. The buses are pulling away without me. But that’s the way it should be, I guess. I deserve to walk.
    All that long way. And all by myself.

CHAPTER 4
    B i r d i n a C a g e
    When I finally get to Park Road, I head into A. C. Petersen Farms, which is a weird name for a restaurant. They have pictures of cows inside and outside but it’s on a busy street with tons of stores. I wonder if there is a restaurant somewhere in the middle of nowhere named Crowded City.
    My mom is waiting. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron.
    “I missed the bus and had to walk.”
    She shakes her head. “Sit yourself right down there and start that homework of yours,” she says, nodding toward the end of the counter. The same place I always sit. A place where she can keep an eye on me, she says.
    “Anything you want to tell me?” She seems tired.
    “They called you, didn’t they?” I ask.
    “Yes. I don’t know why you would do such a thing, Ally.” She sounds sad instead of mad. Which is worse, I think.
    There is a tray full of glass sundae dishes filled with brightly colored ice cream. Strawberry, pistachio, black raspberry. Pink, green, and purple. I like the colors next to each other and wonder what kind of impossible things I can draw about ice cream. Maybe melting rivers of it. And a man with a cone-shaped head sitting in a banana split dish rowing with a spoon.
    “
Ally!
Are you
lis
tening?”
    “Oh. Sorry,” I mumble, pushing off the floor with my foot to spin on the padded stool.
    “I just don’t know what to say anymore.”
    My mom’s boss looks at her over his glasses.
    She drops to a whisper. “Just do your homework. We’ll talk at home. And please—no spinning on that stool.”
    “I’m sorry. I am. I really thought Mrs. Hall would like that card.”
    “How could
that
be?” she says as she picks up the tray of ice cream and moves away.
    I pull out a book and open it, but the letters squiggle and dance. How are other people able to read letters that move?
    So instead I stare at the steaming liquid dripping into a coffeepot and start thinking of steaming volcanoes. And dinosaurs standing around drinking coffee, staring up at the giant meteor soaring through the air, commenting on how pretty it is. And I think about how lucky they were that they never had to go to school. I grab a napkin and begin a drawing of them for the Sketchbook of Impossible Things.
    Soon, my mom’s brown and white checkered apron is in front of me.
    I look up. “I swear it. I didn’t know it was a sym . . . a sym . . . a card for dead people.”
    “It’s a sympathy card,” she says. “And it’s for the people that miss the person that has died. Not for the dead.”
    “Well, don’t you think the dead person deserves a card more than anyone?”
    And she laughs. She leans her elbow on the counter and lifts her other arm to put her hand on my face. It’s warm and I’m so relieved that she isn’t that mad at me. “You’re funny. You know that?”
    Then she pulls over the napkin with the dinosaurs holding coffee cups. “What’s this?”
    “Just an idea I have for the Sketchbook of Impossible Things.”
    She stares at it. “Aw, your grandpa knew you were talented, and he’d be so proud of how hard you’re working on your art. And he would love that you named your sketchbook after
Alice in Wonderland.
He had such fun sharing that book with you.” She looks up at me. “Just like he shared it with me when I was young.”
    Alice in Wonderland
—a book about living in a world where nothing makes sense made
perfect
sense to me.
    “I miss Grandpa,” I say. Three words that hold sadness like a tree holds