Kepler’s Dream Read Free Page B

he’d be right back. Hildy trotted off with them, like that tiny animal was going to be a big help if they found a pack of burglars back there.
    With just Rosie, Abercombie, Lou and me standing around, things got mighty quiet. And uncomfortable. If Our Guest hadn’t been there, Rosie and I could have talked about what was going on, but as it was we were locked into silence, our eyes on the ground. Every second took an hour.
    We heard footsteps outside the front door just as cars started to pull up in the driveway. The police were arriving. Miguel ushered my grandmother in and made a come-here gesture toRosie, who returned to the fold of his arms. My grandmother looked wide awake now, the General Major again. Her face was pale and fierce, her lipstick a bright, frowning line.
    â€œWell,” she said. “We can’t know everything that might be missing right away, of course, out of the thousands of books in the Library. But one thing is clear.”
    She looked around with a stern, distressed expression. I couldn’t tell from the way she was talking to us if we were supposed to be her soldiers, getting ready for battle—or if we were actually the enemy.
    â€œKepler’s
Dream,
” my grandmother said, in a voice heavy with upset, “is gone.”

TWO

    I H a V e TO B a CKTR a CK a minu T e TO e XPL a I n .
    It wasn’t my idea to spend that summer at my grandmother’s house. I hardly even knew my grandmother
had
a house—made out of mud or anything else. I’d heard that she and my dad didn’t get along, and that she was maybe mean, or crazy, or both, but I had never met the woman before. She was like a made-up character, Cruella de Vil or Darth Vader, someone you’ve heard stories about but don’t believe actually exists.
    I should explain something about my family. When some people divorce, the situation is bad but not a complete disaster: people still see each other, or talk on the phone, or meet every now and then at a counselor’s office with the plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox. The kids eventually get stepparents and maybe half siblings, back-and-forth schedules between houses and divided-up vacations. We had a lot of that in Santa Rosa.
    But when we Mackenzies do things, we do them
all the way
. It’s Extreme Divorce, like some kind of reality TV show.
    So with my parents, the break happened when I was a tinybaby. I guess one day they just looked up at each other and BOOM! realized they hated each other’s guts—they must have forgotten to notice that when they got married. According to Mom, my dad “was never cut out for having kids,” though there weren’t “kids,” there was just me, Ella. Anyway he ended up far away, like he’d been thrown off a moving train, in Spokane, Washington (say Spo-can, not Spo-cain), where he ran fishing expeditions in the wilderness. Fish seemed to suit him better than people. Maybe he felt bad about leaving my mom and me behind; then again, maybe he didn’t. He sent the odd card, mailed guesstimate-type presents around Christmas (books for the wrong age group, toys mismatched to my tastes), and every now and then made his way down to California for a visit that involved some combination of bowling, ice cream and a movie, and embarrassed awkwardness all around. My dad wasn’t a bad person—at least I didn’t think so—he just didn’t know how to be a dad. It was like no one ever gave him the manual. You got the feeling when our visits were over that part of him was thinking,
Phew! Got
that
done. Now, where’d my rod and reel go?
    So in Santa Rosa it was just Mom and me and Lou living together, happy as clams (who I guess are happy though I don’t know why, when all they have to look forward to is one day being chowder). Or we had been until that winter of my fifth-grade year, when my mom got sick.
    She had cancer. Leukemia. Leukemia sounds better