Penelope Crumb Never Forgets Read Free

trying to decide between a glow-in-the-dark card deck and a Portwaller Town Hall jigsaw puzzle. Angus Meeker is playing with a tall brown hat that looks like the kind Mayor Luckett was wearing in the painting.
    And Miss Stunkel (Miss Stunkel!) is trying on umbrellas.
    I can feel my ears start to sweat. “What’s the matter with you all? We didn’t finish looking at all the stuff in there!” I yell, pointing to the museum room.
    Everybody stops. My words are a heavy blanket, one that has been kept in the corner of a basement and smells of mold. It covers the room and ruins everybody’s good fun.
    Miss Stunkel grips the umbrella and then peers at me out of the corners of her eyeballs. She’s got a look on her face that says, Ready, Aim, Fire! But instead of hurling the umbrella at me, she just holds her chicken-bone finger in the air.
    I nod to let her know I don’t want any trouble. After a long moment, she tucks her finger back inside her jumper pocket and slides the umbrella into the wooden barrel with all the others. Then she turns away from me to keep from having murdering thoughts.
    I turn away, too, and that’s when I see Patsy Cline and Vera Bogg side by side at the jewelry counter, with their shoulders touching and their heads entirely too close together.
    I wriggle between them, pushing them apart. “Everybody left me behind in there.” I point to the museum room. “There’s more to see, you know. Things that are more important than a gift shop.”
    “Sorry,” says Patsy Cline.
    But she doesn’t look sorry. And I’m about to tell her so when Vera dangles a small white sand dollar swinging from a chain in front of my nose. Engraved on it in deep letters are the words FRIENDS FOREVER . “Look what we got,” Vera says.
    “We who?” And then I see the same necklace peeking out from underneath Patsy Cline’s frizzy hair.
    Good gravy.
    Before I can help myself, right then and there in the museum gift shop, I open my mouth as wide as it will go. And then I yell loud enough for even one-eared, Mangy Teddy to hear. “Doesn’t anybody care about dead people? Dead people are people, too!” And then I reach into my pockets, pull out all the money that I had emptied from my piggy bank that morning—fifteen dollars and fourteen cents, plus a Canadian penny—and find the museum’s donation box. “This,” I announce as I stuff the money into the slot, “is for dead people everywhere!”

3.
    M r. Drather swings open the door to the bus and says, “Back so soon?”
    I climb inside and slide into my seat. He’s got the radio on a country-western music station, and there’s a man singing some sad song about good love gone bad.
    He turns around in his seat. “Didn’t learn anything from the Fort McHenry incident, did you, kid?”
    “No.”
    “Guess not.” He unwraps a candy bar and breaks it in half before eating it. “Mary hurt again this time?”
    “Mary who?” I say.
    He picks at the corners of his mouth with his thumbnail. “Sorry. Miss Stunkel, I mean.”
    My word. I didn’t even know that Miss Stunkel had a first name. “Miss Stunkel’s name is Mary? She doesn’t really look like a Mary.”
    “What does a Mary look like?” he says.
    “First of all,” I say, “a Mary doesn’t have a mean face, like she’s sucking on lemon seeds all the time. And she has nice eyes. The kind that when they look at you don’t wish you were dead.”
    He must not know what to say to that, because he turns around in his seat and taps his fingers on the steering wheel.
    I take out my drawing pad from my toolbox and draw a Mary who is not Miss Stunkel. When I finish, I take it to the front of the bus and show Mr. Drather.
    “You draw pretty good,” he says.
    “Want me to draw you?”
    He shrugs. “Do I have to do anything more than what I’m doing right now?”
    I say, “What are you doing right now?”
    “Nothing,” he says.
    And I tell him that’s just fine. I sit cross-legged on the floor by