Project Mulberry Read Free

time—and if he remembered, they usually weren't the ones we needed. He'd get mad at himself for forgetting, or mad at the quarters if they weren't the right ones. But he loved looking up the stories about the pictures on the coins.
    Connecticut was my favorite quarter. It was Patrick's favorite, too. I liked it because the tree was so pretty; I wondered how hard it had been for someone to carve all those tiny branches. And maybe I also liked it because it was on my mind a lot: I was having no luck finding a second Connecticut. I had two quarters from lots of other states, but still only one Connecticut.
    Patrick liked Connecticut because of the story about the tree. It was sort of a spy story. Way back in colonial times, the king of England tried to take away Connecticut's government charter. There was this meeting where the king's men were going to tear up the charter, and suddenly the candles got blown out so the room was all dark, and when they got the candles lit again, the charter was gone. Some guy had escaped with it, and hid it in a hollow oak tree—the tree on the coin. It even has "The Charter Oak" in teeny letters.
    We never put the quarters into the folders until I'd found two of the same state, so both of our Connecticut slots were still empty.
    I turned over Patrick's quarter.
    "New York," I said.
    "Dang it."
    We already had our New Yorks.
    Â 
    "Bye, Patrick," my mom said. She must have heard us coming down the stairs, because she was all ready for him. Her chopsticks were loaded with a bite of rice and a few pieces of kimchee. Patrick opened wide, and she popped that mouthful right in.
    "Thanks, Mrs. Song," he said, not very clearly because he was chewing. "Bye, Julia."
    This is their routine whenever Patrick leaves our house at dinnertime. We have rice and kimchee for dinner almost every night, no matter what the main course is, and my mom always gives Patrick a bite as he goes out the door.
    For dinner we were having beef short ribs—and rice and kimchee, of course. I love short ribs. I like picking them up in my hands and gnawing on them to get every last shred of meat.
    "Patrick coming back after supper?" my mom asked.
    "Yup," I said. "We haven't done our homework because of the meeting, and afterward we talked about our project."
    My dad said, "What project?"
    I picked up a rib. "Wiggle project," I said. "We want to do something with animals."
    "A report on an animal?" My dad again.
    "No, it's a hands-on thing," I explained. "You have to work with a real animal. So they suggest all these things like sheep and cows and pigs, or else you can do pets. We can't do
any
of those."
    "So if you do a cow project, you have to milk it yourself—something like that?"
    "No, you have to raise it. In the old days, kids used to get a lamb or a calf or something from a farmer, and they'd learn how to feed it and take care of it. That kind of thing."
    "Mom, if Julia gets an animal, can I have one, too? Can I have a dog?" That was Kenny.
    "No pets," my dad said. He turned to my mom. "Didn't your family raise animals?"
    My dad grew up in Seoul, which is the capital of Korea, a really big city. But my mom's family lived outside the city, and in those days Seoul didn't have many suburbs. It was mostly countryside.
    "Not really," my mom said. "It's not like my family were farmers."
    I knew that. I heard about it all the time—my parents were always saying that I had to get good grades because both of my grandfathers had been teachers.
    "But almost everyone kept poultry," she went on. "I know a little bit about chickens."
    "Could we—"
    She didn't even let me finish.
"No,"
she said immediately. "Chickens are a mess. And they need lots of space to run around and scratch and build nests. Besides, I'm sure it would be against zoning laws or something to keep chickens here."
    Our apartment is a townhouse—one of a whole line of skinny houses all stuck together. It has a little square of grass on one side