Taking Care of Terrific Read Free Page B

Would you die peacefully in the shower?)
    "Enid," says my mother, "the exact location is not at all important." (I wonder if she says that to her patients as she aims her million-volt X-ray machines at them. "The exact location is not at all important, tra-la. Head, stomach, knee, somewhere around there; relax.")
    I like to think that my grandmother died in her—my—bed. The thought doesn't gross me out. It gives me a sense of history.

    "Tom Terrific," I said to Joshua Cameron, "this is going to be our turf. The Public Garden. So we have to get to know it really well."
    Tom Terrific looked at me with that frowned-up sort of face that four-year-olds get when they don't know what you're talking about.
    "Why do we have to do that?" he asked.
    I thought for a minute. I wanted to tell him all about green places: how everyone needs a green place in his life, a place where you can be whatever you want to be, a place where you feel alive and ageless. If you are fourteen, like me
adolescent,
Famous Psychologist Wilma Sandroff says; God, how I hate that word
adolescent
), it doesn't matter in your green place. You can be three, or
forty, or eighty—whatever you want to be. And if you are four, like Joshua Warwick Cameron IV (what would Wilma Sandroff call four? Early Childhood? How I hate Wilma Sandroff), you wouldn't have to be four anymore. You could be a hundred and nine, if you chose, in your green place. You could be Tom Terrific.
    But I realized he would be a little confused by all of that.
    He pulled at my sleeve. "Why is this our turf?" he asked. "Why do we have to get to know it really well?"
    I thought of an answer he might understand. "Because," I said, "it's where we escape from the enemy."

    Tom Terrific was mulling over that bit of information (and smiling; he understood about the need to escape from the enemy) when suddenly he was whomped on the head. Not by a weapon. Not by a club or a blackjack or anything. But by a huge, soft, black purse. The woman who was carrying it hadn't meant to hit him. It was just that he was so short. As she walked past, her fat pocketbook knocked the top of his blond head and almost wiped him out. Some babysitter I was turning out to be; it would be tough to explain,
bringing him home with a concussion.
    "Hey!" I said to the woman who had hit him. She turned, startled, and looked back at her victim, who was rubbing the top of his head and deciding whether or not to cry.
    "Well," she muttered, "don't stand in the middle of the path, then." She turned and walked on. Hobbled, really. She wasn't too great at walking, maybe because her shoes were both untied, so that she was tripping herself, and her ankles looked swollen. Also, her gray hair was in her eyes, so she could barely see where she was going. And her long black coat (this was July. Hot. I had already taken Tom Terrific's sweater off) flapped around her like a giant bat.
    "Is that the enemy?" Tom asked. I could see that he was intrigued by the idea of enemies. And his head was okay. Her purse was overstuffed and probably just as soft as Bearable, who was still under Tom's arm.
    "No. It's just a bag lady."
    "What's a bag lady?"
    Boy, did Tom Terrific have a lot to learn. Probably his mother had taught him every nursery rhyme that Mother Goose ever dreamed up, and probably he knew the words to the Apostles' Creed and also the seven warning signals of
cancer. But no one had ever told him about bag ladies.
    "Well, first of all," I told him, "they're ladies. You know what ladies are."
    "Yep."
    "And usually they're kind of old."
    "The one who whomped me on the head was old."
    "And they're poor," I said.
    Tom Terrific thought about that for a moment. "What's 'poor'?" he asked.
    What's "poor"? Tough to explain that one to a kid who lives in a huge house on one of Boston's most exclusive streets and whose Teddy bear has a Steiff label.
    "They don't have any money, and so sometimes they don't have any place to live, or very much to