I laughed. “No, it wasn’t. He was born Douglas Gregory Williams. I think that would be a great name for a conductor.”
“Sweetie, maybe he was trying to get away from something. Maybe he had a family he was embarrassed about. Or maybe he just didn’t like his name. You went through that.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. When you were seven.”
“That doesn’t count,” I said indignantly.
“Yes, it does. You put a lot of work into changing your name. You wrote up an official name change. Actually you wrote six of them. You melted a crayon to make a seal and almost set fire to the shower curtain. You delivered one document to your dad and me, one to your teacher and the rest to the neighbors.”
I closed my eyes and pressed a hand to my forehead. “Princess Aurelia Rosebud Nightingale,” I said with a sigh.
“You do remember.”
“I do. Joey Higgins refused to call me by my new name.”
“And you bloodied his nose.”
“I had to stay after school and write lines, which took a long time because all I knew how to do was print.”
Mom was laughing now. “You argued with the vice principal that writing lines was cruel and unusual punishment under the constitution, because the school hadn’t taught you how to write yet.”
“Hey, it got me out of detention half an hour early.”
“Poor Mr. Campbell let you go because he was afraid his head was going to explode,” she chortled.
I remembered Mr. Campbell, a tiny, wiry man with a rodentlike face and thinning hair who reminded me of a Stretch Armstrong toy—his sleeves and pant legs were always just a bit too short. I remembered how surprised and impressed I’d been years later when nebbishy Mr. Campbell ran into a burning building to save the teenage son of his old high school girlfriend.
“I have to go,” Mom said.
“Okay. Tell Dad I’ll call him tonight.”
“I will. Take care of yourself. I’ll hold a good thought for your music festival. Talk to you soon.” She blew a kiss through the phone and hung up.
I replaced the receiver and lay back with my head on the seat of the chair. My father was going to play a flea in a series of television commercials. An apparently highbrow flea. Was it too late to change my name back to Princess Aurelia Rosebud Nightingale?
21
Shoot the Tiger
I decided to stop at Maggie’s studio on the way in to the library in the morning. I was feeling a bit uncertain about my meeting with Everett. He did have the option of ending my contract—after all, the renovations to the library weren’t going smoothly and I’d gotten tied up in a murder.
Maggie’s studio was on the top floor of the River Arts Center. Climbing the stairs always reminded me of high school, which made sense, given that the brick building once was a high school. Maggie was leaning over her worktable, in a white tank top and baggy blue cotton pants, chewing on a pencil.
“Maggie,” I said.
She looked up with the same guilty expression Owen got when I caught him doing something he shouldn’t be doing, like stealing things from Rebecca’s recycling bin, for instance.
“What happened to ‘no more chewing pencils’?” I asked, crossing the open studio space to stand on the other side of the table.
“This project is what happened to ‘no more chewing pencils.’”
Maggie chewed pencils the way a beaver chewed trees. At least she used to. It used to be that every pencil she had was pockmarked with teeth imprints from the point to the metal end that held the eraser. Even she admitted it was gross and more than a little unsanitary and not particularly good for her teeth. So she’d given up pencils cold turkey, experimenting with substitutes like gnawing on a carrot stick.
“How about some banana bread instead?” I asked, holding up a paper bag containing a couple of slices of the loaf I’d made the night before.
“You don’t have any caffeine on you, by any chance. Do you?” she asked with a sigh.
I brought my other hand from behind my back. “Not for you, but I do have a large chai from Eric’s.” I handed the cup across the table to her.
“How did you know I needed this?” She took a long drink through the sippy-cup lid.
I’d bought myself a large dark-roast coffee. I took a drink and set the cup on the table. “Because when I stopped at Eric’s he said you’d been in first thing. I figured you’d be ready for another cup by now.”
“You figured right. Thank you.” She unfolded the top of the paper bag and peered inside. “I love banana bread.” She broke off a bite. “So what was bugging you last night? You weren’t making banana bread just for the fun of it, were you?”
“No.”
“So?”
“So I have a meeting tonight with Everett about the library renovation.”
“You know he’s going to back you.”
I scraped at a blob of dried paint on the table. “He could just end my contract.”
She shook her head. “Not going to happen. Next problem.”
“My father is going to be a flea,” I said.
Maggie almost choked on the banana bread. “He’s going to be a flea or he has fleas?”
“Ha, ha, very funny,” I said. “My father is going to play a flea in a TV commercial that will probably be seen all over the country.”
“Oh, c’mon, it’s not that bad.”
“It was my sophomore year when he did the cereal commercial where he was the dried-out, dancing, singing raisin.”
She opened her mouth and I held out my hand. “Do not sing that song if you ever want to eat another one of my brownies. Ever.”
She wisely popped another piece of banana bread in her mouth instead.
“Everyone was singing that song. Five of my friends dressed up as the shriveled raisin for Halloween. We did Secret Santa in the dorm. Guess what I got for my present.”
“You’re not in college anymore, Toto,” she said.
“Let’s change the subject. What are you working on?” I set my forearms on the table and leaned over to get a better look, albeit an upside-down look, at her current project.
“It’s a collage for Roma for the clinic. I’m using photos of the Wisteria Hill cats. And I’m hand coloring them. I was just going through the last batch of paper I made, looking for backgrounds, but there’s still something off about the layout.” She leaned back and studied her work spread out on a large sheet of Masonite. Then she shook her head and took another pull from her tea. “Oh, I’m assuming you heard about Ami.”
I nodded. “I drove Rebecca to the hospital to pick Ami up.”
“Eric feels awful.”
“It’s not his fault,” I said, straightening up to pick up my coffee. “Ami didn’t even know she had the allergy.”
“I’ve heard of being allergic to seafood and peanuts, but never poppy seeds.”
Suddenly I remembered Everett sitting at my kitchen table, turning down my offer of a muffin. “I have,” I said slowly. “Everett’s allergic to poppy seeds.”
“That makes sense,” Maggie said, dropping a chunk of banana bread in her mouth.
“It does?”
She held up a finger until she’d finished chewing and swallowed. “Well, yeah, since Everett is Ami’s grandfather.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You didn’t know?”
“No. Rebecca never said anything.”
Maggie knocked crumbs off her shirt. “Ami had some kind of fight with her grandfather, maybe seven or eight months ago. According to the town grapevine they haven’t spoken since then.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“It is,” Maggie agreed. “Ami’s the only family Everett has.” She looked at me across the worktable and a small smile turned up the corners of her mouth.
“Stop smirking,” I said. “I get it. My dad’s going to play a flea on TV. So what?”