Free Squashed by Joan Bauer Page A

fields, thinking about what a delightful girl I was and what a deadhead Sharrell really was—and he’d never even seen me with my perfect makeup job. I made Dad coffee and baking powder cheese biscuits, of which I was determined to eat only two bites. Cheese biscuits made Dad feel loved and appreciated, which kept him peaceful during breakfast. The Rock River Pumpkin Weigh-In and Harvest Fair was twenty breakfasts away, and you can bet my father was going to be swimming in warm, cheesy heaven.
    Dad was attacking one of his Important Life Goals: running seven miles in under forty minutes. He’d trimmed his speed down to forty-two minutes, which I told him was a miracle for a person of his extreme age. He flopped in the kitchen dripping wet, checked his watch, and collapsed.
    “It’s conceivable,” Dad said, wheezing, “that I could be dead.”
    I poured coffee into his “Forty Isn’t Old If You’re a Tree” mug and got myself a glass of water.
    “You look tired,” I said, being kind. Actually, Dad’s face had that dark, craggy look that Abraham Lincoln got during the Civil War. Dad had added three new clients to his schedule last month, which meant he was working round the clock when he wasn’t running. He wasn’t sleeping well, either, but then, he hardly ever did.
    “Maybe you should cut back, Dad.”
    Dad did not believe in the concept of rest. He closed his eyes, tensed his muscles, and breathed deeply.
    “A harnessed mind,” he said, “can change the body.”
    I considered my body and knew the only thing that would change it was basic starvation. He did severe stretching exercises to prove his point. I took the perfectly browned biscuits out of the oven and told my body it wasn’t hungry. This concept didn’t take. I ran from the kitchen a broken person, with a cheese biscuit clenched in my fist.
    Everything went down the toilet in October (especially my grades) because pushing a winning squash to the limit took everything I had. Miss Moritz was pumping up for her fall extravaganza: “The Major Battles ofWorld War II and How They Make Us
Feel
Today.” She wanted us to “connect with the emotion of the battlefield because history isn’t just facts, it’s
feelings.
” My feelings for the battlefield weren’t deep.
    Dad didn’t appreciate that the next twenty days were
the
most important in all of the pumpkin-growing competition. This was when a giant could gain ten pounds per day or die in rot, and then where were you? Out in the cold, that’s where. Dad picked homework over squash nurturing every time. Cyril Pool didn’t have this pressure. Cyril did have stupidity working against him, which gave me hope, since Cyril didn’t even know he was stupid.
    It was 7:32. Grace still hadn’t called to tell me about Wes. I checked the phone to make sure it was working. Maybe Grace’s phone wires had been cut by terrorists.
    Now it was 7:47. The smell of Dad’s remaining biscuits filled the house, and I picked off another one. I tried the phone line three minutes later, when three gunshots sounded in the distance. Gunshots weren’t heard in Rock River except when the VFW went duck hunting, which they never did on Sunday. This could be trouble.
    Dad and I ran outside. More gunshots were blasting. An old truck sped around the corner. It was pursued by Mannie Plummer in her gingham housecoat, holding a rifle screeching fire. “They took it!’ she screamed, pointing down Bud DeWitt Memorial Drive. “They stole it right in plain daylight! They stole my baby!”
    Roxye and Phil Urice came out of their house because Mannie had flopped down on their lawn in her grief and they had just fertilized it real good yesterdaymorning. Mannie didn’t notice, and Roxye and Phil weren’t about to tell her. Mrs. Lemming stuck her head out her front door, saw Mannie slumped on the newly fertilized lawn, and within minutes waddled down the street with a jug of cider and paper cups, which she passed out to the small