Free Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo

she said. “I’ll see you Monday, at Ida Nee’s.”
    “Yes, you will,” said Louisiana. “The Rancheros will ride again. I promise you.”
    Beverly sat very still, her arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t look at Raymie. She didn’t say anything at all.
    Raymie closed the door to the station wagon as quietly as she could and climbed the front steps to her house. Before she went inside, she turned and watched the car go up the street. There was black smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe. Raymie stared at the smoke, willing it to shape itself into something that had meaning — a letter, a promise. She stared until the car disappeared.
    “Where in the world have you been?” said her mother. She was holding open the front door. Behind her was the bookcase, filled with all of Raymie’s father’s books, and behind that was the yellow expanse of the shag carpet, which seemed to go on forever.
    “I was —” said Raymie. “I was, um, reading to the elderly.”
    “Come inside,” said her mother. “Something has happened.”
    “What?” said Raymie. “What happened?” She felt her soul form itself into a small, frightened ball.
    “Mrs. Borkowski,” said her mother.
    “Mrs. Borkowski,” repeated Raymie.
    She held Florence Nightingale very close to her chest, as if the lady with the lamp could protect her from whatever it was that her mother was getting ready to say.
    “Mrs. Borkowski is dead.”

Raymie stared at the yellow carpet. She stared at the bookcase. She couldn’t look at her mother’s face. She felt, more than anything else, bewildered. How could Mrs. Borkowski be dead?
    “There’s no funeral,” said her mother. “But there will be a memorial service tomorrow at the Finch Auditorium. Mrs. Borkowski’s daughter is taking care of things, and that’s what she said her mother wanted: a memorial service, no funeral. Who knows why.” Raymie’s mother sighed. “Mrs. Borkowski was always so strange.”
    “But how can she be dead?” said Raymie.
    “She was old,” said Raymie’s mother. “She had a heart attack.”
    “Oh.”
    Raymie went into the kitchen. She picked up the phone and called Clarke Family Insurance. The phone rang. Raymie looked up at the sunburst clock on the kitchen wall. The clock said that it was 5:15. Sometimes Mrs. Sylvester stayed late on Saturdays, typing things up.
    The phone rang again.
    “Please,” said Raymie. She tried to flex her toes. But her feet were frozen, numb. Her toes wouldn’t move at all.
    Mr. Staphopoulos had never said what you should do if you
couldn’t
flex your toes.
    The phone rang a third time.
    Mrs. Borkowski was dead!
    “Clarke Family Insurance,” said Mrs. Sylvester in her cartoon-bird voice. “How may we protect you?”
    Raymie said nothing.
    “Hello?” said Mrs. Sylvester.
    Raymie couldn’t speak.
    “Is this Raymie Clarke?” asked Mrs. Sylvester.
    Raymie stood in the kitchen and nodded her head. She held on to the phone and stared at the sunburst clock and thought about Mrs. Sylvester’s gigantic jar of candy corn. It was so bright. It was as if it held light instead of candy corn. It was a very comforting thing to think about — a jar filled with light.
    “I —” said Raymie. But she couldn’t get any further than that. The sentence she needed to say was jammed up inside of her. Maybe the words were somewhere in her toes? Also, her soul felt incredibly small. She wasn’t even sure where it was. She searched around inside of herself, trying to locate it.
    “There, there,” said Mrs. Sylvester.
    “Um,” said Raymie.
    “He’ll come back, honey,” said Mrs. Sylvester.
    Raymie realized that Mrs. Sylvester thought that she was upset about her father leaving.
    Mrs. Sylvester didn’t know that Mrs. Borkowski was dead.
    Something about this made Raymie’s soul even smaller and her toes even stiffer. It occurred to her that nobody really knew what anybody else was upset about, and that seemed like a terrible thing.
    She