Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online

life a bag lady, a little boy walking cross-legged now because he was about to wet his pants, and a fourteen-year-old girl in jeans came sweeping through.
    Apparently the bag lady had done this before because she knew the way right to the john. It was just in time for Tom Terrific.
    When we came back out of the hotel, the doorman was helping a Japanese man take about
thirty-seven leather suitcases out of a taxi, so he couldn't hold the door for us again. But he nodded, said "Good afternoon" a second time, and didn't blink an eye as the bag lady went into her death-defying traffic-stopping number once more.
    Then we were back in the safety of the Public Garden.
    "Thank you," I said to her. "You really saved Tom's life. Or at least his dignity."
    "Who's the Negro?" she muttered abruptly.
    I looked around, startled. There were lots of black people in the Garden; there were Chinese, Puerto Ricans, WASPs, and anybody else you could think of. I didn't know who she was talking about. And I hadn't heard anybody say "Negro" for about ten years, except maybe my great-aunt Eleanor, who tends to use obsolete language. Every time she comes to visit she asks, "Enid, do you have a beau?" and for a minute I think she's asking about a hair ribbon.
    "What?" I asked the bag lady. "I'm sorry; I don't know who you mean."
    "With the
instrument,
" she said brusquely.
    Oh. Of course. "His name is Hawk," I said.
    "You tell him," she muttered, looking at the ground, "I'll do it. I think it's a good idea, it
would serve them right, nobody ever fights back, I'll do it if he will, if other people will, you tell him."
    "You'll do
what?
" I asked, puzzled. My I.Q. isn't all that monumental. Enid almost rhymes with
stupid,
of course.
    She looked up, her little eyes bright and piercing. "Picket," she hissed. "
Disrupt.
"
    "Why don't
you
tell him?" I asked; but she had turned already and was plodding away, disappearing around the cement corner of a statue's base. High above her, looking out with glazed eyes over his straight bronze nose, George Washington sat with impeccable posture atop his pawing horse. He stared ahead through the trees, his gaze blank. So did all the other people in the Garden as the bag lady shuffled past them, their eyes like the blind eyes of statues.
    When we got back to our corner of the park, Hawk was gone. A man wearing a business suit was reading the
Boston Globe
on the bench where Hawk had been. It was getting late.
    I took Tom Terrific's hand and walked him home. He counted things along the way. Twelve dogs, six taxis, and eight bright orange parking tickets on the windshield of illegally parked cars.

Chapter 9
    Seth Sandroff called after supper. Probably he couldn't dream up any vandalism that day, and he was tired of tormenting his sisters and looking for someone else to drive crazy.
    The Sandroffs live on Commonwealth Avenue, about three blocks from our house. His father owns a TV station. His mother, as I've said, is a child psychologist; but mostly she gets her kicks out of being a Well-Known Personality. She wrote a book once, called
Get in Touch,
subtitled
Living with Adolescents,
which a lot of people bought because, let's face it, a lot of people don't much like living with adolescents, and her book told them how to do it without committing suicide. So she was on the
Today Show,
simpering dumb answers to dumb questions asked by Jane Pauley; and after that she was on a lot of talk shows, and now she is the Dr. Joyce Brothers of the parental world.
    She's a first-class phony. One of the things her
book harps on is "learning to love yourself," after which, of course, you will "learn to love your teenager," following which your teenager will, presumably, learn to love you. Wilma Sandroff loves herself so much that as soon as she became a TV personality, she went off to a beauty farm to lose twenty pounds; then she had her hair bleached platinum blond; then she had a facelift. Now, instead of looking like a