The Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti Read Free Book Online Page A

surprised by things he couldn't
handle.
    He headed down the driveway toward the house,
and I was about to go home when Mr. D'Angelo stopped suddenly. He turned his
head quickly around as if he'd heard something. I hoped that something wasn't
me. I continued walking casually past the house even though I was headed the
wrong way, and tried to look interested in nature. But it wasn't me he'd fixed
his eyes on; it was the hedge of trees and blackberry bushes that separated his
property from Little Cranberry Farm.
    I decided I must have been wrong before; his
life mustn't be as simple as I imagined if he could be so startled by a rabbit,
or whatever he'd heard just then. I never forgot that look; in fact I
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    would think of it later over and over again.
Those eyes both edgy and doubting. You could almost hear the argument going on
inside his head as his eyes darted around those bushes.
    I knew that argument. It was the one where
there are only two sides, no middle---jump to conclusions or cover your eyes and
keep both feet on the ground. I had that argument myself many times, later.
Whenever I kick myself for being such an idiot, for not seeing, I try to
remember what Big Mama told me.
    "You acted out of instinct, is all," she had
said. "You can't fight it, Jordan. When you're afraid, even a little bit, it's
usually all or nothing."
    That's one thing about Big Mama. She knows a
lot about instinct.
    Grandpa opened the oven door and let out a
cloud of heat. "You sure you can handle this, baby?" he said to me.
    "Just like taking a cool drink," I
said.
    "Don't encourage him," Grandma said.
    "Grandpa's Hotter 'n Hell Hot Sauce," he said
for the hundredth time.
    "You're repeating yourself, Eugene," Grandma
said.
    My father opened the cupboard door and took out
a stack of plates. He had been there when I arrived home, greeted me the same as
always, as if nothing unusual had happened
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    between us that morning. If it's true what they
say, that anyone who does what he did is crazy, then maybe he was already
beginning the process right then. Who knows if craziness is an instant thing, or
if it takes time to grow, like splotchy green mold on a decent piece of
bread.
    All I know is, you wonder.
    And I know too that if craziness does develop in a person over time, what takes longer is for the family members to
notice. Or admit to noticing. That night, I was relieved to find him his old
self, just Dad, instead of the different people I'd been so busy imagining him
being. I was pleased with that relief. It was a false soothing, though, a drink
of cold saltwater for the guy dying of thirst in the ocean. The car I'd seen in
the D'Angelo driveway suddenly didn't seem like his anymore. Relief put me in a
good mood. Sometimes you realize plain, boring, normal life is the best it
gets.
    Grandpa Eugene poked around the pan inside the
oven with a long fork. It was too hot outside to have the oven door open for
that long. When he came back up, his cheeks were rosy. His hair, usually
sculpted into the style of a fifties greaser, was now a fuzzy frenzy that made
him look shocked and alarmed. I've noticed that about people. Lots of times they
stick to the hairstyle they had the last time they felt stylish, even if it was
forty-five years ago.
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    "I like the sound of it, if it's any of your
business. Hotter 'n Hell Hot Sauce. All those H's," Grandpa Eugene
said.
    "It's called alliteration," Grandma Margaret
said. She used to be a high school English teacher and advisor to the Debate
Club. Since she was retired and had no one else to teach, Grandpa Eugene usually
got stuck being the student. He wasn't the teacher's pet in her eyes, either,
but the slow kid who never did his homework. He took his role good-naturedly
most of the time, probably because a good part of his day he spent away from
her, at Eugene's Gas and Garage, which he'd owned for forty years and had just
sold. He still got up and went to