Chicken Boy by Frances O’Roark Dowell

Author:Frances O’Roark Dowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Fall break came the weekend after the open house, one whole Thursday and Friday of freedom plus the weekend. When Granny called to invite me to spend the break with her, it took me thirty seconds tops to stuff a few T-shirts and some clean underwear in my backpack and leave Daddy a quick note on the kitchen table. Maybe she didn’t want me living with her, but at least she could stand my full-time company for a few days.

She was cleaning out her refrigerator with paper towels and a spray bottle of ammonia. Granny’d always joked she had one of them self-cleaning refrigerators, but all it took was one peek inside to know she’d made that idea up. The fact was, Granny’s house wasn’t a whole lot neater than mine, even if she was better about taking out the trash. It was just friendlier somehow, maybe because she always had a pot of coffee warming on the stove and something for you to eat if you were hungry.

“You can’t be too careful about germs these days, what with your E. coli and your mad cow disease,” she told me when I asked her what the heck she was doing. “Besides, I heard the motor grinding away in the middle of the night last night, and I figured it was working too hard, the way it has to make everything cold through all those layers of crud.”

I lugged out a couple bags of slimy lettuce and petrified carrots for her, then helped get dinner ready. What I liked best about eating at Granny’s house was she always served you campout-style food—hot dogs or sloppy joes, baked beans and biscuits cooked in a cast-iron pan. Me and Granny liked to talk about how we were going to go camping together one of these days. There was a spot on Jordan Lake, she said, where we could catch fish every morning for our breakfast. “You cast your line out of your tent while you’re still in your sleeping bag,” she liked to say. “You can catch your breakfast in five minutes.”

After I scooped up the last of my baked beans on a biscuit, Granny had another surprise for me. She reached up to the top of the refrigerator and pulled down an apple pie, a real one, not from the frozen-food section of the Food Lion. “Betcha didn’t know I could make one of these, did you?” she crowed, dishing out a quarter of the pie onto a plate she then set in front of me on the table. “You might think this old woman don’t have any tricks left up her sleeve, but just you wait.”

It made me nervous to see Granny acting so strange, cleaning her house and baking pies. Next thing you’d know, she’d be telling me to scrub behind my ears before I went to bed. The rest of the night I couldn’t help but feel like something was going to pop out from behind the couch or under the rug.

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