Blossom Promise by Betsy Byars Page A

Mouse, the Snoopy, and the ‘You’re somebody special.’”
    “No ‘Drop Dead’s?”
    “I will be glad when you learn to drive, Ralphie, so you can deliver balloons.”
    “I’ll be glad when I can drive too,” he said.
    Delivering balloons, he had already figured out, would give him the perfect excuse to stop by Maggie’s. “Oh, I had some balloon deliveries out this way,” he would say. Never mind that country people never had balloons delivered. Then he could add, “Want to ride along?”
    Of course he would have to wear a clown suit, his mother would insist on that, but still it would be nice to be alone in the car with Maggie.
    Ralphie put the balloons in the station wagon and came back to the kitchen table. Beneath “Dear Maggie” he wrote, “I’m sorry about Pap’s heart attack.”
    His mom came back into the kitchen in her clown suit and red wig. She claimed to have worked out her own individual clown makeup, but she looked a lot like Ronald McDonald.
    Ralphie wasn’t going to wear makeup no matter what—maybe, maybe he would stick one of those red balls on his nose right before a customer opened the front door, but that would be it.
    Ralphie heard his mom’s station wagon start, and he raised his head to watch her pull out into the street. Then the balloons blocked his mom from view as she drove away.
    The phone rang. Ralphie did not get up. He called, “Phone’s ringing,” to his brother. “Mom said for you to answer the phone while she was gone.”
    “She did not,” the brother called back.
    “All right, if you don’t believe me, don’t answer.”
    “I won’t.”
    “Only it’s probably a balloon order. The first thing mom’s going to ask you when she gets home is—”
    The brother picked up the phone on the next ring. He came into the kitchen.
    “It’s for you.” He sneered. “It’s a girl.”
    Ralphie jumped up so quickly, his chair tipped over backward.
    He grabbed for the phone. There was only one girl in the world who could be calling him.
    “Hello.”
    “Ralphie?”
    It was Maggie, and it sounded as if she were crying. Ralphie hated for Maggie to cry. He was in love with her, had been for two years, since that first electric moment he opened his eyes in the hospital and saw her sitting on the foot of Junior’s hospital bed. Even if she hadn’t been telling the story of how she had her brother busted into city jail, he would have loved her.
    “Yes, it’s me. What’s wrong?”
    “Oh, Ralphie.”
    “What? What is it?”
    “You remember Mud?”
    “Mud, the dog?”
    “Yes.”
    “What about him?”
    “Well, he’s dying.”
    “Oh.”
    Ralphie knew from the way she said the words that that wasn’t the worst of it. More was coming. His shoulders straightened. He knew too that somehow what was coming would directly involve him.
    “And, Ralphie.”
    “Yes.”
    “Ralphie.”
    There was an extra syllable in his name this time.
    “Yes! Go ahead. I’m ready.”
    “Ralphie, we think we know how to save him.”
    Ralphie hated to ask, but he knew he had to. “How?”
    “We have to smuggle him into the hospital so that he can see Pap’s still alive.”
    “Wait a minute. Mud is the big dog or the little fuzzy fellow?”
    “The big one. And, Ralphie, there’s a problem.”
    “Oh, really.”
    “Yes, Mud won’t walk. He’s in a coma.”
    Her voice began to tremble again. Ralphie wished it wouldn’t do that.
    “See, if Pap’s dead, Mud doesn’t want to live either, but Pap’s not dead. It’s like an old-timey play I saw on TV where the boy died because he thought the girl he loved was dead, and then she came to, and he really was dead.”
    “I missed that one.”
    There was a silence, and Maggie said, “If you’d rather not …”
    “No, I want to,” Ralphie said. “I haven’t done anything illegal in a while. I’m losing my touch.”
    “Oh, Ralphie, I can always count on you.”
    “It looks that way. When do you want the smuggling to take