Zebra Forest by Andina Rishe Gewirtz Page A

here. You didn’t mean that, either, but you did it, and you ruined everything! She was okay before you came! She was good!”
    He flinched at that, and I could see his hand tighten on the spoon.
    “Good?” he said, his voice low. He waved a hand to indicate the kitchen. “This was good?”
    I glared at him. “It was
okay,
” I said. “And you came and messed it all up. That’s what you
do,
isn’t it? Mess things up? Is that what you did when I was little? Is that why my mother ran away?”
    I saw the spoon drop into the pot, and in the same instant he was moving toward me, his face suddenly white. I flinched, pulling
Treasure Island
up to shield myself. But he didn’t hit me. He just stood there, an inch or so away, chest heaving, towering over me.
    Slowly, I looked up into his face. He was standing there, lips pressed together, staring down at me. And the expression on his face confused me, because as I watched the color creep back into his cheeks, he looked more hurt than angry.
    I pushed my chair back cautiously, and a piece of
Treasure Island
fell onto the floor between us. He looked down at it, then leaned over and picked it up.
    For what seemed like a long time, he stared at the broken piece in his hand. Then he said, “I think I can fix it, if you want me to.”
    I wasn’t sure I could get my voice to work just then, so I shrugged, but after a second, I laid the other pieces on the table. He picked them up gingerly.
    “All it needs is some good tape,” he said. “There’s some downstairs. But you’re missing the front piece.”
    When I finally got the words out, they were no louder than a whisper. “That was never there,” I said. “Those are the pieces we always had.”
    Andrew Snow didn’t say anything. But he went downstairs, got the tape, and put Rew’s book back together. While he was doing it, I sat at the table, watching the soup boil in the pot.

A ll afternoon, silence stopped up the air in the house. Rew hadn’t talked much in general since Andrew Snow came, but it was different knowing he
wouldn’t
talk to me, even if I wanted. By evening, I was ready to scream, just to hear the noise. Instead, I sat down with Andrew Snow for supper.
    The soup he’d made was filled with all the rest of the vegetables in the bin. I’d never seen such lumpy soup.
    “Why’d you put this in?” I asked him, making a pale, round ball duck and bob in my bowl.
    “It’s a turnip,” he said. “They’re good in soup. Sweet.”
    I watched Andrew Snow eat. I noticed he ate all the soupy part first and saved the vegetables for the end.
    “We don’t usually get turnips,” I said.
    “I don’t wonder,” he said. “Mom always hated them. She didn’t like any root vegetables much. I remember she once said she didn’t like eating things that grew with their heads in the dirt. We had a lot of tomatoes, though. My father used to come home, close his eyes, and guess what was for dinner before he came in the kitchen. If he was stumped, he’d say to me, ‘Well, at least I know we’re having tomatoes!’”
    I smiled at that. I’d never known my grandpa was a funny man. Maybe that’s why Rew loved jokes so much.
    “Your father,” I said when he got up to get me a second bowl. “What did he do?”
    “He owned a shoe store,” he said. “A little one, in the city.”
    “But he wanted to be a farmer?”
    Andrew Snow smiled at that. “Maybe,” he said. “Or a woodsman. Who knows? He certainly loved the country. He took me to the mountains once, when I was nine or ten. Taught me how to find my way in the woods by the direction of the sun, and about the plants there, that sort of thing.”
    “Like what?” I asked.
    Andrew Snow stirred his soup. “Well,” he said, thinking, “like, there are kinds of mosses that can get totally dried out — they can look dead, even — and then they perk right up with the first rain. He loved that sort of thing. He loved knowledge in general. A big reader, my