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  JOAN BAUER

  VIKING

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2012

  Copyright © Joan Bauer, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bauer, Joan, date–

  Almost home / by Joan Bauer.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixth-grader Sugar and her mother lose their beloved house and experience the harsh world of homelessness.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59192-5 [1. Homeless persons—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B32615Al 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011050483

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For my sisters, Barb and Karen, with much love

  WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO: Barbara Dwyer, MSW, who provided a rich understanding of foster care, children at risk, and the unstoppable power of resilience.

  Beth Fuller, family therapist, who helped me see how broken families can move toward wholeness.

  James Nelson, bass player supreme, who taught me the realities of musicians, bands, and the fine art of collaboration.

  Dr. John Morehead, veterinarian and overall great guy, who helped me explore the heart and the potential of a frightened, abused dog and a child’s responsibility to care for him.

  Regina Hayes, my editor, who knew how to bring this story home.

  Evan, my husband, who supports in every conceivable way; Jean, my daughter, an invaluable early reader; and JoAnn, Rita, Laura, Mickey, Kally, Donna, Catrina, and Chris—true friends who believe.

  Contents

  Also by Joan Bauer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Author's Note

  1

  MR. BENNETT WALKED into room 212 carrying a plastic bag. He smoothed his sweatshirt that read DEATH TO STEREOTYPES, tucked Claus his rubber chicken under his arm, raised one eyebrow, and jumped on his desk. He opened the bag, lifted a loaf of bread into the air and shouted, “Sell it to me.”

  He threw the bread on the desk.

  Peyton Crawler let his eyes go back into his head like he’d been dead for years. Harper Wilhelm hollered, “It’s good for you.”

  Everyone in sixth-grade English groaned. Mr. Bennett shook his head. “It has to be more than that.”

  “You’re hungry,” Katie Nesbitt said.

  Mr. B shrugged.

  I see where he’s going. I raised my hand. “Do you like toast?”

  Peyton Crawler smirked. “That’s stupid.”

  Go back to being dead, Peyton.

  “As a matter of fact,” Mr. B announced, “I love toast.”

  I pressed in. “With butter and jam?”

  He pulled down his orange wool hat and grinned. “Strawberry jam.”

  I had what I needed. I ran up and grabbed the bread. “Then I can tell you, that this bread”—I looked at the label—“Aunt Fanny’s Homemade Honey Bread, makes the best toast in the universe.”

  Mr. Bennett jumped off the desk and looked at the price. “It’s expensive.”

  “It costs more because it’s better,” I told him. “And you can freeze half of it, and only use it when you want toast. It’ll make you so happy, you won’t be able to stand it.”

  He walked to the huge B that hung on the wall behind his desk—the Great B, he called it. “Sold.” He slammed Claus on the desk (rubber chickens don’t mind). “Why did she sell me?”

  Kids looked at each other, clueless. Mr. B twirled Claus in the air. “These are golden lessons from my checkered career in advertising. Think. What did Sugar do?” Mr. Bennett was in advertising for fifteen years and made real decent money, but he gave it all up to teach sixth grade.

  Katie raised her hand. “She had to learn about you before she could sell you the bread.”

  “That’s right. She persuaded me. She formed an argument to convince me.” He stood in front of the smaller B on the wall—the not-so-great B. “So, when you are trying to sell someone something—an idea, a loaf of bread, whatever—find out what the person is about.”

  Mr. Bennett held up an ad with a picture of a cool-looking singer standing by a piano. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked us.

  Simon said, “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Look closer,” Mr. Bennett suggested.

  Carrie said, “I love her dress.”

  Mr. Bennett looked at the ad. “Nice dress.”

  I said, “She’s holding a cigarette in her left
hand. You don’t see it at first.”

  Mr. Bennett nodded. “And why is that?”

  “They’re trying to show that smoking is cool,” Carrie said.

  “They’re trying to manipulate you,” Mr. Bennett said. “Your mind takes in the photo—you don’t notice the cigarette at first, if ever, but it’s there.”

  “They want us to smoke,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  And my mind went to Mr. Leeland, my father, who looked so good in so many ways, being handsome and funny and seeming to love life, but in his left hand there was always a losing hand.

  “Persuasion is an art. It can be misused or it can be powerful. Tonight, I want all of you, including the dead among us”—Mr. B threw Claus into Peyton’s lap—“to write a stirring paragraph on one way you have seen persuasion misused—an advertising campaign, something on the Internet, something in your life. Specifics are found on thegreatbknowsall.com.”

  I wondered if I should write about Mr. Leeland and how he always persuaded Reba to believe he was going to come through for us.

  “I will read the best three out loud in class, so work excessively hard on this.”

  I wouldn’t want anything about Mr. Leeland read out loud.

  Harper Wilhelm was giving me her evil eye like she knew all my secrets. I smiled and walked past her. Reba says it’s good to smile around people who don’t like you—it makes you stronger. I beamed a big one in Harper’s direction; she looked disgusted and left the room. I walked up to Mr. B. He was exactly my height—five feet four inches. His ski cap had dogs on it.

  “Mr. B, I’ve got something real personal I want to write about, but I wouldn’t want the class to hear it.”

  He adjusted his hat. “Well, make it so good, it will kill me not to read it out loud.”

  I grinned. “I’ll try.” I stood there because I didn’t want to go home. I wished I could tell him all that was happening at my house. “I’m not sure how to start writing about it.”

  He leaned Claus against his coffee mug. “Writing about personal things isn’t easy, Sugar. Try breaking it up into small, manageable pieces.”

  Small and manageable was not what my life was like.

  He looked at me. “Are you okay?”

  That depends on how you define okay.

  x x x

  I walked home with Meesha Moy, my best friend. Her life wasn’t small and manageable either. Even when we were a block from her house, we could hear the sound of bad accordion music carried on the wind. Meesha stopped walking and shook her head. Two months ago, her family had to rent out her room to Mr. Denton who played, or tried to play, the accordion. Meesha had to sleep on the couch in the TV room. Her dad got sick and the bills were killing them. We had a lot in common, except that Meesha’s dad couldn’t work because he was sick. Mr. Leeland didn’t work because he was a gambler.

  We haven’t had to rent out a room . . . yet.

  The bad accordion music got louder; a dog started howling. Meesha looked like she could start howling, too, but Reba taught me to be grateful no matter what. I looked up at the blue sky. “It’s a pretty day, huh?”

  Meesha glared at me. “If it was raining, he wouldn’t be practicing on the porch.”

  I nodded and headed down Pleasant Street, my street, working hard at my gratitude. Reba was always telling me, “You take the G-R out of gratitude and you’ve got attitude.”

  Only once did I mention that attitude’s got three T’s, not two.

  “I’m teaching you enduring concepts for living,” she snapped. “Not spelling.”

  Chester, our postman, was pushing his cart down the street. My grandpa, King Cole, was a mailman until the day he died. “Mail tells a story,” he always told me. “A good mail carrier knows what’s going on in every house on his route. They know who’s paying their bills on time, they know who’s late.”

  Chester looked at me with sympathy and handed me a stack of envelopes all marked URGENT. I hate that word. Only one was addressed to me, or halfway at any rate. It had curlicue writing.

  I sighed. Sugar isn’t the easiest name to be slapped with, I’ll tell you. I was supposed to get named Susannah. I was supposed to get born in a hospital, too, but my whole life started as one big surprise when I got born in the back of a Chevy in the parking lot of the Sugar Shack in Baton Rouge in a rainstorm so bad, my parents couldn’t make it to the hospital. When I popped out and Reba saw the Sugar Shack sign, she felt it was a sign from God; right then I got my name. At least God told her to stop at Sugar. Sugar Shack Cole would have been a chore to live with. As for Mr. Leeland, he got the thrill of helping me get born, and believe me, he hasn’t done squat to help since then.

  But I was grateful. As soon as I could write, I sent a note to the Chevrolet company in Detroit, Michigan, and thanked them for making such good backseats that a baby could get born and be okay. That company cared so much, they wrote me back and said that although many babies had been born in Chevrolet backseats over the years, I was the first one they knew of named Sugar.

  Reba says part of why I’m on this earth is to bring a little sweetness into people’s lives. “And sweet doesn’t mean stupid,” she says. “Sweet doesn’t mean weak. I’m not talking kittens wearing sun hats either. I’m talking kindness. You go out there, Sugar Mae Cole, and show ’em what it means to be sweet.”

  I threw the Sugar Booger envelope into the garbage and walked up the path to our house. The yellow paint was cracked and our porch needed repair, but we had hanging flowerpots that made up for some of that. Reba was sitting on the porch in a white chair with her pink phone to her ear, clutching the little silver bell on the necklace Mr. Leeland had given her last year right before she kicked him out for the umpteenth time. Mr. Leeland got it in Atlanta and called it her southern bell. Reba’s big desire is to be a fine Southern belle, which is kind of like being a lady on steroids.

  When Reba clutched that bell, it meant she was ready to pop off and working hard to find her graces.

  “Why yes,” she said into her pink phone, “yes, I know, and I’m terribly sorry we’re late again.” Her voice went deep Southern now, pouring the words out like hot butterscotch melting vanilla ice cream. “But I’m struggling as it is to pay the rent. Surely, sir, you understand that I can’t manage the late fee.” Reba clung to that bell like it was a lifesaver. She closed her eyes. “Why, yes, I hope we will be able to resolve this soon as well. You have a nice day now.” She flipped her phone shut and shouted, “Honking, skinflint moron! If his brains were dynamite, he couldn’t blow his nose!”

  I wanted to know more about the late fee, but I decided not to ask. King Cole always told me, “If you’ve got a good, fair question and you ask it at the wrong time, what do you get?”

  Answer: “In trouble.”

  I kissed Reba on the head and went inside to start my paragraph on bad persuasion.

  It’s always good when homework can help you manage a part of your life.

  2

  THERE ARE PEOPLE in our lives we cannot trust.

  One of those people in my life is my father.

  Is there Gorilla Glue for fathers, I wonder?

  Duct tape to keep one together?

  I remember so much and wish I didn’t.

  All the fights about him borrowing money and never paying it back.

  All the times he’d play cards with me for money.

  I was little, but he always won.

  There was a strange look in his eyes when that happened.

  Sometimes he’d disappear and not come back for the longest time.

  He had the gift of persuasion.

  His voice sounded like he meant every word,

  His eyes would fill with love,

  And it was hard to believe he didn’t mean what
he said,

  But he didn’t.

  I’ve learned a lot having a father like this.

  One of the big lessons is that you learn about people

  Not just by the words they say, or the promises they make,

  But by what they do.

  I want to be the kind of person who does what I say I’ll do.

  I want people to know they can trust me.

  Mr. B said to write a paragraph, but the words of this poem poured out of me from some secret place. He was going to have to adjust.

  There were probably lots of poems to write about my father.

  My grandma, Mr. Leeland’s mother, used to say, “You be respectful of your father, Sugar, for he’s been through harder times than you know.”

  I didn’t know what those hard times were, other than all the times he lost money gambling. I asked King Cole how you respect someone you don’t trust.

  “Now, that’s one the great minds have been wrestling with for ages. It’s not the easiest thing to do. They’re all agreed on that.”

  “Did they come up with an answer a kid can understand?”

  “It just so happens they did. Everyone alive has good parts and bad parts to them. Some people work hard to develop the good parts, and others work hard on the bad. I think we can respect a person’s potential—what they could be—but we don’t have to like it if they’re acting the wrong way. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Like they’ve got good things inside they don’t know how to get at?”

  “That’s right—they’re in a locked drawer.”

  “And they can’t find the key.”

  He grinned and wrote that down in his notebook. “That’s good truth, isn’t it? And I’m giving you full credit for this one.” He wrote some more. “‘This concept was inspired by Sugar Mae Cole, one of the great minds of our time.’”

  I laughed. “I am not.”

  “It’s my book. I say what I believe.”

  He put that in chapter two of his autobiography, Upon These Truths I Stand. King Cole wasn’t a real king, but he always felt he had royalty inside. I missed him bad. I did a shadowbox of him in school for inspiration week. I had him standing by a sunset; the sign by the road read SOME SUNS WILL NEVER SET.